Charlie Duncan might very nicely be the oldest man in Georgia. “I’ll be 100 and 6 in Might,” he mentioned the opposite day at Benton Home, a senior-living facility within the city of Woodstock. With that a lot mileage, he’s survived a number of issues, one in every of them being the stock-market crash of 1929.
Duncan, who nonetheless has his hair and his wits, and tooled round behind the wheel of a PT Cruiser till a fender bender final yr, was ten years outdated when the market crashed. On the time, his household had a farm in close by Hickory Flat. “Cotton, corn, peanuts, candy potatoes,” he recalled, leaning again in his recliner, beneath a framed certificates from the United Sq. Dancers of America and a proclamation from the county, which lately designated a Charlie Duncan Day.
“We did O.Ok. for some time,” he went on. “Daddy acquired up at four-thirty within the morning seven days per week. When he acquired up, all people acquired up.” He spat in a cup. “I’ve used it since I used to be eight years outdated,” he mentioned, referring to his snuff. “My grandmother lived with us, and these two outdated girls instructed her, ‘That boy’s wormy.’ So she began me on tobacco and I handed these tapeworms. I assumed my guts was popping out.”
In October of 1929, Duncan recalled, his world modified: “I didn’t know what a inventory was till any individual instructed me the entire thing crashed or smashed or no matter it was.” He thinks he heard the information from his father—“That’s how we heard most issues,” he mentioned. “Unexpectedly you couldn’t promote your crops for nothing,” he added. “You couldn’t make fifty cents in a day on a farm, in case you might discover any individual to rent you, which you couldn’t.”
Duncan had hoped to develop as much as be a rustic physician. “There wasn’t sufficient of them round,” he mentioned. “When you had a toothache, he pulled your tooth. A minimize? He sewed it up.”
The crash scuttled that dream, and the household moved to a brand new farm. “Me and my brother drove a crew of mules hitched to a two-horse wagon,” Duncan mentioned. They paid for eighty-nine arable acres with cotton: “Two bales was the down cost.” The poor financial system had stunted colleges, too. “You couldn’t get schoolbooks,” he mentioned. “Then our faculty burned down. You needed to stroll a number of miles to a different district.” When he was fifteen, his father pulled him out to work full time. In 1931, the household might solely get a penny and a half for a bale of cotton. “You needed to pile up so many bales after the Despair hit,” he mentioned. At nineteen, he left house to work on a dairy farm, however the proprietor accused him of being lazy. “I instructed him to take the job and shove it up his ass,” Duncan mentioned. The telephone rang in his room. He ignored it. “I acquired forty-five calls one Friday,” he mentioned. “All scams. I acquired one this morning. It was a girl. I mentioned, ‘What would you like? When you gonna need intercourse, you bought the fallacious individual. That give up working twenty-five years in the past.’ ”
The occasions of 1929 left Duncan with a sixth-grade schooling and a lifetime of largely bodily labor. After serving within the Second World Warfare, he labored at mills and as a craftsman who specialised in bannisters for spiral staircases. He married twice: round forty years to every lady. He flipped a number of homes and ultimately made slightly cash, which he didn’t put money into the inventory market. “I can’t afford to lose it, as a result of I can’t make no extra,” he mentioned. “So I am going the secure approach: C.D.s.” Requested whether or not he had every other common life recommendation, he listed, in no specific order, good intercourse, contemporary greens, the occasional Coors Gentle, and water aerobics, which he did thrice per week till his hips gave out final yr.
A good friend arrived to take him to lunch at a biker bar, whose wall holds a framed picture of Duncan with Rudolph Giuliani, who tracked him down for a preëlection picture op in 2024. (“He mentioned howdy, he smiled, then he left,” Duncan recalled, with a shrug.)
Again at Benton Home, Mariam Bailey, who’s 100 and 6, sat all the way down to lunch. She was born close to Pittsburgh, the daughter of a minister. The Despair hit the congregation arduous. “We simply took the autumn because it got here and did the most effective we might do,” she mentioned.
What was her recommendation if the market stored dropping, as in 1929?
“Simply maintain on,” she mentioned. “Life is stuffed with ups and downs.” The soup arrived. Bailey narrowed her eyes and took a glance. “Cream of one thing,” she mentioned. ♦
