IN MEMORY OF LAYNE LONGFELLOW, MY DEAR FRIEND with the golden voice

Dr. Layne A. Longfellow, 81, educator, writer, humorist, musician, composer and world traveler, died peacefully after a lengthy illness at his home in Prescott, Arizona, on Jan. 12, 2019. He was born on Oct. 23, 1937, in Jackson, Ohio, the son of the late Hershel and Opal Longfellow.

Dr. Longfellow was a graduate of the Jackson, Ohio, high school, Ohio University (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna cum Laude), and the University of Michigan, where he completed a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology. Following that, he received a number of post-doctoral fellowships, most notably a National Institute of Mental Health award to work with Dr. Carl R. Rogers, one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research. In his varied career, Layne taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and later was Academic Vice President at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona, where he helped design a curriculum that integrated wilderness experience and academic studies.

In 1974, he was hired to be the Director of Seminars for Executives at the renowned Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, a post which led to an illustrious career as a professional speaker and seminar leader. In 1978, at age 40, Layne established his own company, Lecture Theater, Inc., a forum for the presentation of provocative issues with the help of spoken words, songs, humor, piano music and photographs.

Through his company, Layne presented well over 2,000 multi-media speeches and seminars to audiences and organizations internationally.

Layne was elected to the National Speaker’s Association Hall of Fame in 1985, and later awarded the rare and highly prized title of “Legendary Speaker” by his colleagues in the Association.

In 2007, Layne, who served as the Longfellow Poetry Ambassador for the Friends of Longfellow National Historic Association, was the host at the 200th birthday celebration of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and followed up that same year with a reading of Longfellow poetry at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Dr. Longfellow’s list of awards, distinctions and recognitions is long, as is the number of writings, both professional and popular, including articles in distinguished journals and popular magazines, books, audio presentations and DVDs.

Layne was preceded in death by his parents and is survived by his long-time companion, Neera Tandon, of Prescott. Services will be held at Mayhew-Brown Funeral Home in Jackson, Ohio, with internment in Fairmount Cemetery next to his parents.

Arrangements are pending. A celebration of Layne’s life will be held for his many friends and acquaintances in Prescott, Arizona, in April, at a date to be determined.

Psychologist Layne Longfellow is the go-to expert on how people behave in elevators. After years of research, Longfellow came up with a simple guide to "How to Behave in an Elevator," including suggestions like "face forward," "watch the numbers," and "stop talking with anyone you do know when anyone enters the elevator." While learning about Longfellow, Alex at Weird Universe compiled a collection of fascinating nuggets from ongoing research in this area:

• Studies of elevator body placement show a standard pattern. Normally the first person on grabs the corner by the buttons or a corner in the rear. The next passenger takes a  cater-cornered position. Then the remaining corners are seized, and next the mid-rear-wall and the center of the car. Then packing becomes indiscriminate.

• "When the sixth person gets on you can watch the shuffle start," says Longfellow. "People don't quite know what to do with the sixth person. Then another set of rules comes into play governing body contact."

• In an uncrowded elevator, men stand with hands folded in front or women will hold their purses in front. That's called the Fig Leaf Position. Longfellow says, "As it gets more crowded you can see hands unfold and come down to the sides, because if you have your hands folded in front of you in a really crowded elevator, there's no telling where your knuckles might end up. So out of respect for the privacy of other people you unfold them and put them at your side."

• High-status individuals are given more space. For instance, if the president of the company gets on, he gets more space.

• Men leave more space between themselves and other men than women do with other women.

I believe he was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
talking about this very thing once. 

Goodbye, my friend!!!! See you at the Rendezvous!!!
(private joke)

SIDE NOTE:  I first met Layne in a dream and then heard him on CD Baby reading his ancestor's poetry (Henry Wadsworth) on a CD. I left a comment on the page, he responded and the rest is history. I brought him to my home town to headline a poetry festival and he charmed us all and we became friends. I typed up my dream I had had about him and it blew his mind. His life story was in the dream and all of his many accidents and mishaps that almost killed him years before. He was a remarkable man. I miss you, Layne, Voo

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And here's the poem I wrote for Layne
before I met him in real life.....


The Voice That Makes Me Weep


Sitting in the growing darkness of this room full of flowers
Cherished books and minuscule spots of sunlight
I watch the sky outside the window change into another color
Another entity, one I do not know and of which I sometimes fear.

From the black and silver box in the corner comes your voice
Like a whisper from another time and place, speaking to me
Of tides and ships and crosses of snow
Old friends, dead and dying and people searching for their love ones
Lost forever and found again at Heaven's open door.

Heartbreak inhabits that voice. Heartbreak and hope, the sweetest of ironies
The richness of it reaches deep within my breast and shakes my heart
Like a small earthquake rumbling there below the surface of a fragile ground
The tenderness of it takes my breath away and makes me tremble at it's
Vocal touch, the emotion displayed there rushing over me like an unexpected
Spring rain running down the petals of a rose.

What is it about your voice that makes me weep? What is it about you
That makes me long for something I never had and dream of things
That never will come true? Who are you? From what star did you fall?
See? I can't even think of you without lapsing into poetry!

A new poem begins and your buttery voice speaks new life into old words
That never like this touched their readers from those long ago newly written pages
But now are like velvet swords swinging through airwave and cosmos
Simultaneously cutting open and laying bare and then healing again
With the magic of the human tear and the knowing that another heart
On another shore has felt the same loss and love that you thought
Till then, was yours alone to bear.

Can I ever hear the word Whisper! again or Silence! without thinking of you?
Can I ever hear a child's laugh without thinking of "Edith with golden hair"
And the way you laced "The Children's Hour" with love enough to fill the ocean
And make me wish I was a child again sitting on my papa's knee?

No, I am ruined. Your voice has ruined me
I do not care if I ever hear another
No matter what golden words he may speak to me or how tenderly he may
Say my name
I will only compare his voice to yours and his will pale and grate my ears.


All the tender pathos of the here and the hereafter, you say and I melt like wax
And wipe my streaming eyes with a handkerchief that's seen it's better days
A sob escapes my throat and I sit now in utter darkness as the black and silver
Box goes silent and the voice caresses only in the ring of memory
A faceless voice, unknown and distant, living in a man I've never met and probably never will.

The voice of a stranger on a silver disc reading words written by a long dead poet
One acquainted with sorrows and touched by the infirmities shared by all human hearts
Reading the contents of my own soul and speaking them out loud. Heartbreak and hope
Peace and perplexity. Joy and pain. Exquisite agonies that never found a voice till now

The owner of that instrument doesn't even know I exist, 

Doesn't know the sea of tears I've cried
Doesn't know how he has healed me in his renderings,

 Doesn't know how dear is the voice
That speaks to me of Evangeline and Hiawatha or how I sit and listen intently
Seeing in my mind's eye, the broken oar, the Wayside Inn, hearing the ebb of the tide
And imagining the approving smile of Henry Wadsworth listening somewhere in the ethereal.

He doesn't know he spends every Sunday afternoon with me
Drinking sweet tea and weeping
Like an orphaned child as he begins to read
I am only a stranger far away and never met and never known.

Yet, here, in this room full of flowers, books and broken dreams
With the afternoon shadows darkening into evening and silence descending
Into the void left by that sweet voice ringing in my ears
Once more I shake my head at the power of prose, the magic of music and the
Goodness of God who made the man who has the voice that makes me weep
And I no longer feel alone.


©by Voo
1/03/05

For Layne Longfellow, the man with the voice that makes me weep and whose voice you're hearing now. Someone I am now proud to call my friend! (That must have been God's doing!!!)