Business
professor Clarence Duncan retires after 29 years at Piedmont College. |
(Back to Piedmont News)
Duncan plans to travel after
29 years of teaching
(1/10/04) Clarence Duncan received a rocking chair when he retired
from Piedmont College, but after 29 years of teaching, the former accounting
professor says he plans to do more rolling than rocking.
Duncan and his wife, Joyce, who also is retired from teaching nursing at
North Georgia Technical College, will be putting miles on their camper and
doing lots of fishing following his last official day at the college on Dec.
31. When they are not traveling, Duncan said that during the summer the two
will be serving as camp ground hosts at Tugaloo State Park near Lavonia.
The two met at Winterboro (Ala.) High School and were married in 1962, the
same year Duncan joined the U.S. Army. He was on active duty until 1973,
including a one-year hitch from 1967-68 in Vietnam. He served as an advisor
to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) 5th Division, spending six
months in the field with an artillery unit and six months in operations.
He remained in the Army Reserve through 1997, when he retired with the rank
of lieutenant colonel.
Originally from Talladega, Ala., Duncan earned his undergraduate degree in
math and master’s degree in business administration from Jacksonville State
University. In 1974, Duncan said he got word that a small college in northeast
Georgia was looking for a business professor. At the time, Piedmont had barely
a tenth of its current enrollment.
“There were about 250 students and 18 faculty members,” Duncan said. “There
were only two of us in the business department, me and Bruce Harvey. Bruce
is now a high-profile defense attorney in Atlanta, and if I ever get into
trouble, I’m going to call him.”
The two-person department had its advantages though, Duncan said. Over the
years he taught a wide variety of courses from accounting and business to
economics. “Those were the good old days,” he said. “And no committees.”
Duncan recalled that the first course he taught was in cost accounting, and
there were only two students in the class. “Both of them went on to be very
successful,” he said. One of them was Albert Huber, who is now president
of the Patterson Pump manufacturing factory in Toccoa.
While the college has grown, the field of accounting has also changed rapidly,
Duncan said. “When I first started there were no computers. Everything was
done with pencil and paper.” Gradually computers were more and more integrated
into businesses and consequently the classroom. “During the past four years,
I taught principles of accounting online. Students even took their tests
online,” he said.
Like most of the faculty at Piedmont in the 1970s, Duncan had to wear at
least two hats, and one of them was a baseball cap. He had played high school
and American Legion ball, so naturally he was tapped to coach the Diamond
Lions, a post he held for four years. “Actually, I got kind of conned into
coaching,” he said with a smile. “Don Ryder was a math professor and the
baseball coach, and I was his assistant. He left to go back to school, so
that made me the coach. We did not have a winning record.”
At a reception by the Piedmont faculty in December, Duncan said that over
the past 29 years he had “made a lot of friends at Piedmont among the faculty,
staff, and students, but they say when you still love your job, that is the
time to retire. I still love it. I’ve enjoyed coming here every day and teaching.”
And while he may have retired, Duncan said he still visits the Piedmont campus
almost every day to work out at the fitness center. That rocking chair will
just have to wait.
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