OSSIE LANGFELDER 
Aug. 2, 1926-Oct. 21, 2015
Ossie Langfelder could have ended up in China. Or Decatur. Or any number of places besides Springfield, where he ended up mayor.
He was not initially impressed with the capital city when his family moved to Springfield while World War II raged in Europe, with the United States still at peace. It was the final leg of a journey that began in Austria, which his family fled to escape the Nazis.
“Arriving in Springfield, Illinois, for me was a total mental disaster,” Langfelder wrote in his book, My Incredible Journey, which he self-published in 2011. “I could not believe that I was being banished to such a small community, around 58,000, in the midst of hundreds of farms!” Langfelder remembered that his mother had laid a map of Illinois on the kitchen table in Chicago, where the family briefly lived after moving to America, closed her eyes and pointed in the vicinity of the center of the state. Her finger landed on Springfield.
Things could have been much worse. When the Nazis marched into Vienna in 1938, Langfelder recalled flags festooned with swastikas flying from windows all around his family’s home.
“I remember him (my father) saying ‘Don’t look out the window, we don’t have a Nazi flag – they’ll arrest you,’” Langfelder recalled during a 2012 interview for an oral history project sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. “It didn’t mean anything to me. All I thought about was, ‘Why don’t we have a Nazi flag?’” Langfelder’s father, a manager in a paper manufacturing plant, was Jewish. It wasn’t long before his parents began talking about leaving the country.
“My mother one day said she thinks we might be going to China, which didn’t mean anything to me,” Langfelder said in the 2012 interview. “I thought it was kind of exciting.”
Langfelder remembered a close call when he and his father went to the Argentine embassy to procure visas in hopes of going to South America. His mother gave strict orders when they left the house.
“My mother told me to stay with my dad and never let go of his hand because he might be arrested,” the future mayor told the ALPLM interviewer. “She didn’t tell me why he might be arrested.”
While standing in line at the embassy, someone approached his father and whispered in his ear. They immediately left the embassy – Langfelder recalled that everyone in the line was arrested soon afterward. For hours, he roamed the city with his father, unable to visit restaurants or even sit on benches that bore “No Jews Allowed” signs.
“The rest of the day, we just walked, we didn’t do anything,” recalled Langfelder, whose mother was Lutheran.
Sometime after nightfall, a taxi cab drove up and took his father away, leaving Langfelder alone on the street. He later learned that the cab driver was a relative who had taken his father into hiding. He told the interviewer in 2012 that he couldn’t remember how he got home, but he was sure that he was crying.
Eventually, Langfelder, his older sister and their parents took a train to Switzerland. He carried only a change of underwear and part of his stamp collection. The Germans, he said, confiscated his stamps on the train – nothing of any value was supposed to leave the country. Much to the young Langfelder’s disappointment, the family got visas in Switzerland.
“I was actually praying I wouldn’t get a visa because I wanted to go back home,” he recalled in 2012.
From Switzerland, the family went to England, where Langfelder reluctantly learned English – he later said that he saw no point because he figured that he would soon be going home to Austria. From England, the family took a ship to Canada, then a train to New York, then traveled to Chicago and finally to Springfield, where his father ordered Langfelder and his sister not to speak German in public.
“’If you don’t speak English, don’t speak at all,’” Langfelder recalls his father saying. “‘Americans don’t like foreigners.’” The same edict didn’t apply to appearances. Shortly after arriving in Springfield, the family took a stroll through downtown, which was crowded with shoppers. His mother, a lover of felines, had a black cat on a leash. Langfelder in his book wrote that he wore lederhosen.
Langfelder’s father took a job selling lubricating oil to manufacturers, walking more than five miles from the family’s home on North Sixth Street to sell his first quart to a soybean processing plant across town, near the intersection of Veterans Parkway and Sangamon Avenue. After graduating from Lanphier High School and one semester at Springfield Junior College, which became Benedictine University, Langfelder was drafted into the Army but didn’t see combat. He enrolled at Purdue University after his discharge and became an engineer, working for the state highway department before taking a job at Crawford, Murphy and Tilly, a Springfield engineering firm where he worked for 22 years.
Mayor Jim Langfelder, who won election last spring, says that his father’s entry into politics came while campaigning for former city finance commissioner James Dunham, who was Ossie Langfelder’s brother-inlaw. Ossie Langfelder was elected streets commissioner in 1979 and soon became one of the city’s most popular politicians.
As streets commissioner, Langfelder employed more minorities, who comprised 14.5 percent of the streets department in 1986, than any other city commissioner.
He won the first mayoral election after Springfield adopted an aldermanic form of government in 1987, collecting more than half the vote in a three-way primary and defeating then Mayor Mike Houston while other incumbent commissioners struggled to hold elective office.
“(I)t was probably image that made Langfelder the big vote getter,” the State Journal-Register intoned on its editorial page after the 1987 primary. “He is seen by the public as a modest man who has done a competent and attentive job as streets commissioner. His position on the voting rights lawsuit (which forced the city to abandon the commission form of government) and other council issues seem to be of little concern to the voters.”
Langfelder didn’t make it past the primary in a 1995 bid for a third term. The current mayor says that his father suspected that voters would pick someone else. Jim Langfelder, one of 13 children born to Ossie Langfelder and his wife, Midge, said he thinks that his father, whom he says didn’t delegate as much as other mayors and was known for always returning phone calls no matter what, was worn out from the job. The current mayor said he thinks his dad ran for a third term because his family urged him.
“He ran because we wanted him to run – we wanted him to run a third time,” Jim Langfelder says.
After losing his bid for a third term, Langfelder went to work for the state Department of Transportation, helping develop bid specifications for projects. He remained on the job until he was nearly 82, finally leaving after falling ill at the office about eight years ago. He lost a leg to diabetes within months of leaving his state job.
“He loved to work,” said Josh Langfelder, a son who is now Sangamon County recorder. “If he had not had diabetes, he would have continued to work.”
Before dying of natural causes at home, Ossie Langfelder, who was Catholic, worried that he would not see his father in heaven because his dad was Jewish. Jamie Cour, one of his daughters, assured her father that he would be inside the pearly gates, waiting for him. Send me a sign, she told him, when you see Popsch in heaven. The day her father died, Jamie Cour told her husband that she would be all right as soon as she got the sign.
“Just then, the lights of our house went out and we lost all power for the next 20 seconds or so, and then suddenly it returned,” Cour recalled during a eulogy she delivered at her father’s funeral. “I jumped up and yelled, ‘Thank you, Dad!’”
Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
