The photograph the Meros family released after his death shows him out on the water in a white captain's cap, grinning as he holds up a blue crab from a crabbing trip in Ocean City. That was Chester Meros: still out on the water at 89, still Maryland's oldest living man at 110. He died on July 10, 2026, four days before what would have been his 111th birthday, at the Brooklyn Park home he had kept for 70 years.

By the time of his death, FOX45 Baltimore reported he was the second-oldest known living man in the United States, a distinction the Gerontology Research Group had made official on July 14, 2025, when it validated his age on his 110th birthday and named him the oldest known living man in Maryland.

Meros was born on July 14, 1915, in the coal town of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, the son of Anthony and Veronica Meros. He followed his father into the coal mines of Schuylkill County and later took to the road himself, driving a truck that hauled coal north to New York City.

Around 1941, with the country ramping up wartime shipbuilding, he left Pennsylvania for Baltimore in search of work and was hired at Bethlehem Steel, where he took up welding on the yard's cargo ships. Of everything he helped build, he counted one vessel his favorite ever after: the SS John W. Brown, a Liberty ship that remains today one of only two of its kind still afloat in the country.

That same period brought him Helen Anna Lubinsky, whom he married and stayed married to for 70 years. Their six children, Eugene, Stanley, Dennis, Terry, Debbie Zawitoski, and Michael, grew up in the Brooklyn Park house the family settled into and where Chester would live for the rest of his life. Helen died on January 22, 2013, at age 94, according to her obituary from Gonce Funeral Service.

He kept a boat afterward and went crabbing on the Chesapeake for years, landing his last catch at 89. "He had a great personality, and he loved people," his daughter, Debbie Zawitoski, said. "He loved to sing, and he'd break into Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra songs. He didn't stop. He crabbed until he was 89."

His later years turned him into something of a local fixture. At 108, FOX45 Baltimore ranked him the 14th-oldest known living man in the United States and noted he had already lived through both the 1918 flu pandemic and COVID-19. By 110, he had climbed to second.

He died at 110, at home in the house he had kept for seven decades, four days short of the birthday that would have made him 111. "He would have been one hundred and eleven on the fourteenth of July," his son Eugene said.

Three things remain because of Chester Meros: the Liberty ship he helped weld together more than eighty years earlier, one of only two of its kind still afloat in the country; the Brooklyn Park house that was his family's home for 70 years; and six children who can still picture him mid-song, a blue crab raised in one hand, refusing for 89 years to come in off the water.