This week: one of America's richest women and the oldest US military survivor of Pearl Harbor

THE hotel magnate and philanthropist Caroline Rose Hunt, who has died aged 95, was the daughter of the Texas oilman HL Hunt (who some said was the model for the character of JR in the soap opera Dallas); she was also one of America's richest women.

Hunt's father, who owned an oil field in Texas that once contained the world's largest deposits, provided a trust for her which she invested in hotels. She founded Rosewood Hotels & Resorts in 1979, which operated The Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas and owned the Lanesborough in London. The operating company was The Rosewood Corporation in Dallas. It was sold in 2011 to New World Hospitality, now known as Rosewood Hotel Group.

Away from business, Caroline Hunt was a well-known philanthropist who supported many causes in the US; she also served on the board of the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington.

She married twice and had five children, 19 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren.

She had 14 siblings including the sports tycoon and Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, who died in 2006, and the oil executive Nelson Bunker Hunt, who died in 2014.

THE war veteran Ray Chavez, who has died aged 106, was the oldest US military survivor of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged the United States into the Second World War. As recently as last May Chavez travelled to Washington DC, where he was honoured on Memorial Day by President Donald Trump.

Hours before the attack, Chavez was aboard the minesweeper USS Condor as it patrolled the harbour’s east entrance when he and others saw the periscope of a Japanese submarine. They notified a destroyer that sunk it shortly before Japanese bombers arrived to strafe the harbour.

By then Chavez, who had worked through the early morning hours, had gone to his nearby home to sleep, ordering his wife not to wake him because he had been up all night.

“It seemed like I only slept about 10 minutes when she called me and said, ‘We’re being attacked,’ ” he recalled in 2016. “And I said, ‘Who is going to attack us?’ ”

“She said, ‘The Japanese are here, and they’re attacking everything.’ ”

He ran back to the harbour to find it in flames.

Chavez would spend the next week there, working around the clock sifting through the destruction that had crippled the US Navy’s Pacific fleet.

Later he was assigned to the transport ship USS La Salle, ferrying troops, tanks and other equipment to war-torn islands across the Pacific, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa.

Although never wounded, he left the military in 1945 suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that left him anxious and shaking.

Returning to San Diego, where he had grown up, he took a job as a landscaper and groundskeeper, attributing the outdoors and a healthy diet with restoring his health.

However, he would not talk about Pearl Harbour for decades. Then, on a last-minute whim, he decided to return to Hawaii in 1991 for ceremonies marking the attack’s 50th anniversary.

Born on March 12, 1912, in San Bernardino, California, to Mexican immigrant parents, Chavez moved to San Diego as a child, where his family ran a wholesale flower business. He joined the Navy in 1938.

In his later years, as he became well known as the attack’s oldest military survivor, he would be approached at memorial services and other events and asked for his autograph or to pose for pictures. He always maintained that those events were not about him, but about those who gave their lives.

Chavez was preceded in death by his wife, Margaret, and is survived by a daughter.