Oldest

Your June 10 obituary of Brig. Gen. Wesley Hamilton, 96, erred in describing him as "the nation's oldest general." There is at least one older: my uncle Brig. Gen. Homer Case, who lives in Santa Barbara and last December celebrated his 100th birthday. He is frail today, partly because of injuries he suffered in World War II, but he is indomitable. In his 99th year, unbelievably, he wrote his military memoirs, which tell of his commissioning as a lieutenant in 1917 and his subsequent 38 continuous years of active service, including stints under Gens.

If the TV audience for the Oscars were a person, it might soon be eligible for the senior discount.  Sunday's Academy Awards presentation ABC is almost certain to generate big ratings. After all, the Ellen DeGeneres-hosted event will feature an all-star cast of presenters, including Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Lawrence, and will honor popular films such as "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "12 Years a Slave. " But here's a less-celebrated fact about Oscar viewers: They aren't getting any younger.

Reporting from Lakemont Park in Altoona, Pa.-- My current  travels across the great American roller-coaster belt will put me aboard five of the oldest operating coasters in the world, including the very oldest at little Lakemont Park here in Altoona. Photos : View the 21 oldest roller coasters in the world I found the rough, rickety and rundown Leap-the-Dips at Lakemont Park to be the perfect throwback to the golden age of coasters, when thrills were raw and wild rather than neutered by lawyers and lawmakers.

The oldest known material on Earth is a tiny bit of zircon crystal that has remained intact for an incredible 4.4 billion years, a study confirms. The ancient remnant of the early Earth may change the way we think about how our planet first formed.  The crystal is the size of a small grain of sand, just barely visible to the human eye. It was discovered on a remote sheep farm in western Australia, which happens to sit on one of the most stable parts of our planet. "The Earth's tectonic processes are constantly destroying rocks," said John Valley, a professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who discovered and dated the crystal.

Gertrude Noone was a 44-year-old insurance policy clerk for Travelers in Hartford, Conn., in 1943 when she enlisted in the Women's Army Corps. When she died peacefully Thursday morning at age 110 at an assisted-living facility in Milford, Conn., she was the oldest known living military veteran in the world -- a fact that made her proud. "Oh, she loved it," Deborah Woods, a grandniece, said Friday. "She felt it was important to serve when she did during World War II." Noone, who rose to the rank of sergeant first class, was chief clerk of the large dispensary at Ft. Myer, Va., by the time she left the Army in 1949.

Defensive tackle Dave Butz of the Washington Redskins, at 38 the oldest starting player in the National Football League, announced his retirement.

The repeated exclusion by you and the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission of rape and wife beating as hate crimes, denies the bias of the male establishment against admitting to these, the oldest hate crimes. LOUIS ST. MARTIN Pomona

Penelope, an African-born lowland gorilla that produced four offspring in the Cincinnati Zoo's mating program, has died at age 35. A gift from Nobel Prize winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Penelope had lived at the zoo since 1957 and was its oldest lowland gorilla until dying Wednesday.

In his review of the PBS program "Stealing Time: The New Science of Aging" (" 'Stealing Time' Looks at Advances in the Science of Human Aging," June 2), Robert Hotz says "one of the greatest triumphs of the 20th century is the doubling of the typical human life span since 1900." My understanding is that the human life span is no different than it was in biblical times. That is, the oldest people today are no older than they were back then. What has changed considerably is the human life expectancy.

New dating techniques suggest that the remains of so-called Peking Man -- a batch of Homo erectus fossils found in the 1920s -- are 200,000 years older than previously calculated. That suggests he was probably the oldest cold-weather inhabitant in human ancestry, according to the research in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature. During a glacial period about 770,000 years ago, the average yearly temperature in northern China, where he was found, would have hovered around the freezing mark.

When Alice Herz-Sommer played the piano at Theresienstadt her audience was enthralled. As she approached the end of Chopin's difficult Revolutionary Etude, the piece's mounting musical turbulence exploded. "Alice's hands slid furiously over the keys, zig-zagging up and down from the heights to the lowest registers, with the final four chords ringing out, like so many shrieks of despair," biographers Melissa Muller and Reinhard Piechocki wrote in 2006. The next day, she was given an extra ladle of watery soup - a privilege at a Nazi concentration camp, but one that made the pianist distinctly uncomfortable.

The only thing not completely stupefying about Sunday's men's Olympic super giant slalom was that Norway won. Kjetil Jansrud became the fourth straight Norwegian to claim the super-G gold, so just go ahead and pencil in a Kjetil, Aksel or Lasse for 2018. Everything else about Sunday's result was pulled out of a magician's hat. America's Andrew Weibrecht, four years after stunningly taking super-G bronze in Vancouver, and having done absolutely nothing since, stole silver from his back-of-the-snowpack No. 29 start position.

The oldest player in the NBA isn't worried about staying in front of quicker counterparts or piling up assists or leading his team to the playoffs. Steve Nash just wants his body to cooperate so he can get through a game. It was too much to ask again Tuesday night, the Lakers point guard departing prematurely because of discomfort in his leg and back. He was done at halftime after 17 unremarkable minutes, leading one to wonder just how many are left on the odometer of a 40-year-old who continues to creak his way toward the Hall of Fame.

To see teacher Rose Gilbert - a nonstop, 5-foot dynamo - in front of a high school classroom was to see a master at work. "I'm on fire," she would tell her 12th-graders in Room 204 at Palisades Charter High School, emphasizing the point by wearing a red plastic firefighter's helmet. Yet, even after more than half a century of imparting a love of Homer, Camus, Faulkner and Joyce to her youthful charges, she never seemed to burn out. Each semester for more than 50 years, into her 90s, Gilbert lectured on dozens of classic works, including "The Great Gatsby," "The Iliad" and "The Stranger.

They are both African Americans, World War II veterans, Texas natives and, oh yes, 107 years old. And for the last six decades, they lived about 200 miles away from each other but had never met -- until now.   The nation's oldest known veterans, Richard Overton of Austin, and Elmer Hill of Henderson, spent Friday bonding over barbecue ribs and trading stories about their service.   Their meet-up, held in Austin, was “history in the making,” Karen Lucas, a vice president with Emeritus Senior Living, which arranged the get-together, told the Los Angeles Times.  It took two weeks to plan and coordinate the event, she said, which was received with enthusiasm by both Hill and Overton.

The oldest fossil of a previously unknown ancient leopard species, found in Tibet, is shaking the pantherine evolutionary tree, suggesting that big cats arose in Asia, not Africa, according to a new study. During a 2010 expedition to Tibet, paleontologists led by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and USC discovered a large portion of skull and several intact teeth that they now attribute to a previously undescribed sister species to the modern snow leopard. In all, they collected seven specimens from three individuals, and dated them to 4.1 to 5.9 million years ago - dialing back the clock on big cat evolution by as much as 2 million years, according to the paper, published online Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Panthera blytheae , named for the daughter of longtime museum benefactors Paul and Heather Haaga of La Cañada Flintridge, was slightly smaller than the snow leopard and probably roamed the Tibetan plateau for several million years, dining on antelope, pika and blue sheep, according to paleontologist Zhijie Jack Tseng, lead author of the paper.

There is yet another way to get to Basel, Switzerland ("Swiss Carnival Tinged With Bizarre Traditions," Feb. 2), and that's via the K-D Ship Line from Rotterdam up the Rhine River. Basel is the end of the line for this relaxed method of travel. For accommodations in Basel, it would be hard to find any better than at the Drei Koenigen (Three Kings), which claims to be the oldest hotel in continuous service in Europe. However, its facilities have been modernized and upgraded to meet the most demanding tastes.

The San Fernando Valley is 260 square miles of suburbia. Actually, make that suburbia on nutritional supplements. And antidepressants. With perhaps a little cosmetic surgery south of Ventura Boulevard, where the big money is. Or maybe - now that it's grown to more than 1.7 million people in nearly three dozen cities and neighborhoods rich and poor - the Valley isn't even a suburb anymore. It begins just 10 miles northwest of Los Angeles City Hall, sprawling west to the Simi Hills, north to the Santa Susana Mountains, and east to the Verdugo and San Gabriel mountains.

Steve Nash was hailed as a missing piece when the Lakers acquired him from Phoenix last year. Now they're just trying to keep him in one piece. He was supposed to be the answer to their failed attempt to snare Chris Paul, a solid second choice the NBA couldn't veto. But Nash was hit with more injury news Monday in a medical file that won't stop growing. He will miss at least two weeks because of persistent back pain, the Lakers announced. Nash was found to have nerve root irritation after being examined in Los Angeles by back specialist Robert Watkins.

Clarence 'Ace' Parker Oldest living Football Hall of Fame member Clarence "Ace" Parker, 101, a star of New York City football in the 1940s who was the oldest member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, died Wednesday, the Canton, Ohio-based Hall of Fame announced. He had been hospitalized with a pulmonary condition since late last month, the Virginian-Pilot newspaper reported. Born May 17, 1912, in Portsmouth, Va., Parker was an all-around athlete who played football, basketball and baseball at Duke University, earning All-America honors as a tailback in football.