Leah L Garchik's Biography

Leah Garchik, a woman who has never owned a car with push-button windows, lives in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district with her husband. She has two grown sons for whom she has baked many cakes.

She learned how to knit and everything else useful in her native Brooklyn. She has been writing a daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle since 1984; the National Society of Newspaper Columnists named it best items column in the country in 1992; in 1998, 2000 and 2004, the San Francisco Bay Area Publicity Club named her Favorite Columnist, and a Chronicle Readers' Poll named her Best Gossip.

She also reviews books for the Chronicle, does freelance magazine features, wrote the text for "San Francisco; The City's Sights and Secrets," a Chronicle book, and "Real Life Romance,'' a collection of quotes from the Overheard portion of her column.

She is a panelist on the KALW audience-participation quiz show, "Minds Over Matter" and former bell-ringer in a German polka band. Her garden is overgrown, but she is a tall person so she doesn't have the heart to prune; and she prefers bittersweet to milk chocolate.