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The framed diploma from the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine's first graduating class looks almost new compared to the box fan, metal file cabinets and semi-neat piles of stuff in the small room.
Ducey came to the Lowcountry with that fresh 1950 degree and a beautiful young bride.
"We weren't going to stay here very long," said Margaret Anderson Ducey.
He was going to get his feet on the ground, then move to Savannah, where his father was a vet and where Margaret first caught his eye on the school bus to Savannah High.
Ducey took over the practice of Dr. Buddy Cooper, even moving into his house with a clinic on the side, and keeping the same phone number. It didn't cost him a nickel.
At the time, Ducey was the only licensed veterinarian in three counties. He had 13 dairy herds to tend, ranging from 50 to 150 head. He tended countless little hog farms, and 3,000 brood cows at Cypress Woods Plantation outside Ridgeland, one of the largest beef herds in the East. He worked sale-barn auctions four days a week in Ehrhardt, Yemassee, Fairfax and Walterboro, sometimes getting home after midnight.
"I castrated stallions coming and going," he said. "Bull hogs the same way. Big bull hogs."
Not much of that goes on anymore in Jasper, Hampton and Beaufort counties, where real estate with a view now rides high on the hog.
But the Duceys never left Ridgeland.
The man they call "Doc" will turn 85 on April 3. He has a heart condition and he's been fighting bronchitis for weeks. But he still works a few hours in the clinic most days.
"If it rains like this, I don't come," he said when we talked last week. "I don't want to get wet."
'POSITIVE INFLUENCE'
Most of Ducey's patients today are pet dogs, the animals people in the Lowcountry rarely used to take to a vet. He's quit doing surgery, and last fall he finally stepped away from treating three dozen saddle horses and 40 to 50 bird dogs at the exclusive Okeetee Club hunting preserve and timber farm south of town.
He still drives a white Ford F-150 pickup to the little white, cinder-block clinic on U.S. 17 that once was a studio for artist Mark Sheridan. He answers the phone that often has a scratchy connection, or no connection. And people come through the screen door.
One recently asked, "Would you look at my ferret?"
Another asked, "Will you pull tail feathers off my parrot?"
On Saturday, Ducey was honored for 60 years of work that's taken him from being chased by an ornery new mother cow, to contemplating ferrets.
The Jasper Animal Rescue Mission in Ridgeland unveiled a green street sign naming its driveway "Ducey Drive."
"He's still a kind of country doctor, just a no-nonsense type of doctor who everybody in the community loves," said executive director Kimberly Jones. "We wanted to honor him before he retired. He's a very humble man."
Sommer Richardson Bacon, technical manager at the animal shelter, said Ducey cared for her great-grandfather Bill Pinckney's dairy herd in Pinckney Colony, near Bluffton.
"He's known for his service, hard work and dedication," Bacon said. "Sometimes his payment would be in chicken eggs. I remember him being in five different places in one day doing rabies clinics all over the county. That's what we want to be at the Jasper Animal Rescue Mission. We, too, want to get out in the community and help people, and have a positive influence."
'LARGER THAN LIFE'
Ducey's influence in Jasper County is widespread.
He was a Ridgeland Town Council member and mayor from 1954 to 1962. He lost his last race by one vote to his good friend, W.D. Blackmon.
"I didn't like it at the time, but I soon realized that was the best vote that's ever been cast in the world," he said. "Back then, you were everything -- traffic court, judge and jury."
He started Ridgeland's first Little League baseball program 50 years ago. He built the town's first recreation baseball field with the help of volunteers and Jasper's famous private hunting preserves, which sent bulldozers. This was before any of his own three boys -- Freddie, Tommy and Pat -- were old enough to play.
Ducey threw a mean curve for Savannah High, Auburn University and his beloved Georgia Bulldogs. He saw a gaping vacuum for kids in Ridgeland and he filled it, sometimes coaching three teams at a time.
"He was like a figure larger than life in a way," recalls Mike Thomas of Ridgeland, retired comptroller of Palmetto Electric Cooperative. "He was something we'd never seen before -- a younger person who took us under his wing. He knew baseball, which you don't always get in a small town program. He loaded us in the back of his pickup and hauled us to Hardeeville and Beaufort for games. All the boys liked him."
Ducey also started the youth football program, lining that same field for a different sport. They played in Basil Green's league in Beaufort, and in Hampton, Walterboro and Garden City, Ga.
'WIDE OPEN'
Ducey was in the group that brought golf to Ridgeland.
He could scrape up only a foursome when he arrived. He, George Alford, Doug Jones and Farris Highsmith used to drive to the Hampton County Country Club to play.
"We got some more interested in it," he said, "and soon we said, 'Why don't we build our own club?' "
Bob Causey, the pro in Hampton, came down and laid out what became the Sgt. Jasper Country Club. Margaret Ducey remains part of a historically strong women's contingent there.
The club has produced a number of good golfers, including Tony Nimmer of Bluffton, who played for Clemson University, and Puggy Blackmon, the hall of fame golf coach at Georgia Tech who is now director of golf at the University of South Carolina. Ducey's son, Pat, is a former golf pro in Florida, and his son, Tom, who played golf at Carson Newman College, has been director of golf at the elite Old North State Golf Club in North Carolina since that Tom Fazio layout opened in 1992.
The Duceys' daughter, Barbara Ann Weaver, lives in Bluffton and works at Palmetto Electric. They have 10 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
"My wife's got them," Ducey said of the great-grandchildren. "I'm not that old."
He's old enough to have been a navigator in World War II bombers. And to have slowed down from a lot of hard work and play. For a long time, Ducey had his own 310-acre farm and a tire re-capping business on the side.
As for the changing Lowcountry, where he was delighted to find the dove and quail aflutter, the deer thick as ticks and the fish always running, Ducey says, "I'm old school. I like it wide open."
He's a man of few words but tells good stories. He's laid back but gets a lot done.
And he sits in an office that fits him like an old sweater and says, "Live life to the fullest."
That's life in the fast lane on Ducey Drive.
