"Do what you want, and you will never work a day in your life." That old adage,...
Michael Gene Sullivan’s version of Charles Dickens’ traditional “A Christmas Carol” is not about Scrooge, the miser...
In San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, before the internet, match.com, and social media, flower stands...
Herbert and Gloria are flirting. Like spooning teens, the elderly pair are joking about their relationship and...
They met harvesting bananas on a kibbutz in Israel, part of a summer tour introducing young Jews...
Sally Abbott believes her role as a novelist was written before she was born. It started with...
Mark Sugarman wants to repair the world. The 79-year-old Financial District resident has spent his whole life...
Bruce Neuburger was never an armchair radical. Organizing against the Vietnam War while in the Coast Guard...
It was, you might say, the last breakfast. On a summer Saturday in 2020, dozens of family...
Few who end up in the hospital are likely to be thinking about whether there’s a sufficient,...
SENIOR BEAT GUEST COLUMN – Many years ago, I spent a year baking desserts in a restaurant...
Seated in the backroom of a café on Polk Street, Kevagne Kalisch leans against the wall and...
When his mother, Lucrezia, was diagnosed with cancer, then 25-year-old Frankie Gaetano Balistreri cared for her at...
It’s an overcast summer morning, and Chrisie Giordano is leading a tour of Golden Gate Park’s Japanese...
If you think dollhouses are just for children, you haven’t met the artisans and collectors, like Margaret...
SENIOR BEAT GUEST COLUMN – Even though I’m 78 years old, I have resisted seeing myself as...
Seventy-one-year-old Richard Marino is on the cusp of retirement. And it’s making him anxious. He’s gone through...
He was in the sixth grade and really wanted to be in the school band. But his...
Lauren McNamara makes sure to remember where the regular clientele at Sam’s Grill like to sit. She...
LeBeau Market calls itself Nob Hill’s Community Grocery Store, where you can get almost everything: from Lay’s...
Summers for Deborah Drysdale meant idyllic days at her grandparents’ cattle ranch in the Blue Ridge mountains...
Jonah Raskin was 10 in 1952, during the height of the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War....
If you’d been walking along one of the steepest streets in San Francisco one sunny afternoon in...
Eve Maher hands out programs to visitors boarding the SS Jeremiah O’Brien for a tour and memorial...
A SENIOR BEAT GUEST COLUMN – My correspondence with Jutta Mengersen (now Brockhaus), the “World’s Ideal Pen...
When 17-year-old Jose Heriberto Garcia came courting the young girl who’d become his wife, his future mother-in-law...
SENIOR BEAT COLUMN: I got my first job in San Francisco nearly 40 years ago, in the...
A stained glass window by Bill and a "fishing" quilt Etta made for him adorn a hallway...
“Do what you want, and you will never work a day in your life.” That old adage, intones 66-year-old Vonn Scott Bair, “is a myth, a lie, a LIE.” He’s been doing what he wants since retiring eight years ago, but said, “I work longer and harder than I ever have.” It’s not that Bair ...
Michael Gene Sullivan’s version of Charles Dickens’ traditional “A Christmas Carol” is not about Scrooge, the miser who hates the holiday. Sullivan’s “A Red Carol” is “about everyone else,” a world unrepentant for its cruelties, said the 64-year-old resident director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, appearing at San Francisco’s Z Space Theater through December ...
In San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, before the internet, match.com, and social media, flower stands downtown were one place a boy could meet a girl. Harold Hoogasian met his wife, Nikki, in 1974 at his dad’s Post Street flower stand, where he helped out. She’d accompanied her dad, a funeral director, who’d come ...
Herbert and Gloria are flirting. Like spooning teens, the elderly pair are joking about their relationship and contemplating new places to have sex. Riding a horse, suggests Herbert, garnering a slightly lascivious grin in return. I loved my (late) husband, says Gloria, hinting that the usually creative man was a rather unimaginative bedmate. Herbert preens ...
They met harvesting bananas on a kibbutz in Israel, part of a summer tour introducing young Jews to the then-new country. These days they’re working together as the co-hosts of “Not Born Yesterday,” a half-hour podcast focusing on the challenges and joys of aging. Miriam Goodman and Lynn Winter Gross went on to become college ...
Sally Abbott believes her role as a novelist was written before she was born. It started with her middle name: Abbott’s mother was so enamored of the renowned short-story writer Katherine Mansfield that she gave her second daughter the middle name “Mansfield.” To top it off, both Katherine and Sally were born in the same ...
