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.

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.

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.

An 86-year-old San Jose woman has died from a head injury she suffered while running in the New York City Marathon last weekend. Joy Johnson stumbled in the 20th mile of the race and fell to the ground, the New York Daily News reported . Medics urged Johnson to let them take her to a hospital but Johnson, running in New York for the 25th time, insisted on continuing. After the race, she appeared on the "Today" show, where she was interviewed by Al Roker with bandages covering the right side of her face and head.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the wake of September's deadly jet crash, Santa Monica officials sued the Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday to gain control of the city's embattled airport, which local groups want to turn into a park. Filed in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles, the lawsuit seeks a declaration that the city holds clear title to the 227 acres containing the oldest continuously operating airport in the county. It also challenges the constitutionality of a 1948 agreement between the city and federal authorities that requires the historic property and its 5,000-foot runway to remain an airport in perpetuity or be returned at the option of the FAA to the U.S. government.

Steve Nash might not have a choice about any of this. Father Time has been giving him a full-court press since last season. He'll be 40 in February. So he's on board with the Lakers' experiment that might debut Wednesday at Golden State. Nash could be sitting out the second night of back-to-back situations. "I want to play them all, but if missing the back end of some or all the back-to-backs prevents me from missing a month or two because of injury, then I think it's something you've got to look at," Nash said Tuesday.

The nation's oldest full-time national park ranger, who works at the  Rosie the Riveter museum in Richmond, Calif., recently joined the ranks of the furloughed because of the ongoing U.S. government shutdown. Betty Reid Soskin, 92, is a ranger at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Northern California. “At 92, I am very sensitive to the passage of time. We learned about the furlough gradually,” Soskin said told the Associated Press last week.

It's a line Steve Nash would rather leave off a resume that includes two most-valuable-player awards, 10,249 assists and a record 90.4% accuracy on free throws. He's now the oldest player in the NBA. "It's not a privilege I ever really dreamed about," the 39-year-old said Saturday while encircled by reporters during Lakers media day. "It's pretty strange and I guess surreal in a way. " PHOTOS: Lakers Media Day That would make it like everything else Nash has experienced since becoming a Laker.

Scientists say they have discovered a fossil of the oldest known vertebrate animal with a jaw -- a strange chimera of a fish that could unseat the shark as a representative of extremely "primitive" jawed fishes and turn our evolutionary understanding of humans' ocean-dwelling ancestors on its head. The new fossil described in the journal Nature, called Entelognathus primordialis , is a 419-million-year-old armored fish from the end of the Silurian period, right before the start of the Devonian, known as the Age of Fishes for their remarkable diversity during that period.

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.

Televangelist Paul Crouch, founder of the world's largest Christian broadcasting network, has waged a fierce legal battle to prevent a former employee from publicizing allegations that he and Crouch had a sexual encounter eight years ago. Crouch, 70, is the president of Trinity Broadcasting Network, based in Orange County, whose Christian programming reaches millions of viewers around the world via satellite, cable and broadcast stations.

The World 3-D Film Expo III, which opens Friday and continues through Sept. 15 at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, has lined up some of the well-known classics of the format's heyday 60 years ago, including 1953's "House of Wax" with Vincent Price, the 1953 musical "Kiss Me Kate" with Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel and Ann Miller, and 1954's "Creature From the Black Lagoon" with Julie Adams and the Gill-man. FOR THE RECORD: World 3-D Film Expo: In the Sept. 5 Calendar section, an article about the World 3-D Film Expo misspelled the name of the Arriflex camera as Aeroflex.

Frank Pulli MLB umpire turned to instant replay in '99 Frank Pulli, 78, a longtime umpire for Major League Baseball who used instant replay to make a call nearly a decade before video reviews were allowed, died Wednesday in Palm Harbor, Fla., of complications from Parkinson's disease, according to MLB. Pulli umpired in the National League from 1972 to '99 and worked four World Series, six NL championship series and two All-Star games....