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• Elderly woman killed in SLO house fire was well liked in the area

  Elderly woman killed in SLO house fire was well liked in the area

  Barbara Beck, the 79-year-old woman who died in a house fire Wednesday, will be missed for a variety of reasons, said Bill Morgan, a Bishop’s Peak neighbor who has lived across the street from Beck for the past 10 years.

• A.G. woman tells of being an Eisenhower

  A.G. woman tells of being an Eisenhower

  When Kaye Eisenhower Morgan of Arroyo Grande began college in 1952, her uncle Ike (Dwight D. Eisenhower) was running for president of the United States. She tried to hide her last name from her dorm mates, not wanting the notoriety.

  At one event she heard a girl say, “I hear there is an Eisenhower girl on campus and I hear she got drunk at a frat house,” an untrue rumor. Eventually, the truth that Kaye was an Eisenhower came out, and she had to fend off suitors interested only in her name.

  In January 1953, Kaye and her family attended the inauguration of “Uncle Ike.” Although not often in the White House, the family was taken through the mansion by Mamie Eisenhower (Ike’s wife), who showed them the Red Room, Blue Room, Gold Room, Oval Office, etc. It was yet to be redecorated by the Eisenhowers. Kaye was 18 years old.

• How to live your last days: Cayucos woman fulfills her dreams

  How to live your last days: Cayucos woman fulfills her dreams

  Inside Jodi Fisher’s fragile body, cancer cells are aligned like stars speckled in the sky. Surgery is futile. Chemotherapy, not a cure.

  Fisher, 44, is dying. But you wouldn’t know it. The Cayucos woman is a vivacious mother of two young children, a wife, a sister, a daughter. And, now, she is a fighter who has transformed having a terminal illness into a reason to embrace living.

  She laughs often and has a knack for finding humor in even the most exhausting and challenging of circumstances.

• Father: Ga. woman with flesh-eating bug wants book

  Father: Ga. woman with flesh-eating bug wants book

  A week ago, doctors gave her little chance of survival. Now a Georgia grad student who is battling a rare flesh-eating infection is alert and bored enough to ask for a book, her father told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

• Habit of ‘borrowing’ leads to trouble

  Habit of ‘borrowing’ leads to trouble

  I doubt most embezzlers start out to steal. I bet most just begin “borrowing” a little. That thought crept into my mind Wednesday as I read The Tribune’s story about Morgan Rafferty of Arroyo Grande, whose sentence for embezzlement was six months in jail and three years’ probation.

  She was convicted of stealing $31,000 from Mothers for Peace. She was the group’s treasurer. She was also accused of stealing almost the same amount from the Environmental Center of San Luis Obispo, where she was executive director.

  I don’t know her, and all I know about her case is what I read in The Tribune. But I have known a few embezzlers. In the 1950s, when I was selling vacuum cleaners, two of my fellow salesmen pawned some of the company’s cleaners and then lost the money betting at Bay Meadows race track.