GRAZ, Austria: Austrian media say the country’s oldest known woman has died at age 110.
Public broadcaster ORF has reported that Hermina Dunz died Saturday in the southern city of Graz.
The city’s mayor, Siegfried Nagl, said Dunz celebrated her 110th birthday Feb. 24, and that she was in remarkably good shape for a woman of her age. … Read full obituary
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The oldest African elephant in an American zoo has died.
Petal, who was 52 and lived most of her life at the Philadelphia Zoo, was found lying in her stall by workers Monday morning. She usually slept standing up.
The elephant had been in excellent health recently. A zoo official says she was showing no signs of illness or decline. … Read full story
March 19, 1913 - February 14, 2008
Country and Western singer and entertainer dubbed ‘Australia’s first cowboy’, who became the world’s oldest recording artist
Smoky Dawson was one of Australia’s most enduringly popular entertainers. He was a western singer before it was coupled with country and was dubbed Australia’s first cowboy. He went on to become the world’s oldest recording artist. He made his first record, I’m a Happy Go Lucky Cowhand, in 1941 and his last, Homestead of My Dreams, in 2005, when he was 92, although a DVD featuring new performances was completed just before his death. … Read full obituary
July 24, 1900 - May 27, 2008
Veteran who survived the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian armies in 1918
Franz Künstler was not overimpressed with the sudden attention he attracted at the very end of his extraordinarily long life. Living quietly in the small German town of Niederstetten, in Baden-Württemberg, he was discovered to be one of the very few former First World War soldiers still alive, and the only one who had fought in the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
This brought him visitors, inquisitive interviewers and letters from around the world. But he confessed that was “anything but proud, to be the last soldier of the Emperor”. “I was no Hurrah soldier and simply did what I had to do,” he told the German magazine Cicero. “Young people had to kill each other. Is that somehow justified?” was his bitter reflection on what the war had meant. … Read full obituary
May 21, 2008 — TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The last plaintiff in the historic Brown versus Board of Education case has died.
Zelma Henderson died yesterday in Topeka, Kansas, at 88. She had pancreatic cancer.
In 1950, Henderson and 12 other black parents in Topeka challenged the city’s segregated school system. The 1954 Supreme Court decision in the case overturned segregation in the country’s public schools. … Read full obituary
Ollie Johnston, the last of the “Nine Old Men” who animated “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Fantasia,” “Bambi” and other classic Walt Disney films, died Monday. He was 95.
Johnston died of natural causes at a long-term care facility in Sequim, Washington, Walt Disney Studios Vice President Howard Green said Tuesday. …
Walt Disney lightheartedly dubbed his team of crack animators his “Nine Old Men,” borrowing the phrase from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s description of the U.S. Supreme Court’s members…
Perhaps the two most accomplished of the nine were Johnston and his close friend Frank Thomas, who died in 2004 at age 92. … Read full obituary
RAF pilot who was shot down, sent to Stalag Luft III and took part in the Great Escape of 1944
The death of Sydney Dowse leaves only three British survivors of the “Great Escape” by Allied air force officers from the German prison of war camp Stalag Luft III in March 1944. Hitler issued an order that all those recaptured were to be shot but was allegedly persuaded to reduce the figure to 50. Seventy-six men got away but only three reached safety. The 23 survivors of those recaptured were sent to prison or concentration camps. Dowse was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin, from where he again escaped. In all he made five escape attempts.
As an RAF Flight Lieutenant, Dowse had baled [sic] out from his photo-reconaissance Spitfire of 608 Squadron over Brest in August 1941, after taking photographs of the German battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst sheltering in the port. Landing in occupied Brittany, he tried to make contact with the French Resistance but was taken prisoner… Read full obituary
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TOKYO - Kaku Yamanaka, Japan’s oldest person, has died of old age in central Japan, officials said Saturday. She was 113. …
Born on Dec. 11, 1894, Yamanaka became Japan’s oldest person when Tsuneyo Toyonaga, 113, died in February. It was not immediately clear who had become Japan’s new oldest person…
Yamanaka was known for her love of singing and took part in local karaoke contests…
Edna Parker of Shelbyville, Indiana, is recognized as the world’s oldest person at age 114, according to Guinness World Records. … Read full obituary
The last Turkish veteran of the First World War who also fought for the independence of Turkey
The last Turkish veteran of the First World War, Yakup Satar, who has died at the age of 110, fought at the Second Battle of Kut in the Mesopotamian campaign. He was captured there by the British in February 1917, as Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Maude’s British and Indian army drove the Ottoman Empire’s forces back up the Tigris from Basra towards Baghdad. … Read full obituary
REDDING, Calif. — Raymond Jacobs, believed to be the last surviving member of the group of Marines photographed during the original U.S. flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World War II, has died at age 82. …
Jacobs had spent his later years working to prove that he was the radio operator photographed looking up at an American flag as it was being raised by other Marines on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945. …
Jacobs retired in 1992 from KTVU-TV in Oakland, where he worked 34 years as a reporter, anchor and news director. … Read full obituary
Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) — Earl Butz, the U.S. secretary of agriculture who was forced to resign after telling an obscenity-laced racist joke in 1976, died yesterday in Washington. He was 98 and the oldest living former Cabinet member. …
Butz was named to head the Department of Agriculture in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. He remained in the Cabinet under President Gerald Ford after Nixon resigned in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal. …
It was a crude joke that turned Butz into a household word and punch line on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” show. Butz was flying from the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City, Missouri, to California when he told his infamous story to a group that included singer Pat Boone and John Dean… Read full obituary
RAF pilot who was awarded the Military Cross for his part in the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III
“Jimmy” James was one of 76 officers who escaped from Stalag Luft III on the night of March 24, 1944, and was fortunate not to be among the 50 executed on Hitler’s order on recapture. He was sent instead to Sachsenhausen concentration camp from where he tunnelled his way out, only to be caught again after 14 days on the run.
He was the second pilot of a Wellington bomber shot down south of Rotterdam in June 1940. Initially hopeful that German security would not be too tight, the Netherlands having been overrun only in May, he planned to acquire a boat to sail back to England, or at least get him far enough from the coast to be picked up. A Dutch farmer gave him food and shelter but for one night only as his presence was certain to become known: the local police arrested him before he could move on. …
Squadron Leader B. A. “Jimmy” James, MC, survivor of the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, was born on April 17, 1915. He died on January 18, 2008, aged 92 … Read full obituary
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Desmond Plunkett
TOLEDO, Ohio — J. Russell Coffey, the oldest known surviving U.S. veteran of World War I, has died. The retired teacher, one of only three U.S. veterans from the “war to end all wars,” was 109.
Coffey died Thursday at the Briar Hill Health Campus in North Baltimore, where he had lived for the past four or five years, said Gaye Boggs, nursing director at the nursing home. No cause of death has been determined, she said Friday. His health began failing in October.
“We’re sure going to miss him,” Boggs said. “He was our most famous resident, that’s for sure.” …
Coffey never saw combat because he was still in basic training when the war ended.
The two remaining U.S. veterans are Frank Buckles, 106, of Charles Town, W.Va.; and Harry Richard Landis, 108, of Sun City Center, Fla., according to the Veterans Affairs Department. In addition, John Babcock, 107, of Spokane, Wash., served in the Canadian army and is the last known Canadian veteran of the war. … Read full obituary
Australia’s oldest Olympian Eileen Wearne died last week aged 95, the Australian Olympic Committee announced today.
Wearne, who died on Friday, competed in athletics at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
She finished fourth in heat three of the women’s 100m. … Read full obituary
New Zealand’s oldest surviving film star, Witarina Harris, has died at the age of 101.
In 1928, aged 22, she was picked by Universal Pictures to play the starring role of Princess Miro in the silent movie Under The Southern Cross, later known as The Devil’s Pit. … Read full obituary
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