Nation’s longest-serving sheriff says he won’t run for reelection next year

WUGA | By Jeff Dantre

Published September 21, 2023 at 1:16 PM EDT

41NBC/WMGT

Georgia’s and the nation’s longest-serving sheriff says he won’t run for reelection next year, ending more than 50 years as Houston County’s chief lawman.

91-year-old Cullen Talton was first elected in 1972 after careers as a dairy farmer and a county commissioner. The population of Houston County was 63,000 when he was first elected. It’s 170,000 today.

County commissioners there honored Talton in a ceremony Tuesday with two of his great-grandchildren among those in attendance. Talton says he still enjoys the job but it’s time to hang it up.

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Jeff Dantre

Jeff has delivered morning news at WUGA Radio for more than a decade. He was among a team at CNN that won a George Foster Peabody Award in 1991 for an educational product based on the fall of the Soviet Union. He also won an Edward R. Murrow Award from Radio Television Digital News Association in 2007 for producing a series for WSB Radio on financial scams. Jeff is a graduate of the Babcock Graduate School of Management at Wake Forest University (MBA) and holds a BS in Business Administration from Campbell University, both in North Carolina.

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