Dick Langman was always a wordsmith.
Even as a boy in New York, he loved language, literature, and poetry. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English, took graduate classes at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and could recite lines from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Frost on demand.
He was generally calm and reasonable, too, his sons said. “He didn’t get upset easily,” his son Mark said.
His vocabulary was extensive, and he could spell practically any word. So it’s no surprise that he spent 50 years, from the early 1950s to his retirement in 2002, as an editor, page designer, and reporter for The Inquirer, the Bulletin, the Morning Call of Allentown, the Pottstown Mercury, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and the Evening Tribune in Hornell, N.Y.
He joined The Inquirer in 1981 and worked mostly nights for 21 years as a copy editor, assistant news editor, and suburban assigning editor. Former colleagues at The Inquirer called him a “meticulous editor,” “enormously patient,” and “a man of great integrity” in Facebook tributes.
He won an award from the old Pennsylvania Newspaper Publishers Association in 1957 for a front page he designed for the Morning Call and spent 20 years as assistant city editor and news editor at the Bulletin. “I’m glad that I had a chance to work with him,” a former Inquirer copy desk colleague said. “What a pro.” Another said: “I could not have had a better teacher.”
On June 13, Dick Langman died of complications from pneumonia at Bryn Mawr Hospital. He was 99.
Long before he came to Philadelphia in 1961, Mr. Langman was a seasoned newspaperman. He honed his reporting skills as a writer at the Evening Tribune in New York and the Mercury in Pottstown.
In January 1954, he opened a Page 1 story for the Mercury with: “From clomping around in wooden shoes in Holland to wearing modern footwear in Bechtelsville is a long way, and Mrs. LaVerne Fronheiser is glad to be home. She’s not too glad, however, because her husband had to stay in Germany, where he’s stationed with the infantry.”
On Page 1 in March 1954, he wrote: “They had need of a chaplain yesterday at borough hall. He could have served well the 50 moaners and groaners whose cars were tagged for parking violations.”
He moved on to the Morning Call and covered high school sports and other news. He left for Honolulu in 1959 and became sports editor at the Star-Bulletin. But he missed the East Coast and returned to work at the Bulletin in Philadelphia in 1961.
“Hawaii is one of the loveliest places in the world,” he told the Morning Call. But his wife, Betty, had roots in Norristown, he said, and they both got homesick.
Earlier, after college, Mr. Langman worked briefly for the Associated Press in New York and as a statistician for what is now the Elias Sports Bureau. He enlisted in the Army after high school in 1944, went to active duty in 1945, and served until the end of World War II.
At The Inquirer, a former colleague recalled, Mr. Langman edited a story about a horse that had injured a leg. Naturally, he tried to find out which leg was hurt.
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“Dick was a painstaking editor,” his former colleague said on Facebook, “and a master in getting the details right.”
Richard Langman was born Sept. 5, 1926, in New York. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School and earned a bachelor’s degree at City College of New York in 1948.
He met Betty Fabbri, the society editor at the Mercury, and they married in 1954. The Morning Call announced their union in its Breakfast Chatter column by saying: “Best wishes to reporter Dick Langman, who walks the long mile in Norristown Sunday with Bettina.”
He and his wife had sons Mark, Peter, and Andrew, and lived in Allentown, Ardmore, and the Quadrangle retirement community in Haverford. His wife died in 2017.
Mr. Langman and his wife shared wanderlust, and they went to Russia, Austria, Hungary, Europe, and elsewhere. They visited Italy 10 times, France three times, and Cape May as often as possible.
They liked to cook together, too, and he shared his favorite recipes with colleagues at The Inquirer. At the Bulletin, he became part of the “old bulls” lunch group.
He submitted his own prewritten obituary to his funeral director long before it was needed and said: “He enjoyed classical music, poetry, mystery novels, and British mystery and comedy.” He also liked crossword puzzles, fishing, table tennis, classic movies, and duplicate bridge.
He cheered for the New York Yankees baseball team and the Green Bay Packers and Pennsylvania State University football teams.
“He delighted in jokes and was a real fan of the Marx Brothers,” his son Peter said. “When we were children and a local movie theater would feature a Marx Brothers film for one night, my parents made sure that we went. Fond memories indeed.”
In addition to his sons, Mr. Langman is survived by two grandchildren and other relatives.
Services were held earlier.
Donations in his name may be made to the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, 100 S. Independence Mall West, Suite 600, Philadelphia, Pa. 19106.
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