The nation’s oldest sitting federal judge has died at age 104.

His law clerk, Nanette Turner Kalcik, says U.S. District Judge Wesley Brown passed away Monday night at the Wichita assisted living center where he lived. He was born on June 22, 1907, here in Hutchinson.

Brown was appointed as a federal district judge in 1962 by then-President John F. Kennedy. In 1979, Brown officially took senior status, a type of semi-retirement. But he continued to carry
a full load of cases decades later.

Brown’s long tenure on the federal bench rivals that of Joseph Woodrough, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, who had been the longest practicing judge in the federal judiciary when he died in 1977 at age 104.

(AP)