Langdon a lifelong resident of east Pierce

Ed Langdon is a lifelong resident of the east Pierce County area, with a life that spans 80 years.

Ed Langdon is a lifelong resident of the east Pierce County area, with a life that spans 80 years.

He was born in Puyallup in 1930, well before the suburban buildup. Farming still dominated the valley region.

“It’s a lot different now,” Langdon said. “I went through the Depression days and everything.”

His father was a guitarist for a band, in the “days it was still old-fashioned music.” His mother was a strict woman, he said, but he still brought her pies from the rhubarb farm where he later worked.

As a boy, he enjoyed the outdoors, camping, fishing and hunting with a close friend of his whenever they could make their way up to Greenwater or Lake Kapowsin. He knew how to start a fire and pitch a tent, and he was able to take down three-point bucks with his .308 rifle. Later in life, he would go lake fishing with his brother-in-law.

From the time he was 18 years old, Langdon worked on a rhubarb farm in Sumner, doing a little bit of everything on the property over the course of 20 years.

He never learned to read or write, and he still can’t, he said. But he said he never minded because he didn’t need it for work.

Langdon never left the east Pierce area, but he also never grounded himself to one address.

“I’ve lived all over,” he said. “In Puyallup, in Sumner, and in Buckley.”

Langdon’s younger sister and nephew still live in the Graham area. He doesn’t get to see much of his sister, who is in an Alzheimer’s home, but he still receives occasional visits from his nephew.

Langdon has gone to the Bonney Lake Senior Center since 1996, when the current building was still new, making him somewhat of a fixture with the other members and staff.

“A few years ago on Valentine’s Day, every one of the girls on staff posed with Ed in a photo,” Senior Center Cook Lara Wheeler said. “It was a big group photo and we all gave Ed a smooch.”

Though he can’t move around easily without a walker and admits himself that he doesn’t know electronics well, one of his favorite pastimes has become Nintendo Wii bowling.

“Recently, somebody made Ed give it a try and he really took to it,” Wheeler said.

“I liked it a lot,” Langdon said. “I beat (Director Sue Hilberg) and she didn’t like that too much.”