John Langstaff, 84; author, singer founded Christmas Revels
By Scott Alarik, Globe Correspondent  |  December 14, 2005

It seems strangely like John Langstaff to leave us 
at Christmastime. Though he achieved fame as a concert baritone, 
influential music educator, author, and cultural activist, his life 
and art always seemed to revolve around the holiday season.

Mr. Langstaff died of a stroke yesterday in Switzerland. 
He lived in Cambridge and also had a home in Vermont. He was 84.

In 1971, he founded the Christmas Revels in Cambridge, 
which will entertain more than 19,000 people this month with 
its trademark blend of traditional music, dance, ritual, and 
theater. Annual Christmas Revels productions in eight other cities 
will be seen by more than 60,000 people this month. A Revels 
production is also held here in the spring.

Mr. Langstaff was not just drawn to the merriment of midwinter, 
but to how much the season incorporates the passions that guided 
his life and career.

''There's a need for art that connects us to each other," he told 
the Globe in 2000. ''You go far enough back in any culture, and 
you find these rituals, these ways of bringing people together. I think 
that connectedness is so important to us. It always has been, you know; 
the rituals tell us that."

Mr. Langstaff was born on Christmas Eve in 1920 in Brooklyn 
Heights, N.Y.; and it is helpful in understanding his holiday 
obsession to know that was no accident. His parents, who hosted huge music 
parties that time of year, yearned for a Christmas baby, 
he said. On Dec. 24, Mr. Langstaff's mother ran up and down stairs 
and moved furniture around trying to induce labor.

Among his most cherished childhood memories were sitting by his 
mother at the piano, watching the faces of partiers as they sang 
together. He never lost that desire to see music shared.

After studying voice at Grace Church Choir School, the Curtis 
Institute of Music, and the Juilliard School, he began his career as a 
concert baritone. In the 1940s and '50s, he gained international renown, 
and made more than 30 recordings. In England after he served in the US 
Army during World War II, he made several EMI recordings with George Martin, 
who later achieved fame as the Beatles' producer.

''When I first started working at EMI," Martin said yesterday from his 
home in England, ''he was already a fine, fine singer. He was extremely 
well-respected by his peers, but never really had pretensions to be a great 
classical singer. His main forte was in getting people involved with music. 
He was wonderful at that, and he was frightfully good with young people; just sort 
of a bundle-of-fun with music, which is what music should be."

As Mr. Langstaff's own family grew, he became increasingly interested 
in teaching children the joys of music. He hosted a popular BBC TV show 
for children, ''Making Music," and ''Children Explore Books" on NBC.

In 1955, he became head of music education at the Potomac School in Virginia, 
serving for 13 years before filling the same role at the Shady Hill School 
in Cambridge for six years. He wrote 25 books, most either for children or guides 
for teaching music, including the Caldecott Award-winning ''Frog Went a-Courting."

''Whenever I am asked to go to schools," Mr. Langstaff told the Globe, 
''I always tell them, 'I'm not coming here to sing for you; I'm coming to make 
music with you.' "

In 1957, he produced ''A Christmas Masque of Traditional Revels" at New York's 
Town Hall. In 1966, NBC asked him to produce a similar ''Christmas Masque" 
as a Hallmark Hall of Fame special. Among its cast was the soon-to-be-famous 
Dustin Hoffman, playing the dragon slain by St. George.

In 1971, his daughter Carol coaxed him into reviving his Revels idea at 
Sanders Theater. Together, they smartly turned its re-creation of ancient 
music and ceremony into the modern holiday tradition of the Christmas Revels.

''He had a gift for bringing out the best in other people, because he always 
looked for that," Carol said yesterday from her home in Sharon, Vt. ''He believed 
in encouraging people, looking for what was best in them. I don't think 
he had to learn that; it was always in him. I just think life was very, 
very exciting to him. He was always a student, always learning, all his life."

As Revels became more popular, Mr. Langstaff presided over its expansion into a 
national empire. After retiring as artistic director in 1995, Mr. Langstaff 
continued to help Revels Inc. branch out into marketing recordings, books, and 
educational kits aimed at helping teachers and parents share music with children.

''Jack was amazing to work with," said Revels executive director Gayle Rich. 
''He was never a person who appeared to have a strong ego, or a sense of 
'Do-it-my-way-or-else.' And yet you knew he had a clear idea of how he wanted 
things to be. I learned so much watching how he worked with people, how he 
encouraged them, and created community. He knew how to let people blossom."

Martin laughed softly, a little sadly, confessing that he somehow never imagined 
Mr. Langstaff would die. Something about his spirit remained so boyish, so eager 
for more.

''I think he'll be well remembered for giving a lot of joy to a lot of people," he said, 
''and for encouraging young people to get involved with music. And his work with Revels 
will unquestionably be his monument. I mean, he's already there, isn't he? He was a 
legend in his own time."

Besides his daughter Carol, Mr. Langstaff leaves his wife, Nancy Trowbridge Langstaff 
of Cambridge; two other daughters, Deborah of Basel, Switzerland, and Caitlin of 
New York City; two sons, John of Winston-Salem, N.C., and Gary of Beverly; nine 
grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

A memorial is being planned for late February. 

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company



December 16, 2005 latimes.com
OBITUARIES
John Langstaff, 84; Founded Modern-Day Christmas Revels Staged in Many Cities
By Valerie J. Nelson, Times Staff Writer


John Langstaff, who founded a modern-day theatrical celebration of the winter 
solstice called the Christmas Revels that draws from folk traditions in many 
cultures and is performed annually in cities across the country, has died. He was 84.

Langstaff, who lived in Cambridge, Mass., died Tuesday after suffering a 
stroke while visiting his daughter in Basel, Switzerland, said another 
daughter, Carol Langstaff.
  
The first Christmas Revels, which he staged in New York in 1957, drew from pre-
Christian celebrations of the solstice, incorporating death and rebirth themes 
and a carnival-like atmosphere. The first show flopped with the public, but 
another several weeks later in Washington, D.C., sold out.

The present-day Revels, which are being presented in nine cities this month, 
can be traced to 1971, when Carol persuaded her father to help her revive the 
tradition in Cambridge, Mass.

"There's a need for art that connects us to each other," Langstaff told the 
Boston Globe in 2000. "You go far enough back in any culture and you find these 
rituals, these ways of bringing people together."

As the years went by, Revels were as likely to feature Old English rituals and 
a medieval mummers play — a folk drama based on the legend of St. George — as 
they were the cultures of Slavic Eastern Europe, Russia or France.

"He was sort of a cross between a very gifted artist and a missionary for theatrical 
celebration, which he has spread across this country," said Susan Cooper, a longtime 
friend who met Langstaff backstage at a 1974 show and wrote for the Revels.

Nine cities — with New York, Washington, D.C., Houston and Oakland among them — 
are presenting shows in December. The Oakland productions, held last weekend and 
today through Sunday, are the city's 20th.

"For hundreds of years, the older material has had a palpable power. People respond 
to it, and Jack knew that," said David Parr, artistic director of the California Revels 
in Oakland.

It was no accident that John Meredith Langstaff was born on Christmas Eve in 1920 
in Brooklyn. His lawyer father and pianist mother, who gave elaborate caroling 
parties, were determined to have a Christmas baby. She moved furniture and ran 
up and down stairs to induce labor.

As a boy soprano, Langstaff attended an Episcopal church choir school and became 
steeped in processions, rituals and the use of brass instruments to accompany 
singers — elements that would became central to Revels.

After maturing into a rich baritone, Langstaff studied at Juilliard in New York
City and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia but left school in 1941 
to join the Army during World War II.

In the barracks, he organized an informal choir and taught the soldiers a song 
he had learned as a young chorister, the "Alleluia Round" by 17th century composer 
William Boyce.

"It's a difficult round, but once they mastered it they loved it," Langstaff told 
the Boston Globe in 1995. "And we'd always sing it when we were sitting around the 
post exchange drinking beer."

On Okinawa, near the end of the war, a Japanese sniper shot Langstaff in the chest 
and his lungs collapsed. His recuperation took 18 months.

After the war, he performed with orchestras in the United States and overseas and 
made several recordings with George Martin, who later gained fame as the Beatles' producer.

In 1966, Langstaff put together a television version of the Revels for NBC's 
"Hallmark Hall of Fame." Among the cast members was a young Dustin Hoffman, 
portraying the dragon slain by St. George.

Langstaff also wrote 25 books, many of them for children, including "Frog Went a-Courtin'" 
(1955), which won the Caldecott Medal for its illustrations by Feodor Rojankovsky.

For almost 20 years, Langstaff taught music education to children in Virginia and 
Cambridge.

In 1995, he officially retired but remained involved with the Revels company, based 
in Watertown, Mass. With an annual budget of $1.3 million, it presents the Cambridge 
Christmas Revels, puts on shows, and licenses the name and scripts to other companies.

In the right setting much of the history of daily life, Langstaff once said, can be 
learned and experienced through music.

"This music only lives when people are singing it," Parr has told his Oakland chorus. 
"We are singing it now. People 300 years ago in Cornwall were singing it. We're all a 
part of that endless chain. That's one of the big realizations Jack had."

Besides his daughter Carol, Langstaff is survived by his second wife, Nancy Trowbridge 
Langstaff, two other daughters, two sons, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild. 



Jack Langstaff Dies; Created 'Christmas Revels'

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 15, 2005; B06

John "Jack" Langstaff, 84, whose exuberant celebrations of the winter solstice became a 
tradition for millions in search of ritual, died Dec. 13 in Basel, Switzerland, while 
visiting a daughter. He had suffered a stroke two days earlier.

Mr. Langstaff, a concert baritone, children's author and music educator at Potomac School 
in McLean, started in 1957 what was to become "The Christmas Revels," a potpourri of 
medieval music, dance, poetry and drama that elicits audience participation. That first 
performance, in New York City, was a critical success but a commercial failure.

A few weeks later, he reprised it in George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium and
 sold out the 1,500-seat house. He staged it twice for NBC's televised Hallmark Hall of 
Fame in the mid-1960s under the name "A Christmas Masque."

"The nonprofessionals are very important to the 'Revels.' When we started we used to go 
out and find people on the streets at dawn," Mr. Langstaff said in a 1983 interview in 
The Washington Post. "And we used to find some marvelous people that way. That's how we 
got Dustin Hoffman into it in 1958. He hadn't made 'The Graduate' at that time, and played
the Dragon in the mummers' play 'St. George and the Dragon,' although it's probably not 
on his résumé."

Mr. Langstaff formally incorporated the "Revels" in 1971 and expanded it to include spring 
and mid-summer "Revels," and the organization estimates that a million people have been in 
audiences since then. The organization has also published several songbooks, teachers 
manuals, a choral series and audio recordings. "The Christmas Revels" is being staged this 
season in nine cities, including Washington.

The event incorporates amateur singers, dancers and actors with carefully planned audience 
participation. One reviewer described it as "a pan-cultural pageant that encompasses 
medieval and Renaissance music, modern carols and mummers' plays, processionals and 
elaborate costumes, fertility dances and other reflections of both pagan and Christian 
traditions (a collage of the wild and the holy)."

In describing the "Revels" in 1983, Mr. Langstaff said: "We are talking about a season, not 
about Christianity. In earlier days, people lived by the seasons, but in the cities 
sometimes that's hard for us. There are special dances, special songs celebrating the change 
of seasons, and it's great to go back and find them and see if we can draw them back into 
our lives. I feel that people are getting interested in that again."

Mr. Langstaff was born on Christmas Eve in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., where his parents and 
friends would hold impromptu performances of Gilbert and Sullivan and sing Bach chorales, 
madrigals and Christmas carols together.

"I came from a large family where there was always a lot of music," he said. "We used to 
have carol parties. We candlelit the house, the neighbors would come. . . . Everybody 
knew that the Sunday before Christmas was the time to gather in the Langstaffs' 
living room."

At age 8, he entered the Grace Church Choir School in New York City, where he was a boy 
soprano soloist until his voice changed. He later studied at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute 
of Music and at the Juilliard School in New York.

Mr. Langstaff then embarked on a concert career in the United States and abroad. He made 
traditional music recordings for EMI and HMV music publishers in England.

He taught music education at Potomac School for 13 years, from 1955 to 1968, and at Shady 
Hill School in Cambridge, Mass., for six years, while continuing to record in Europe 
with Beatles producer George Martin. For five years, he hosted the popular "Making Music" 
program on BBC-TV in London and was the moderator of an NBC-TV Saturday morning children's 
program, "Children Explore Books." He lived in Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Langstaff also was an author whose 25 books include the traditional children's tale 
"Frog Went a-Courtin'," winner of the 1956 Caldecott Medal. He also produced a six-set 
video series designed to show parents, teachers and others who work with children how to 
involve them in making and appreciating music.

Mr. Langstaff started Revels Records in 1978 and produced 18 recordings of traditional 
children's music, folk and gospel recordings, and a library of seasonal recordings 
celebrating the winter solstice, spring and summer, the harvest and the sea. He retired 
from the Watertown, Mass.-based group in 1995.

Survivors include his wife, Nancy Woodbridge Langstaff of Cambridge; five children, Carol 
Langstaff of Sharon, Vt., Deborah Langstaff of Basel, Caitlin Langstaff of New York City, 
John Langstaff of Winston-Salem, N.C., and Gary Langstaff of Beverly, Mass.; a brother, 
E. Kennedy Langstaff of Adamstown, Md.; nine grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Revels.org tribute

Remembrances
Founder of the Christmas Revels, John Langstaff
by Lynn Neary 

Listen

All Things Considered, December 15, 2005 · John Langstaff, the founder of the 
Christmas Revels, died Tuesday in Basil, Switzerland, after suffering a stroke. He was 84. 

The Christmas Revels is a show that explores the roots of the Christmas and winter solstice 
celebrations from a different era or country each year. It began in 1971 in Boston and has 
since expanded to cities across the country. 

Langstaff was born on Christmas Eve. He was a classically trained singer who also 
wrote children's books.
 
Related NPR Story: Talk of the Nation · December 17, 1997


John Meredith Langstaff
1920-2005
  A truly extraordinary man has passed on. The latest in a year that has seen so 
much loss. A complete catalog of his life would take a book. Thus I will make this a 
personal remembrance of the most important person in my adult life, save only for my father. 
  John Langstaff (‘Jack’ to all who knew him) was born in Brooklyn to a musical 
family, and was first exposed to traditional music in the flesh when he was 13 
by a teacher, Carol Preston, at a local school, who, by a cosmic accident, turned 
out to be the housemate of May Gadd, the Director of the Country Dance Society. 
It is through Carol Preston that Jack came to Pinewoods in 1934, and later went 
on to found Folk Music Week (1950) and to be an important inspiration for the 
founding of the Pinewoods Folk Music Club (1965). 
  I went to Pinewoods rather accidentally (following a girl friend) in 1965 and 
met Jack, though I had heard of him earlier from another friend I used to sing 
with. That girl friend never came back to camp, but I’ve been going – and singing – 
ever since. It really hit me my second year at camp (1966). The first night introduction 
to staff was happening. I was sitting on the porch, rather than inside (as I still 
like to do), looking through the double doors. Jack was singing All Around My Hat – 
I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was looking at the people in the room, 
coming from the pressure and hassle of New York or Boston or wherever, and shedding 
all of that baggage of civilization, listening to Jack weave his magic. The 
saying that would not leave my head was “To enter the Kingdom of Heaven you 
must become as a little child . . .” It seemed to me that I saw that happening 
all around me to people who were quite unaware of it, and if anyone 
had said it was happening, it would have stopped happening. I tend to break down 
whenever I relate that experience, it was totally overwhelming. 
  Jack attempted to teach singing in those years, without much success – witness how 
long it took me to be able to tolerate my own singing. But Jack did seem to sense 
something in me, and in 1970 he asked me to be his accompanist in a Club concert at 
the South Street Seaport. I don’t think Jack recovered his transportation expenses 
for that concert, nor did he when he did the first concert the Club ever put on, at 
NYU Student Center (accompanied by Happy Traum I believe). It was one of thousands of 
times he contributed to getting other people singing, to carrying the movement on.
  And from then on, we worked together on more projects than I can count, the NY Revels, 
starting in 1979, with all the considerable trauma that entailed, the Revels recordings 
(Don Wade and I recorded the first one), Jack’s Minstrel recording (still an absolute 
stunner in my prejudiced opinion), countless school programs, some great concerts all 
around the country, — and countless hours in cars or at Jack’s homes in Lexington and 
Cambridge. We shared so much music, but so muchmore. How do I describe what it all meant? 
What did I “learn”?
  I surely did not learn to sing from Jack, I had the sense to know I could never sound 
like him, and that I didn’t need to. I didn’t get my ‘style’ from him (more from Frank 
Warner surely). But it is the intangibles, the unspoken and unwritten that one ‘learns’ 
from such a close and personal relationship with such an utterly unique person. Words 
come to mind: ‘commitment’, ‘tradition’, ‘community-before-self’, ‘transformation’. 
Jack understood in a way few do what the transforming power of song, dance, community, 
can be. He understood in his deepest being what traditional song means to a ‘village’, 
such as we are. He never spoke to me about that, he would not have known how to verbalize 
it. He lived it, and I saw it. And occasionally I was able to verbalize for him. 
  There is a character, written for the late singer John Fleagle in a Revels script I wrote, 
who cannot speak, he can only sing. He is the “messenger” character, the one who must be 
cut down in the sword dance and be raised up by the Fool. And the Fool, who has never sung 
before, must raise him up by singing. I have just realized as I write this, that this 
character is Jack also. Where is the fool that can raise him up? 
  It is such an enormous loss, yet it was such an enormous life, there must be huge joy 
among the grieving because he gave us so much. He never needed to become as a little 
child, because his inner child never left him, and we all follow that child to this day. 
I always knew this day would come, and I always knew I would never be ready for it. 
Perhaps there is a mystical connection across space and time – Jack surely believed so.
  At the close of each year’s Revels, even if I am not particularly entranced with the 
show or the script, I get a little teary, a lot nostalgic, I think of the 40 years 
with Jack and what it all has meant. Last Sunday, December 11, when the Revels ended, 
I really felt nothing. It was just a pleasant gig. Monday Jack had his stroke. His nephew 
David called me and said he was in a coma and not expected to recover. He died Tuesday morning. 
Perhaps my soul knew and I was already trying to separate?
	“They buried my body and they thought I had gone,
 	  But I am the dance and I still go on.”
More
						-Jerry Epstein

Larger



Guardian Unlimited

Jack Langstaff
Singer and music teacher whose shows lay at the heart of a traditional American Christmas

Derek Schofield
Saturday, December 24, 2005

The Guardian

Jack Langstaff, who has died aged 84, was the founder and artistic director of the 
Revels, a celebration of Christmas and the winter solstice that has delighted American 
audiences for more than 30 years. With its roots in English traditional song and custom, 
it achieved a success that has never been equalled in Britain.
The Revels had its origins in a 1957 New York City concert. A Christmas Masque of 
Traditional Revels drew on the atmosphere of the Christmas parties of Jack's childhood. 
The venture was a critical success, as was the repeat in Washington DC the following 
year, although they were not commercially viable.

The idea was revived in 1966 for NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame series. The cast on that 
television broadcast included Dustin Hoffman as the dragon slain by St George in the 
mummers' play. In 1971, Jack's daughter Carol persuaded him to start up the concerts 
again in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was by then less emphasis on the religious 
aspect of Christmas, and instead the focus was on the older ways in which people 
celebrated midwinter and the solstice: the turning of the year. Jack's aim was to 
dramatise the place of song and rituals such as wassailing, carol-singing and mummers' 
plays in people's lives, and to get the audience to sing.

The concerts evolved their own rituals. The Sydney Carter song Lord of the Dance, written 
in England, using an American Shaker hymn tune, became the traditional ending of the first 
half. As Jack sang the final chorus over and over, the cast joined hands with the audience 
and led them singing and dancing into the theatre foyer. On another occasion, when the 
Sussex Mummers' Carol was not included on the programme, the audience sang it anyway. The 
Revels continue each year, not only at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, 
where about 18 performances a year attract audiences of 30,000, but also in another eight 
American centres, from New York to Houston, from California to Washington DC.

Christmas always held a special place in Jack's life. He was born in Brooklyn Heights, 
New York City, on Christmas Eve - indeed his parents planned a Christmas baby and his mother 
encouraged his birth by moving heavy furniture earlier in the day. Christmas parties in the 
Langstaff household were elaborate affairs with songs, sketches and poems to which everyone 
was expected to contribute. Music filled his childhood, and at eight, he entered the Grace 
church choir school, later studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and 
New York's Julliard School.

Jack came into contact with folk music through his parents, who had Cecil Sharp's published 
collections of English and American songs. At 13, one of his teachers, Carol Preston, took 
Jack to the White Top Festival in Virginia, where he heard traditional singers in context 
and without the piano accompaniment of the concert hall. Preston also introduced him to folk 
dance classes in New York, organised by the American branch of the English Folk Dance and 
Song Society - later the Country Dance and Song Society of America. He also attended the 
Pinewoods Camp in Massachusetts where, in 1939, he was introduced to morris dancing, mummers' 
plays and English traditional customs through the teaching of Douglas Kennedy, director of 
the folk dance society, who was a major influence on Jack.

Jack pursued a career as a baritone singer of classical music, but always included folk songs 
and ballads in his concert repertoire. He missed the social aspect of singing with others and 
adopted an unorthodox approach - talking to his concert audiences and encouraging them to join 
in the choruses.

In the 1940s, Jack saw war service in the Pacific and was shot in the chest. Both lungs were 
punctured, but he made a full recovery and resumed his concert career. In England, he was 
recorded by EMI and HMV, and was befriended by Ralph Vaughan Williams, who used Jack's records 
to illustrate his lectures. Many of the recordings were made at the Abbey Road studios by George 
Martin, who wrote an introduction when they were reissued on the CD, The Lark in the Morn, 
in 2003. Although his classically trained voice may now sound slightly unusual for folk songs, 
his approach and singing was radical and refreshing in the 1950s.

Jack became increasingly interested in music education. The BBC brought him to London to help 
prepare and present a schools' television programme, Making Music. Ron Smedley, 
who directed many of the folk dance society's Royal Albert Hall festivals and was to 
become deputy head of BBC Schools TV, described this series as "one of the jewels in the crown 
of early schools television which helped to revolutionise primary school music teaching."

Back in the US, Jack hosted an NBC television show, Children Explore Books. In 1955 he became 
music director of the Potomac school in Washington DC and then taught in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
where he also helped to establish the Boston arts organisation, Young Audiences, which put music 
performances into schools. In the years since then, he produced music education videos and wrote 
many children's books. He was truly an inspirational teacher of music.

Although retired from the Revels organisation, Jack remained director emeritus and maintained 
a lively interest in all its events. He also travelled widely and was visiting his daughter 
Debbie in Switzerland when he suffered a fatal stroke.

He is survived by his daughter, Carol, from his first marriage to Diane Guggenheim; his 
second wife, Nancy Woodbridge Langstaff, and their children Debbie, Caitlin, John and Gary.

· John "Jack" Meredith Langstaff, singer, born December 20, 1920, died December 13, 2005 

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006


Alex Ross — The Rest is Noise (Music critic of The New Yorker)
December 29, 2005

The Rest is Noise — John Langstaff

John Langstaff 1920-2005
I was very sad to hear, belatedly, that John Langstaff died on December 13th. For those who
don't know the name, Langstaff was a brilliant educator, an immensely charismatic singer of 
the folkish type, and the founder of the Christmas Revels, a multicultural winter-solstice 
celebration that wove together songs, dances, and poems of various traditions. Langstaff 
used to teach at the Potomac School, which I attended, and, although he was gone by the time 
I got there, the music programs at the school were still infused with his philosophy, which 
combined Kodály and Orff methods with Anglo-American folk music both ancient and modern. 
Maypole dances, the tale of St. George and the Dragon, "Children Go Where I Send Thee," 
"Lord of the Dance," pieces by Britten, recitations of Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot, all 
were somehow joined in a seamless continuum. Langstaff would come back to Potomac at 
Christmastime to preside over a version of his Revels ritual, and hearing his grainy, noble 
baritone ringing through the gym was probably my first major experience of what music can do 
to the heart. Last April, out of the blue, I got a letter from Langstaff, whom I'd never met. 
I was looking forward to seeing him in person, and expressing my thanks to him, which I'm 
sure a very large number of people share. A Boston Globe obituary has more about this 
remarkable and irreplaceable man.


Henry Chapin

From Pinewoods Post, Autumn 2006