Charlie Duncan turned 107 years old on Wednesday, making him the oldest living World War II veteran in Ge0rgia.
To mark the occasion, the Cobb Board of Commissioners on Tuesday designated “Charlie Duncan Day,” and he attended the meeting along with family members.
Duncan, who was born on May 27, 1919, grew up in Cobb and Cherokee counties. He served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, building prefabricated bridges for use in the Allied campaign in Europe.
He was sworn in on his 25th birthday and served for 18 months, until shortly after the German surrender in May 1945.
In addition to a county proclamation at Tuesday’s meeting, Duncan also received recognition from the office of U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff.
Duncan, who is a retired master craftsman at an Atlanta millworks company, has had a busy retirement.
He has survived two wives, to whom he was married for 39 years and 44 years, and heads a family with 10 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren.
He later built a home on Ebenezer Road in Northeast Cobb and took water aerobics classes at the Mountain View Aquatics Center.
And Duncan. has kept strong ties with other veterans, dining them often at a Woodstock restaurant, close his home at a senior-living facility, and that’s popular with military retirees.
Duncan spoke just a few words at Tuesday’s meeting, but has been the subject of local and even national media attention in recent years, including a story in The New Yorker magazine in 2025.
The subject was the onset of the Depression in 1929 and how he and his family made it through. At the time, Duncan was living on a farm in Hickory Flat, in Cherokee County.
“All of a sudden you couldn’t sell your crops for nothing,” he told the magazine. “You couldn’t make fifty cents in a day on a farm, if you could find somebody to hire you, which you couldn’t.”
He also said this, about his key to longevity:
Asked whether he had any other general life advice, he listed, in no particular order, good sex, fresh vegetables, the occasional Coors Light, and water aerobics, which he did three times a week until his hips gave out last year.
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