"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...
When his mother, Lucrezia, was diagnosed with cancer, then 25-year-old Frankie Gaetano Balistreri cared for her at home. She craved her favorite Sicilian dishes and called out her wishes from her bed. “ ‘Frankie, pasta con sarde!’ ”(Pasta with sardines); “ ‘Frankie, sfingi!’ (powdered sugar donuts with ricotta filling) “I was running back and forth, ...
It’s an overcast summer morning, and Chrisie Giordano is leading a tour of Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Garden. She pauses in front of the large statue of Buddha and sheds a few tears. The tea garden, she says, is the place where she has come to terms with her daughter’s painful decision to leave ...
If you think dollhouses are just for children, you haven’t met the artisans and collectors, like Margaret Lew, who play in the Lilliputian world of miniature furnishings and accoutrements. Lew’s passion for miniatures surfaced in childhood – she “always liked the little things for my dollhouse” – and reignited in 2003, when at 60, she ...
SENIOR BEAT GUEST COLUMN – Even though I’m 78 years old, I have resisted seeing myself as a senior. It’s not just age, it’s accepting the negative image I have of seniors. Even though I’ve never experienced ageism myself, I nonetheless defined being a senior as being elderly, frail, sweet, and a little dotty. I ...
Seventy-one-year-old Richard Marino is on the cusp of retirement. And it’s making him anxious. He’s gone through other transitions, from coming out as gay, moving from his family home in the Bronx to New York’s East Village, and then leaving New York City for San Francisco. He traded a rambunctious gay lifestyle for a rather ...
He was in the sixth grade and really wanted to be in the school band. But his parents told him there was no money to buy or rent an instrument. His older sister was dating a guy whose brother had a trumpet in his closet. The horn soon made its way to the wannabe musician ...
