Life in the Later Lane
K.D. Sullivan: From Park Bench to Publishing House
At 15, K.D. Sullivan was homeless, hungry, and sleeping on park benches in Honolulu’s Aina Haina neighborhood....
Retired conference consultant embraces San Francisco and its history with tour of her own neighborhood
As she strolls toward the smallest park in San Francisco, Bonnie Wallsh calls back to the group...
Farm life couldn’t compete with the excitement of big cities and the challenge of the executive life
In college, Bob Britt worked as a night auditor at a roadside Holiday Inn in Southern Illinois....
Successful sous chef finds equilibrium and support after career sidetracked by health and hard times
Jon Insco has been a go-getter most of his life — always hustling for his next adventure....
Being an ‘old soul’ isn’t just about age but an attitude – best nurtured by intergenerational contact
SF SENIORBEAT GUEST COLUMN – There’s a corner of Gen Z internet culture that has popularized the...
How a dedicated teacher of young children became a dedicated civic volunteer.
Sharon Yow’s father drove a truck and tried his hand at farming. Her mother worked a switchboard...
Famed boogie-woogie pianist embroiders her performances with her own hand-crafted art
Caroline Dahl has never forgotten the glamorous, red-haired woman in a sequined dress she saw at a...
The biggest, best walk – and bath of a lifetime.
Tina Martin SENIORBEAT GUEST COLUMN – I love San Francisco, and I love to walk. So when...
‘So hard, all the losses and pain:’ Personal and world tragedies led daughter of Holocaust survivors to life of helping others help others
Juliet Rothman was living in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1992 when her 21-year-old son Daniel attempted a double...
Rock ‘n’ roll and diamonds shaped the life of Arthur Indenbaum
WRITER'S NOTE: Arthur Indenbaum died on November 28, 2025, with his wife and daughter by his side....
A lucky phone call steered him into a 54-year career as a shipping executive.
Tony Hanley felt stuck. He’d flunked out of San Francisco City College and was working at an...
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Out of the classroom and onto the airplane. Peter Mundy takes his middle-school students around the world.
Peter Mundy wants nothing more than to educate, motivate, and mentor his young students — and to travel with them around the world. The 63-year-old Castro resident teaches seventh- and eighth-grade history at Cathedral School for Boys, where he’s worked for 27 years. He has taken his students on trips to Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, and ...
A life of resilience: Escaping Soviet antisemitism, Tatyana Yasnovsky built a life in San Francisco as she practiced psychiatry
For Tatyana Yasnovsky, a retired psychiatrist and émigré from the former Soviet Union, her arrival in America in the mid-‘70s was fraught and unforgettable. “I had two little kids on my hands and we were very anxious about the prospect of living in America,” she said. Prompted to leave Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, to escape ...
Things of heaven and earth – but mostly earth – have captivated neuropsychologist who once pondered the priesthood
When he retired in 2009, Charles Vella began volunteering at the California Academy of Sciences. He became known as the “amateur paleontologist.” His first volunteer job was sorting freshwater snails in the basement, which he did for a year. Then with a week’s training, Vella became a docent for the Evolution Group on the main ...
With more than 28,000 movies and TV shows on hand, Colin Hutton’s Video Wave store has survived the onslaught of Netflix and Amazon Prime
It was a rainy winter afternoon, and it wasn’t until Video Wave, the last standalone movie rental store in San Francisco, had been open for about 30 minutes that the first customer wandered in. A young man named Mateo looked around and quickly spied a copy of “Extras,” a collection of episodes of an obscure ...
Sixty years later, a writer returns to her childhood home in Mexico and savors the sights, smells and flavors of a changed San Miguel de Allende
Have you ever wondered about retiring to Mexico? Not me, no expat life for me. But I wondered how it would feel to go home to Mexico again. More than sixty years after leaving, I spent October in my childhood town of San Miguel de Allende, in the central highlands of Mexico. In an amazingly ...
‘Wild writing’ softens clinical healthcare leader’s shift to solo career and enriches retirement
Kathryn Santana Goldman showed an affinity for science as early as grammar school when she captured and chronicled a variety of insects found in her backyard. “My parents had one of those 30-volume encyclopedia sets that I used to look up the insects and document my findings in a small notebook,” she said.“I especially liked ...
