Alice Langford and her daughter Martha (Photo by Jay Paul)
One-hundred-and-ten-year-old Alice Langford, who lives in the Near West End house she has called home since 1956, says she recalls happy times growing up, despite moving often.
“My father was a Baptist minister and a weaver in a cotton mill. We moved around a lot depending on where my dad’s job was in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia,” says Langford, the third of five children of James and Jodie Bray. She has called Virginia home ever since she married Heard Langford in her 20s. The couple first settled in Suffolk and then Richmond, following dairy plant jobs. They had three children: Jerry, who died in 2020 at the age of 86; Chesterfield resident Anne Barden, 87; and Martha, 70, their “surprise baby,” she explains, who lives in Wilson, North Carolina, and visits her mother just about every weekend when possible.
Heard, the plant manager at Richmond’s Curles Neck Dairy, died in 1961 on his 51st birthday, leaving Alice to provide for 7-year-old Martha. She got a job working at Westhampton Pastry Shop, located just a block from her house, in 1962.
“I never learned to drive,” Langford says. “I just never thought I would be very good at it. I would run down the alley in the morning and go in the back door at the bakery. Whatever came up that they needed me for, I did, and [I] made a lot of wedding cakes. I never decorated them, though,” she says. She worked at the bakery for 25 years, retiring in 1987. “They were like family,” she says. “I loved working there.”
When Langford is asked what her secret is for a long life, she has an answer ready: “The Lord is responsible for my length of time still to be living.”
