Remembering the Legacy

Cliff Ellis, the former college basketball coach may have said it best on Sunday, when he noted that Dr. David Langston had a way of breaking down barriers.

The jammed, standing-room-only gathering for Langston's funeral inside the R. Marion Craig Coliseum at Port St. Joe High School, was exhibit one.

People of all colors and station in life turned out to fill "The Dome" just as Langston had so many times during his basketball career.

They came to remember a man whose life, as Ellis eloquently noted, had filled the dash in Langston's timeline on this earth well.

They came to recall a graceful and dominating basketball player who had led Port St. Joe to its first state championship, had garnered a bounty of local, state and national honors, and had come back to Port St. Joe and "The Dome" for one of the most memorable junior college games anybody in that gym could remember.

David Langston leading the Gulf Coast Community College Commodores against Vincennes College, then led by a forward named Bob McAdoo, who would be an All-American at North Carolina and an NBA great with Buffalo, Boston and Los Angeles.

Langston and the Commodores, of course, won, as Langston willed his team to victory just as he has so many times on the hardwoods of Gulf County.

But this celebration, and it was a celebration despite the tears, the cracking voices and the funereal overtones, was about more than a basketball player.

Yes, Bill Hodges, who coached at Indiana State University while leading his team, including a forward named Larry Bird, to the NCAA championship game, and who had hired Langston as an assistant coach, was expected to be among the speakers but was unable to make Sunday's services.

Yes, one of Dr. Langston's teammates at Drake University, Craig Davis, acted as something of a moderator, leading folks through the program and announcing the next in a series of speakers whose paths, at various ages and in varying ways, had crossed Langston's.

This, however, as Ellis noted, was about a man who broke down barriers and wasn't the gathering of white and black, poor and rich, elected officials and common folk, a tribute to Dr. David Langston's life?

There was knowing laughter when several speakers spoke about Dr. Langston's, well, forcefulness of personality, his lack of patience with getting a job done, his dislike for elevators and airplanes, his distaste for words like "can't" or "won't."

Deion Long talked about a time Dr. Langston needed to get to Chicago and how Langston had charged Long, without Long's prior knowledge, with driving him to Chicago.

Needless to say, the drive was not undertaken, "But that was David," Long said with a chuckle.

There were chuckles when speakers discussed what could be charitably described as Dr. Langston's sometimes hard-headed attitudes, about his drive and passion, about his willingness to get things fixed when they needed fixing, done when they needed doing.

He was a walking Nike commercial - Just Do It.

In addition, though, there were the raw emotions of friends and colleagues who had watched someone of value in their lives disappear just days or weeks after speaking with him last.

A standing ovation greeted the news delivered by Ralph Rish, his voice wavering toward the end of his remarks, indicating some $200,000 in federal dollars had been secured for construction of the Norris D. Langston Youth Foundation Education Center.

Ground had been broken on the center, which will sit on Avenue A in Port St. Joe, two years ago and it had become Dr. Langston's focus for most of his energy since.

It seemed that almost uniformly among the last conversations many on the stage had with Dr. Langston involved getting that center off the ground and operational.

It was something of the final brass ring to honoring the name of his brother, the face of the foundation.

As Davis noted during his remarks, Dr. Langston was a man of great action and that action fed the people and communities he touched with love, life and the same passion that fueled Dr. Langston since his youth.

A youth in which he became something of a symbol of the possible, that integration would work, that black and white could indeed come together.

As Ellis noted, Langston helped bring black and white together during the community's most turbulent time and there he was doing it again on Sunday, the gym filled with what one reporter estimated at close to 1,000 people.

A lifelong friend of Dr. Langston's, Hosea Pittman, mentioned Monday that the service was put together as if Dr. Langston himself had formulated the program.

The mix of faith and life, of humor and loss, of tribute and humanity, of dedication to keeping the legacy alive and celebration of that legacy, it was all wrapped in a celebration to a man who touched so many in ways that defy calculation or definition.

There were plenty of words - and yet, at the same time, there were no words.

Dr. David Langston was gone and it is up to those he touched to keep the flame burning.