Alright. This story has nothing to do with legal news or law. But it is such a great story that I'm posting it anyway:
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., Sept. 20 — Silas Simmons was handed a photograph and asked if he recognized anyone in it. He fixed his eyes on the sepia stares and moved his curled fingers over the glass and frame, soaking in the faces for more than 20 silent seconds.
It was a picture of the 1913 Homestead Grays, a primordial Pittsburgh-area baseball team that played before the Negro leagues were even born. His mind, Simmons said, needed time to connect the faces to positions to names. He was entitled to the delay; next month, he will turn 111 years old.
Simmons, known as Si, was born on Oct. 14, 1895 — the same year as Babe Ruth and Rudolph Valentino, and before F. Scott Fitzgerald and Amelia Earhart. He played at the highest level of black baseball while a boy named Satchel Paige was still in grade school.
That Simmons is still living was unknown to baseball researchers until this summer, when a genealogist near the nursing home where he lives in St. Petersburg alerted a Negro leagues expert.
A member of the Center for Negro League Baseball Research confirmed a baseball historian’s dream: that Simmons was indeed a man who had pitched and played the outfield in the equivalent of the black major leagues on and off from about 1912 through at least 1929, and that he had played against such stars as Pop Lloyd, Judy Johnson and Biz Mackey.
Details here from Alan Schwarz in today's New York Times.