When Tech. Sgt. Charles H. Coolidge died April 6, 2021, at 99, he was the oldest living Medal of Honor recipient from World War II and the last from the European theater.
Born Aug. 4, 1921, in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, outside Chattanooga, Charles Henry Coolidge faced adversity from an early age. Apart from the formative lessons of growing up during the Great Depression, Coolidge also suffered from a speech impediment caused by a congenital deformation of his tongue. After years of being mocked by his peers and not understood even by his family, Coolidge underwent surgery in the fourth grade that corrected it, but he still had to go through years of diction lessons.
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