Life in the Later Lane
Former art galley president helps people craft their deepest feelings in ‘lasting letters’ to loved ones
Looking out at Monterey Bay from Santa Cruz early one morning last year, a pair of silhouetted...
September 1, 2026
S.F. protest’s Tin Man has a history of making good trouble on behalf of empathy and kindness
Arthur Persyko loves to make trouble. The good kind, that is. As a young man, he protested...
August 24, 2026
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
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
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...
All Posts
What do you find in nature? All I wanted was a little peace.
I wanted spiritual feelings, but I didn’t know what they felt like. I just knew that people said feeling spiritual gives one a sense of peace and I badly wanted that. I was a stressful, anxious person in need of rehabilitation. Religion didn’t move me. Meditation, acupuncture and massage helped me physically, even mentally and ...
Sculptor & jeweler who finds inspiration in the sea, land and found objects discovers art in her own baldness
Ann Hedges began losing her hair when she was just nine years old. She started drawing to cope, “creating a world that was mine, and one I belonged in,” she said. “Along with having alopecia areata, I was short for my age and painfully shy.” With both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Fine Arts ...
Starting over in the U.S. at 62: Her family was exiled by the Nazis then the Russians. Eventually, she followed other family members to America.
It didn’t bother Shulamis Koyfman that her family thought she’d probably fail the California Board of Nursing licensing exam; she thought so, too. After all, she was 65, she’d only lived in the United States for three years and her English was, she recalls, not so hot. “Honestly, I was 100 percent sure I would ...
Living through the worst: A personal story of one woman’s quest to regain hope and the genesis of ‘Senior Power’
We asked Senior Power! founder Margaret Graf to tell us about the biggest challenge she has faced and what helped her move through it. Margaret Graf saved herself by helping her neighbors. She was inconsolable after the deaths of her daughter and her husband. Finding little support in her Parkside neighborhood, where she had lived ...
Filipino author who helped spread the culture and history of his country still building community in S.F. and advocating for Asian Americans
When you don’t know the “other,” it’s easy to stereotype. If you want to learn about another culture, said Oscar Peñaranda, Filipino educator, author, and activist, “you need to read their literature, look at their artists.” Education, learning about others, enlarges your world and challenges your biases, and by education he refers to much more ...
WHAT TREATS SWEETEN YOUR DAY? For myself, I find it’s hard to be monogamous
“Sweetmeat” is an archaic term for confectionaries. But it rhymes with treats, and that’s what I’m talking about. Cookies and cakes, custards and ice cream, pastries and pies, puddings, and tarts. Oh my! Throughout this pandemic, one thing that kept me sane, was knowing that after lunch and dinner I would have my sweetmeat with ...
