John Choy gets cold when performing outdoors; he’s almost 100. So, he wears a heavy padded jacket with long sleeves. When he plays his butterfly harp or banjo, his long fingers emerge from the cuffs like sea anemones to float effortlessly across the strings. Choy has over 300 songs in a repertoire of traditional Chinese ...
Kathy Schmidt went to high school in Kansas, where her father taught singing at the college level. Her mother taught high school until she married. Schmidt graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a minor in Spanish from Wheaton College in Massachusetts. But in the early ’50s, a woman with that kind of ...
Education, formal and informal – was the air, bread, and water of Hartmut Fischer’s reality from the age four – in a farming village where higher education was dismissed as valueless. “I was the only one in a community of 60 children to reach higher,” he said. For the sons and daughters of the area’s ...
Before the pandemic, Joan Lasselle, 74, was enjoying the life of the recently retired. “People would just reach out to me and ask if I would be interested in volunteering. The thing about retirement is when things come along, I can say ‘yes’ instead of ‘no.’” Forty years after founding and being CEO of Lasselle-Ramsay, ...
When Dina Lisha visited her mother in her board and care home, she was horrified to see how withdrawn and depressed the residents were. So, she went in the day room, turned on some music and encouraged the residents in simple movements. “It was astonishing to see their dim eyes come to life – responding, ...
It’s a typical Saturday morning for Sonny Buxton. He’s up early, fixes himself a bowl of oatmeal and gathers up a stack of CDs he’s going to play during his morning broadcast at KCSM. By 8.45, his son is at the door of his South San Francisco home, and they drive to the College of ...
