Life in the Later Lane
A face of medical care in the Mission, Kattia Balestier has been on the front lines for nearly 40 years
Contact her at naomimarcus@sfseniorbeat.com The patient stormed out of the doctor’s office and headed straight for the...
Early computer nerd – now a regular at future-focused public space with bar – slowly realized he “was in the middle of something big”
Contact her at myrakrieger@sfseniorbeat.com When Theo Armour was a young boy, he played a lot, but not with...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
‘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...
Host of group that supports women forge new life after retirement fitting out her Dodge van to recapture the joys of childhood camping
It’s 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning and Janice Wallace is on Zoom hosting the Bay Area...
Retirement sends Vonn Scott Bair full speed into long days as actor, playwright and game developer
"Do what you want, and you will never work a day in your life." That old adage,...
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Playwright, producer, actor, writer, you-name-it stays enmeshed in Bay area theater despite its ups and downs
When she was a child and the rain was so heavy they couldn’t play on the beach outside their vacation home, Linda Ayres-Frederick and her four siblings would dress up and perform plays. A closet’s sliding doors were their curtain. “I liked dressing up in my mother’s big hat with flowers and flouncing about.” But ...
Former sailor and academic researcher forged unique bond as writing and editing duo
It’s a Thursday morning and the North Beach branch of the San Francisco Public Library has just opened. Like almost every Thursday morning for the last 10 years, Janis Kaempfe and Claude Ury have settled down at one of the branches’ eight networked computers. Ury is there to polish up his review of a recently ...
Teacher, translator, artist, and full-time caretaker: Finding time is just one of his challenges
Hitoshi Shigeta has perfected the art of juggling. Not the act you might see in a circus, but the act of a man whose life has three demanding priorities. He’s a working artist and teacher of art, an English-to-Japanese translator of business documents fighting against a technological wave, and full-time caretaker to his 27-year-old autistic ...
Support housing tenant makes the most of his microwave and contributes to the nabe with ‘pedestrian protection’
How do you eat If you are on a fixed income and live in a single-room occupancy hotel? When the pandemic closed a lot of your favorite cheap food spots? If you are Christopher Coleman, you get creative with your mini fridge and microwave. “The way you cook a juicy porkchop in a microwave, you ...
Military background and delight in the job help ‘star’ Muni driver keep things running smooth
Jolt after jolt, from stop to stop, veteran San Francisco Municipal Railway driver Angel Carvajal has piloted trains, buses, and streetcars across the hills, streets, and tunnels of San Francisco. And over the years, among a mostly civil clientele, he’s dealt with knife-wielding and abusive passengers, a truck driver who plowed into his light rail ...
Insatiable curiosity led free spirit to bio-science career, travel, health activism and now, acting online
A cross-country train trip when she was 9 is a joyful memory for Jane Merschen, one of the few from a difficult childhood. While her mother, made sleepy by medicine prescribed for mental illness, dozed on the trip from Los Angeles to St. Louis, Merschen happily “ran around the train, getting kicked out of the ...
