A North Carolina woman who was known for being the oldest living United States Marine has passed away at the age of 107.

Fox News reported that Dorothy Schmidt Cole died of a heart attack while she was staying at her daughter’s home in Kannapolis.

Cole had left her home in Warren, Pennsylvania to join the Navy after the attack at Pearl Harbor back in 1941, but her height of 4 feet, 11 inches prevented her from enlisting at the time. Desperate to serve her country, Cole put in 200 hours of flight time and tried to join the Marine Corps as a pilot, but was turned down again. Undeterred, she joined the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve that had just been established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942.

At 29 years of age, Cole was one of the program’s earliest volunteers, and she completed six weeks of training at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune with the Women’s Reserve First Battalion. Though she found herself assigned to duty “behind a typewriter instead of a plane,”  she still wore her uniform with pride.

“I loved the hats we were wearing,” Cole told the Marine Corps Times after just after she celebrated her 107th birthday. “It was fun when I got the first complete Marine outfit. I loved it very much and felt right at home with it.”

Cole met her husband Wiley Cole in Washington D.C. during World War II. He was a Navy man who served aboard the USS Hornet, taking part in both the Pacific Theater and Solomon Islands campaigns.

Once the war ended, Cole was discharged as a Marine sergeant, and she moved to San Francisco with her husband in 1953. They had one daughter together before he tragically died in 1955, and she never remarried. She raised her daughter by herself and moved to North Carolina in 1976.

Back in September, Cole was awarded lifetime membership in the Marine Corps League Cabarrus Detachment 1175.

Cole’s daughter told The Charlotte Observer that her mother “was doing really good” into the 100th year of her life, and that up to about 102 or 103, “we could still go to Walmart and I could actually leave her alone and she’d go down her own way. And I can remember having a hard time finding her because she was so short, she was shorter than … the clothes racks. … So I had a hard time locating her and a lot of times it scared me trying to find her.”

Cole said back in September that she is happy that it is easier for women to serve in the military now than it was in the 1940s.

“The girls now, they have an open field with what they can do,” she said, “so it’s gotten better.”