The Central Fulton Mental Health Center at Grady Memorial Hospital is one of the largest and most comprehensive facilities of its type in the Southeast. Colleagues of Wayne Langford, who served as its director for 20 years, say he deserves a significant portion of the credit for making it so.
Operated in conjunction with the Emory University and Morehouse College schools of medicine, the center treats patients with severe and persistent mental illnesses, and over the years has trained a multitude of residents, interns and social workers.
Ron Whitten of Decatur, Langford’s deputy for many years, said his boss was instrumental in obtaining the original federal funding to begin the community-based mental health programs at Grady. Langford also had a key role in recruiting expert medical staff members, Whitten said.
“Wayne’s work ethic and integrity were exceeded only by his kindness and compassion,” Whitten said. “He was especially concerned for patients who were indigent and insisted that all who were served by us receive the same high level of care.”
Dr. Steven Levy of Atlanta, like Langford one of the mental health center’s founders, said the former director also negotiated with the state of Georgia for funds to sustain the center’s clinical services, education programs and cutting-edge research.
“Wayne was a forceful advocate and creative administrator, altogether a superb leader, always fair and thoughtful,” Levy said. “Wayne considered himself a servant of people who were mentally ill and was dedicated to addressing their needs.”
Wayne Langford, 75, died April 30 at his Sautee home after five months of treatment for a brain tumor. The family plans a celebration of his life at 10 a.m. Tuesday at Little-Davenport Funeral Home, Gainesville.
Langford also was known as a home handyman, undertaking major improvements at two of his residences himself.
At a family home in Druid Hills, he converted a screened-in porch to a library-office, expanded a kitchen and dug out a basement to create an extra bedroom. At a mountain retreat in North Carolina, he had a builder frame in a 2 ½-story structure, which he transformed into a four-bedroom, 2 ½-bath “cabin.” In both projects, he enlisted the help of his son, Wayne Langford III of Stone Mountain.
Upon retiring in the mid-1990s. Langford hired a handyman to prepare a house on Lake Lanier as his family’s new home, but as his son put it, “Dad essentially became one of the man’s crew” because he wanted to learn a few more tricks of the building trade.
His first wife, Barbara Langford, died in 1982.
Additional survivors include his second wife, Jeretha “Jere” Langford; two daughters, Rachel Luna-Victoria of Longmont, Colo., and Leah Carmichael of Athens; two sisters, Jean Valentine of Frostproof, Fla., and Harriet Field of Lakeland, Fla.; and four grandchildren.
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