In a new book, Springfield’s former mayor looks back on life and the home he left behind
PROFILE | Julie Cellini
He’s lived in Springfield for nearly 70 years – most of it with his wife, Midge, and their 13 children in a rambling white clapboard house at the corner of Whittier and Laurel Ave.
But at age 85, Ossie Langfelder says he still longs to go home.
“Home was Vienna, Austria,” he says. “My relatives, my stamp collection, my life was there. But everything changed when I was 12, and I guess you could say I have been homesick my whole life. Hitler invaded Austria and because my father was a Jew, we had to flee. That was the beginning of my incredible journey to my life here in Springfield, and the beginning of what would become my little book.”
The ‘little book’ is Langfelder’s life story – a slim, 125-page volume he self-published earlier this year and titled My Incredible Journey. In it he details his serene, privileged childhood in an upper middle class home in one of the world’s most cultured cities. And the harrowing events that led his family to flee Vienna, eventually making their way to Springfield in 1940.
Langfelder moves his life story along quickly, punctuated by more than 60 photographs that trace his transition from being a lonely, skinny schoolboy struggling to find acceptance, to his military service, and his election to two terms as Springfield’s mayor. Along the way, there is his 59-year marriage to Midge and the births of Judy, Janice, Jacob, Julia, Joan, Jackie, Joe, Jay Paul, John, Josh, Jean, Jamie and Jim – seven daughters and six sons. He says initially he didn’t want to have children.
The book has already sold more than 1,000 copies. On Aug. 27, Langfelder will be featured with other area authors at a book signing at Springfield’s Barnes and Noble.
Wheelchair-bound for the past three years since diabetes and circulatory complications necessitated the removal of his right leg, Langfelder says the book project brought him back to being interested in life after he lost much of his mobility. He credits his daughter, Jamie Cour, a speech pathologist, with suggesting it was high time he wrote his memoir, and then tackling the job of getting his writings into a word processor format. She also helped him select and interface with a publisher.
“Dad’s a pretty emotional person,” says Cour. “He’s very feeling, and it took almost two and a half years to do the book. He did a lot of thinking to get his memories on the page. My job was to help him pull it all together.”
The book begins with an elegantly written prologue Langfelder composed when he was barely 15 years old. In it he sets out to “give a little impression of what it means for people to leave all behind, to lose all, and to go out in a strange world.”
During the succeeding years, he says, he occasionally wrote about his life, thinking it might someday become an autobiography to enlighten his children, his 30 grandchildren, and his great-grandchild about who he was and what he came from. “But,” he says, “without Jamie’s constant effort to help me, the book would never have become a reality.”
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