Charles Langdon Obituary

Writer, ruminator, editor and historian Charles W. "Charlie" Langdon died unexpectedly Thursday, July 12, 2012, at his Durango home. He was one month shy of his 78th birthday.

Langdon began his journalism career while serving in the Army. Stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, he was assigned to cover the Winter Olympics in 1960 in Squaw Valley, Calif.

He and his young family moved to Durango in 1966, when he took a job with the newly opened Purgatory Ski Area. He soon became the sports editor for The Durango Herald, and would eventually spend 35 of the next 45 years as a journalist. Sometimes, he was a reporter, and in his later years, the arts and entertainment editor and a columnist whose musings, book reviews and movie recommendations became a popular entry in the Herald's Sunday Opinion pages.

"Charlie was a good human being whose columns and stories were sensitive and insightful," Durango Herald Publisher Richard Ballantine said. "He loved personalities and the arts, and he was always interesting."

Langdon took a hiatus from the Herald in the 1970s, when he and his wife, Laura, owned a bookstore. He later worked as a reference librarian with the Southwest Library System for almost a decade. Even when he wasn't in the newsroom, he was thinking like a journalist.

"I first got to know him when I was the sports editor at the Herald while still in college," said Jackson Clark, owner of Toh-Atin Gallery, who worked at the paper in the early 1970s. "And there were a lot of sports I didn't know much about – I knew absolutely nothing about hockey. He was the kind of guy who would call and say 'You've got to get this hockey story in tomorrow.'"

Langdon's more than 20 years as arts and entertainment editor changed the way the Herald covered the beat.

"He was the beginning of the Herald having a serious arts page," Clark said. "He saw the arts as an important part of the community that contributed to its well-being."

Books, words and learning were abiding passions.

"Regular readers of this column perhaps know that my library is my most treasured material possession," he wrote in his column dated June 8, 1997. "A car is a car, and a hat is a hat, but a book is a treasure. I have read every book in my library at least once."

In 1989, Ray Duncan, the owner of Purgatory, asked Langdon to write a history of the ski area for its 25th anniversary. Called Durango Ski: People and Seasons at Purgatory, a second edition was issued in 2007.

A writer all his life in a variety of forms, several of his one-act plays were performed at Fort Lewis College and in Denver.

Langdon published two volumes of poetry, The Dandelion Vote and The Bearing Tree. Garrison Keillor, who produces and stars in "The Writer's Almanac" on NPR read two poems from The Dandelion Vote on the program, including one, "The Edward C. Peterson Tree," which Keillor also included in one of his anthologies.

"He wrote just like he talked," Clark said. "He was very thoughtful, and he had this cadence. Sometimes, you'd run into him on the street and end up having a 30- or 40-minute conversation."

Langdon's gift of conversation stood him in good stead on his radio program about the arts, "Viewpoint," which aired Saturday mornings for 14 years, from 1983 to 1997, on KIUP-AM (930).

"I was apprehensive," he wrote when leaving KIUP, about the early days of the show. "I was a writer and almost exclusively a print journalist. I imposed upon my friend Paul Folwell to play the interviewee, while I tried to come up with sensible questions while gazing at strange dials, buttons and knobs. The rehearsal was, of course, a disaster. But I did learn one or two things about the recorder, and Paul was still my friend when the ordeal was over."

During the program's 14 years, Langdon interviewed nationally known figures such as Tony Hillerman, Louis L'Amour, Roger Ebert and Liam Neeson, but his favorite guests were people from the local arts scene.

Readers came to know how much he loved his wife, sons and nature through his columns, and they got to know the introspective Langdon, too.

"Like most people, my nature is an odd combination of disparate parts," he wrote for his column of Nov. 9, 1997. "I am wholeheartedly public and absolutely private. I'm a recluse with a public pose as well as a stay-at-home with wanderlust. Also, one small but omnipresent part of me stands forever detached, a dreaming dweller in silence whom I'm compelled to seek out now and then in some remote corner."

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