Frances Langford, the Voice from Lakeland

The promenade along Lake Mirror is named for a Lakeland girl who sang to more wounded soldiers than almost anyone in American history. Frances Langford was born Julia Frances Newbern Langford on April fourth, nineteen fourteen, right here in Lakeland. She was trained as a classical singer, but when Rudy Vallee heard her perform on a Tampa radio station in the early nineteen thirties, he steered her toward popular music and toward Hollywood.

She built a career in film and radio through the decade, but the work that defined her life began in nineteen forty-one, when she joined Bob Hope's United Service Organizations tours. For the next several years she traveled through North Africa, Europe, and the South Pacific, performing in field hospitals and on makeshift stages within range of active combat. She and Hope performed together for five straight years, and her voice on those tours became, for hundreds of thousands of American servicemen, a sound from home.

Langford was not just an entertainer. She wrote a weekly column for Hearst Newspapers called Purple Heart Diary, describing her visits to military hospitals and giving the wounded men a platform to speak. It was journalism as well as empathy, and it ran in papers across the country for the duration of the war.

The city dedicated this promenade to her in nineteen forty-six, the year after the war ended. She passed away in July two thousand five at her home in Jensen Beach, Florida. Her war-related papers are preserved at the Institute on World War Two at Florida State University. The promenade that bears her name honors both her career and her wartime service.