"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...
Lauren McNamara makes sure to remember where the regular clientele at Sam’s Grill like to sit. She Googles them to learn their interests so she can “engage in good conversation.” That’s just a sample of the people skills she’s employed over a long career in the competitive world of merchandising, sales, and interior design. She’s ...
LeBeau Market calls itself Nob Hill’s Community Grocery Store, where you can get almost everything: from Lay’s potato chips to Spanish truffle chips. It offers online shopping, home delivery and keeps up with the latest food trends. Yet its owner, Joseph Omran, feels lucky to still have customers. “The business environment hasn’t been friendly, a ...
Summers for Deborah Drysdale meant idyllic days at her grandparents’ cattle ranch in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. “My friends and I were ecstatically happy playing bridge, my grandmother’s favorite game, after riding farm horses, swimming in the river, and listening to “Oklahoma “and “My Fair Lady” on the record player.” Home was Whitefish ...
Jonah Raskin was 10 in 1952, during the height of the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War. His father was an attorney, among the vast intellectual class swept up in McCarthyism, the campaign to expose suspected Soviet sympathizers. Raskin’s father was never accused. Still, Raskin only learned much later the extent of his parents’ communist ...
If you’d been walking along one of the steepest streets in San Francisco one sunny afternoon in 1984 you might have seen a strange sight: A grand piano with a musician seated on its attached bench careering down vertiginous 22nd Street. Clad in a feathered hat, jacket and tails, and a bright red glove on ...
Eve Maher stood next to a gangway atop the deck of the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, a WWII Liberty ship parked at Pier 35 at Fisherman’s Wharf. A volunteer on the ship, she greeted visitors as they arrived for a special memorial cruise for Armed Services Day on May 18. Petite and stylish, the native of ...
