Twenty-four years ago, Eric Whittington decided that a career as a word processor wasn’t how he wanted to spend the rest of his working life. Then 42, Whittington and his wife maxed out their credit cards and purchased a small, not-very-successful women’s bookstore in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood. They renamed it Bird & Beckett ...
One too many magazines hyping the “30 under 30’”or “40 under 40” jolted a San Francisco geriatrician into countering with an “80 Over 80” project. After three years of interviewing these older city residents, the results can now be seen at 80over80sf.org. “It crystallized something in me: What about seniors?” Dr. Anna Chodos, an associate ...
Wine and orchids have long played a starring role in Paul Bourbin’s life. When he was just seven, his grandfather would serve him a heavily diluted glass of wine with meals, a custom carried on by the Frenchman who made wine in the old country and later in California.” Eventually, Bourbin, too, became a wine expert, ...
When Angelina De Anda makes chicken soup, her first step is to dice ginger and garlic into coins, to flavor the water. When her mom made chicken soup, the first steps were to “kill and pluck the chicken!” she recounts with a rueful grin. “Though we lived in the border city of Cuidad Juarez, we ...
If the stakes weren’t deadly serious, the high-speed car chase through rural Alabama in 1965 might have seemed like a scene from The Dukes of Hazard. Bruce Hartford, then a young civil rights worker, and three volunteers with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been holding a workshop in non-violence in Brantley, a town with ...
Though she moves more slowly now, and the form-fitting gown and sparkling red stilettos have been replaced by more comfortable clothing, 89-year-old Harriet Sebastian is still a performer. Resting in the satin-draped armchair where she spends most of her days, Sebastian paused mid-story and turned toward the credenza where her dancing shoes were hanging. “I ...
