Because of the importance I attribute to Memorial Day, this column is a departure from my usual content
Memorial Day is when I always remember my best friend in the Navy, Hiawatha Lee Langley, who at 20 years old died during an accident on the USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier, during flight operations in the Atlantic Ocean on January 16, 1965. Now, 59 years later, I still think of him.
Hiawatha and I were friends in boot camp and while we were assigned to Air Anti-Submarine Squadron VS-24, which flew Grumman S2F aircraft. Hiawatha was from High Point, N.C. and I from Pittsburgh, Pa., so he always joked about being a Southern boy and having a “Yankee” like me for a friend, and I returned the favor by calling him a “Rebel.”
As the squadron’s Personnel Clerk, I was awakened in the middle of the night to do the heart-wrenching paperwork relating to his passing – the documents that sent a chaplain and another officer to the door of Hiawatha’s family to break the awful news to them.
I wonder what his life would be like today had he lived. I remember meeting his girlfriend, Brenda, and I recall thinking, “Wow! They look like a great couple!” I’m told that to this day Brenda considers Hiawatha to be the “love of her life.” I still think of Hiawatha and wish we could have gotten together and shared our lives throughout the decades. I have never forgotten Hiawatha, his great attitude and his smile.
On June 17, 2022, while driving through North Carolina, I met with Sandie Anglin (Hiawatha’s cousin) and her husband Joe who led me to the cemetery where I could pay respects to Hiawatha over his headstone (it isn’t a gravesite because his body was never recovered from the Atlantic). For the record, it is the Langley Family Cemetery, 717 Langley Daniel Road, Kenly, N.C.
I set up a permanent page at Virtual Memorials for him and I hope others who remember him will sign the Hiawatha Lee Langley Guest Book Page. Sadly, with the passage of so much time, I’m uncertain as to how many people will think to look for this page.
RIP Hiawatha, from your friend, the Yankee.