HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - Ann Drake reaches back - to a time before airplanes traversed the skies or automobiles crowded the roads, to a time before penicillin or communism or plastic toys.

She is 103 and the granddaughter of slaves. She remembers the milestones of the 20th century - the triumphs and the fiascoes.

She also remembers Miss Lottie Brooks, who taught her the ABCs about the same time the Wright brothers were learning to fly. And the first cars, and how they bewildered the horses.

There are, today, more than 135,000 people like Mrs. Drake - people who have lived every day of this remarkable century, fully capable of offering an eyewitness tour of the decades.

Though you would not know it to look at him - his face is smooth and round, his complexion pink - Guo Jingtong remembers the days of the empire. He was born Nov. 14, 1891, in the twilight of the Qing dynasty.

"Whatever the emperor said went. Those who didn't listen got their heads chopped off," he said.

In his 107 years, he has seen the death of the empire, invasion by Japan, the rise of communism, the Cultural Revolution and its turmoil, the creation of a new, post-Mao China - a better China, he said.

"The old society was extremely bitter," he said. "The new society is incomparably better than the old one."

Georgy Lugovoi also was present when an old order passed - in his 98 years, he has seen Russia become the Soviet Union and then Russia again.

As a child he would pass the palace in St. Petersburg and see the czar's children at the windows. Alexei, the hemophiliac heir of the doomed Romanovs, "was always carried around by a big sailor," he said.

When the revolution came, "My father and I were in his shop on Nevsky (the main street) and saw it all through the window. We were afraid that the window would be smashed. People were shouting, 'Bread, bread, bread.' "

The world was coming apart. The Great War had started, and within a few months Lee Owens - born in 1896, a boy who had not traveled 100 miles from his southern Missouri birthplace - was on his way to France.

Eighty years later, the sights and sounds of World War I are vivid in his mind: "The firing of all them guns, them big guns, the whole earth felt like it was shaking, just like you was riding on a train."

"One Sunday, there was a little Mexican boy. He was carrying ammunition across the field, to the guns, and a big shell hit him and just blowed him all to pieces ....

"I can tell you now, it ain't no fun to be in a war," Owens said.

It was supposed to be the War to End All Wars. It wasn't.

Twenty-one years after the armistice, Germany was at war again - with the rest of the world, and with some of its own people.

Strea Liachev, a Jew, was born in Bulgaria. That country allied with Germany and passed laws that rid schools of Jews, and forced every Jew to wear the yellow star.

"I remember how it began - with the yellow stars and how my Bulgarian friends helped us," Liachev said. "On the night that we thought we might be deported (a friend) said to come with her. She had arranged a safe house for us."

They were not deported, but like 25,000 other Jews in the city of Sofia, she, her husband and their son were forced to move to the provinces.

Eighteen hundred miles away, in Leningrad, Georgy Lugovoi - by now a professional photographer for news agencies - endured life without electricity or water at home. People got about a quarter-pound of bread a day, and had to line up all day for that.

"My mother cut the bread into three pieces and we had a piece each for breakfast, lunch and dinner with tea. This saved us. People who ate their bread at one go died much quicker," Lugovoi said. Eventually, hungry and sick, his mother passed away, like so many others in the second Great War.

Ninety-nine-year-old Kushida Fuki remembers the terror of the war's last days: "Every night, when U.S. military planes flew over us, I thought I was going to die today." Then the atomic bomb struck Hiroshima."

On Aug. 15, 1945, she heard the emperor surrender. "I couldn't hear him well. We were on the roof of the office building and some were crying. But I was not sad. I was relieved the war was over."

After the war, the Liachevs emigrated to Israel.

"Life was not so quiet here (in Israel) but I remember opening the door and seeing my son standing in uniform," Strea Liachev says. "I wasn't just happy to see him but I was proud to see him - to have a soldier for a son. Israel felt like home and I came here with all my heart."

By the time she arrived, Ahmed Darwish had already called this land his home for 63 years. He is 112, and the languages he speaks - Turkish, English and Hebrew - are a legacy of the peoples who have ruled the Holy Land in his lifetime.

He tells of atrocities, and of being forced to leave his village by the Israelis. Since 1950, he has lived in a refugee camp at Askar.

"Peace? It is good because we have lived under Israeli humiliation too long ...," he said. "Some people say soon the army will leave and Palestinian police will come here. I can't wait. I will be so happy to get rid of tear gas that chokes me when it is fired in the camp."

Liachev insists that "what is our land is ours, we need a place to be." She also yearns for peace - especially when she thinks of one of her 12 great-grandchildren, an Israeli paratrooper.

Leah Mahlangu also has lived with violence. She was born in 1899, a black infant in white-ruled South Africa.

Her strength and her weakness was her feisty spirit. She would go to work at a farm, and would rebel, and would be fired.

Her employers would send her along with a letter. She never learned to read, so she did not know that "in that letter was the message to the next farmer to beat me up. And when I got to the next job, they would beat me.

"They would take a stick and soak it in salt water and beat me over the hands, between my fingers, very hard."

A world away, Ann Drake was never lashed with a switch. But she, too, felt the sting of racism.

A teacher of languages, she married Joseph F. Drake, who became president of Alabama A&M University at Normal. In 1931 - 40 miles away, in Scottsboro - nine young blacks were unjustly charged with raping two white women.

Joseph Drake "went to see them and talk with the boys," his wife says, but his protests and those of others around the country did no good: Eight were convicted, and five eventually served long terms.

Thirty years later, the civil rights movement was blooming, and students at A&M, a black school, joined the protests.

"The governor and the folks didn't like it, and to be sure to stop this thing, they decided that they would do a very mean and ugly thing. ... They fired Dr. Drake after 35 years as president of A&M.

"After 35 years, he was kicked out," she said, her voice shaking.

"There's still a whole lot of meanness and prejudice," she says. And yet, she lived to see her son become the first black doctor at Huntsville Hospital. And she says she never felt handicapped by the color of her skin.

"I never let it stop me," she said. "I think I've accomplished most of the things I've tried."

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