Life in the Later Lane
Free speech and anti-war activist Sue Trupin found her niche caring for AIDS patients and supporting black grandmothers
Sue Trupin spent more than a decade living in a countercultural enclave in Canyon, a community in...
She’s a photographer and a flamenco dancer who fights to reduce maternal deaths in poor countries around the world
The difficulties that pregnant women face in impoverished parts of the world can seem overwhelming. But Stacey...
Cathedral Hill doctor became a leader in the treatment and prevention of AIDS.
As a boy, James Campbell spent after-school hours in his mother’s lab. Ruth Campbell was a doctor,...
Through one-man performances, son of Holocaust survivor shares history with high school students
It’s a shocking and head-spinning image: A Jew in a German officer’s uniform is being ministered to...
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...
He rode the rails, he slept on the streets, Kevin Fagan spent decades reporting on the homeless for the San Francisco Chronicle
It's a Friday night at Chief Sullivan’s, an Irish-themed bar in North Beach, and The Irish Newsboys...
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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 ...
Painful college experience unexpectedly leads to successful career for man from Mississippi
Imagine having such a vicious toothache and no access to a dentist that you take a pair of pliers and extract your own tooth. Meet Chester Moody. It’s 1958 in the Jim Crow South: Lorman, Mississippi, to be precise. He is 17 years old, attending Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, a historic black college. At ...
Writer of science fiction for the young tries to impart their simultaneous sense of wonder and danger
The path to success for many novelists is paved with rejection slips, but not for Ellen Klages, a prolific author of science fiction and science-oriented historical fiction for young people. “I was 45 and started at the top,” she said. While that might sound boastful, Klages has the receipts to back it up. Her first ...
Wattusi Trio dancers embraced by U.S. jazz greats and European club scene of the ’50s-’70s for their fantastical, “exotic Africa” perfomances
Deloris Perlmutter was only 20 years old when two young Cuban men selected her as the third member of their Wattusi Trio, a newly formed Afro-Cuban dance act that would catapult them to fame in the exploding international club scene of the ’50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. “Every club had its own house band. Acts competed ...
