Charles C. Congdon was born to Charles C. and Jessie Goldie Congdon on December 13, 1920 in Dunkirk, New York. He was educated at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he earned his BA in 1942 and his MD in 1944. He worked briefly as an intern at Bellevue Hospital in New York City before serving with the U. S. Army as a medical officer (1944-1947). After his discharge he returned to the University of Michigan, where he taught pathology (1948-1951) while working toward his MS degree, which was granted in 1950. In 1951, he began working as a visiting scientist and medical officer at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He left the NCI in 1955 to become a group leader at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he worked until 1973. In 1966, he began teaching medical biology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He retired in 1983 and later worked as a UT professor emeritus. Congdon died on February 10, 2019.

Charles Congdon was married twice; first to Margaret Louise Ribble (April 12, 1947) with whom he had five children, and later to Marjorie Ann Davis (November 18, 1967).