VOORHEESVILLE — Jim Duncan was of a different time, his daughters said, where community was everything, and you knew and cared for your neighbors.

Joseph Sapienza, Voorheesville’s head football coach and Mr. Duncan’s long-time coaching colleague, echoed his daughters’ sentiment. “This is somebody who liked and cared deeply about Voorheesville, and his community,” Mr. Sapienza said, describing Mr. Duncan as a “community servant.” 

Mr. Duncan died on Tuesday, March 8, 2022, “peacefully in his home surrounded by family,” his family wrote in a tribute.

James E. Duncan Sr. was born to Grover and May Moak Duncan on April 13, 1949. “My grandpa was a dairy farmer and my grandma ran a restaurant right,” said Mr. Duncan’s daughter, Elisabeth Shroyer. 

Mrs. Shroyer said her grandfather managed Med-O-Dale Farms when her father was growing up. “My dad loved growing up on a farm,” she said.

Med-O-Dale was a dairy farm, Mrs. Shroyer said, and its cows would be shown every year at the Altamont Fair. She said that her grandparents also owned a diner on the site of what is now Gracie’s on Voorheesville Avenue. Mrs. Shroyer recalls her father talking about how his football team in high school would go there for milkshakes after practice.

“Jim was a graduate of Clayton A. Bouton High School,” Mr. Duncan’s family wrote. “The highlight of his 1966 senior year was being a part of the only undefeated football team in school history.”

Some nine years later, on Sept. 19, 1975, Mr. Duncan would marry Patricia Davis, the woman with whom he’d spend the rest of his life — whom he met, not unsurprisingly, to those who knew him, through coaching.  “My dad was my uncle’s baseball coach,” said Mrs. Shroyer of her mother’s brother. And it was during a pizza party at the former Smith’s Tavern following a baseball game when the two met, she said.

The couple had four children, and “he was their biggest fan on and off the field,” Mr. Duncan’s family wrote. “When he finally became a Papa, no one loved their grandchildren more.”

What the sisters laugh about now is that, in a home with their father, an Army veteran and 30-year employee of the state Department of Corrections, it was their mother who was the disciplinarian. “My dad would yell at us and within 15 minutes he was apologizing, even though we were the ones that did wrong,” Mr. Duncan’s daughter, Katherine Clark, recalled with a laugh. “He instantly felt bad.”

“His heart was mush, even though he never really showed it,” Mrs. Clark said.

“For 39 years, Jim was a member of the Voorheesville Fire Department,” Mr. Duncan’s family wrote. “He loved his fellow firemen; they were his brothers.”

Mrs. Shroyer recalled, when she and her siblings were younger, a number of firemen had young families as well, and when school would let out for summer the families would congregate for camping at Lake George. “The fire department was our family,” Mrs. Shroyer said.

Mr. Duncan coached a number of sports in his time at Voorheesville: football, bowling, baseball, and softball, and “being an athlete his whole life, he spent his time participating in many local bowling, softball and golf leagues.” But “his greatest passion,” his family wrote, “was Blackbird football. He bled purple and gold.”

Mrs. Shroyer and her sister recall their father coaching football “from the time we were little.”

The sisters said they “never missed Voorheesville football games,” and, in turn, their father never missed any of his kids’ games either, Mrs. Shroyer said. “He was always there for us,” she said. 

She recalled, too, how he would even help with homework.

“Our dad was very academically successful,” Katherine Clark said.

“And he was just a great dad,” Mrs. Shroyer said. “We had the best dad.”

Mrs. Clark said her father had been her “coach for life.”

When she went to Arkansas State to bowl, she said her father was at every tournament she competed in and she would “listen to him versus listening to my actual college coach.”

Asked how that went over with her college coach, Mrs Clark said that her college coach was “very forgiving, knowing that my dad was such a serious coach back then.” But Mr. Duncan wasn’t “one of ‘those’ dads that undermined coaches; my coach loved my father and respected him and valued his opinion,” Mrs. Clark added. 

Mrs. Shroyer said her father never missed games as as coach either. 

Well, almost never missed games. 

“My sister scheduled a September wedding and I had an October wedding, and I think that’s probably the only two games he missed in his entire career of coaching,” Mrs. Shroyer recalled. 

Mr. Sapienza said Mr. Duncan got into coaching for the right reasons: He wanted to have an impact on the lives of his players and student-athletes.

Mr. Duncan was a mentor for many different Voorheesville coaches over the years, Mr. Sapienza said. “Everything that interscholastics should be about, he modeled.”

“I revered him as a coach and a person,” he said.

In 2018, in what was supposed to be his last game on the sidelines — in the last play of the game — a player who caught the ball was tackled into their father, the sisters said, and shattered his leg into “27 pieces.”

“That was supposed to be his last game, but he still went to practice, watched games,” Mrs. Clark said. “I don’t think he ever actually officially retired.”

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James E. Duncan Sr. is survived by his wife of 46 years, Patricia (née Davis); his children: James Duncan Jr. and his girlfriend, Lori Epp, Elisabeth Shroyer and her husband, Kaycee, Katherine Clark and her husband, Todd, and Rebecca Duncan; his grandchildren: Dakota, Cole, Henry, Duncan, Alida, and Natie.  

He is also survived by his brother, Ronald Duncan, and his wife, Carol, and by his sister, Susan Duncan.  

His infant sister, Dorothy, died before him. 

A service will be held at the Voorheesville firehouse on Saturday, March 19, at 11 a.m. Burial will be private.

Memorial messages may be left at www.altamontenterprise.com/milestones.

Memorial contributions may be sent to the Voorheesville Fire Department, 12 Altamont Road, Voorheesville, NY 12186.

— Sean Mulkerrin