Life in the Later Lane
Born to dance: Tammy Thornton struts her stuff with the Warriors’ senior dance team
It’s game night at San Francisco’s Chase Center and the Golden State Warriors are not the only...
August 10, 2026
Childhood bond with an older neighbor steered law officer’s choice of career and community work
A tarnished silver coin from 1964, likely worth only $10 to any dealer, reminds Richard Lyons Corriea...
August 2, 2026
As a teacher, playwright & screenwriter, Cary Pepper has lots of inside Hollywood info to share
You probably stream most of your movies. But if you happen to rent a film on old-style...
July 15, 2026
All-women punk band still on stage thanks to leader’s career, which started in a mortuary
Invite Klara Lux somewhere, and she’ll always show up early – except on the rare occasion when...
July 6, 2026
Playwright Lynne Kaufman, the author of two dozen plays and five novels, is still going strong, despite some hiccups
The day after Lynne Kaufman retired in 2005, she woke up in tears. “What had I done?”...
June 29, 2026
A win for people power: Supervisors and mayor restore millions of dollars in cut to services for city’s most vulnerable
A months-long campaign by advocates for seniors, the disabled and other vulnerable populations has convinced San Francisco's...
Following in the footsteps of heroes: My visit to the cradles of Civil Rights
SF SENIORBEAT COLUMN – March 17, 1886. A date you probably never considered. Carroll County, Mississippi. A...
June 4, 2026
Couple’s script for their own movie? Shared creative passions and a bent for banter
“I'm Chiquita Banana, and I'm here to say, bananas have to ripen in a certain way,” Margot...
May 28, 2026
Social justice lawyer and activist infusing others with her love of SF’s Great Blue Herons and dedication to conservation
One day in 1993, on her daily walk from her Richmond District home to Golden Gate Park’s...
April 29, 2026
Nonprofit director is happy to bug you, whether you’re 2 or 92, about saving the wild
If you grow up in Los Angeles, where do you find the wild? Norm Gershenz is not...
April 14, 2026
Bass playing lawyer takes on the landlords when seniors call for help
During the day, you’ll find Thomas Drohan in court or at his law office on Mission Street....
April 5, 2026
Former SFSU teacher shifts to helping union workers build leadership abilities
Like some people need coffee, Joan Wong needs to walk – and talk. Mornings, she puts in...
March 25, 2026
Joe Edley, a three-time national champion, has been racking up great Scrabble scores for decades
Joe Edley tucks his co-authored book, “Everything Scrabble,” under his arm and surveys the room. Around him,...
March 16, 2026
As the city’s older population swells, seniors who can no longer live at home face high costs, limited choices
EDITOR'S NOTE: See full profiles of the seniors interviewed by clicking links within the story. A panoply...
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Bayview seniors and youth work and learn together in award-winning program led by artist whose quilts feature city’s Black residents.
It’s a spring-like March morning in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood. A gaggle of preschoolers is busy painting wooden stakes to mark plantings in the garden of the Dr. George W. Davis Senior Center. They’re working under the watchful eyes of teachers from a nearby elementary school as well as Bayview residents, mostly in their 70s ...
Nicaraguan refugee makes a life as bank teller, school aide and house cleaner – with some perks from customers who became friends
Guess Elba Balderramos’s job, a gig where grateful clients paid for her to cruise to Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii and the Panama Canal, and one promised to leave her $50,000 in her will. Trusted family lawyer? Investment Advisor? Nope. Balderramos, now 79, is a bank teller at the Bank of America in San Francisco, where she’s ...
Seniors may worry about crime on Muni, but the biggest complaints are fellow passengers – rowdy teens, the homeless and the mentally ill
It’s another bumpy afternoon ride on the 38-Geary, San Francisco’s most heavily used Muni line. The bus, with its accordion-like middle, is rattling and bouncing so hard that only riders immune to motion sickness can read. The blue seats reserved for seniors fill up fast. Older people, many toting shopping carts, some with canes, crowd ...
An ‘open classroom’ spurred a young girl’s creativity. Now she’s offering a similar experience to older adults as head of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
When Don van Druten rumbled up to Kathy Bruin’s elementary school in his 1949 truck, she and some of the other fifth-graders piled into the truck’s bed, and off they’d go to his house on Lancaster Road in Walnut Creek. There, he would show them how to whittle wood and his wife, Gale, would teach ...
Picking up trash puts Bayview man back on the streets, but this time with a noble mission and hope for the future.
Charles Franks, who dresses neatly in pressed jeans and button-down shirts, said he gets his dress code from his late grandpa, Elmo Gerald McNeal, who “always stayed suited and booted. He’d come home from work at Southern Pacific and change into a suit for dinner.” Born in 1963 at San Francisco General Hospital, he gets ...
Ocean swimmer chronicling his beloved Dolphin Club, a home with ‘soul’ for eccentrics who like their water icy
Don’t talk to 85-year-old Sidney (Sid) Hollister about retirement. He’s not ready, not while the pages of an unfinished manuscript on the early days of his beloved Dolphin Club crowd his desk. And not while there are still many dips in the icy waters of San Francisco Bay to come. Hollister, a gig worker before ...
