Tales of VUMC Past

January 28, 2025

Langford Auditorium: great acoustics, great-tasting backstory

Part of an occasional series about the people behind the names of VUMC buildings

Sheryl Crow, accompanied by Tim Smith, performs at Langford Auditorium to raise funds for the Shade Tree Clinic on Feb. 15, 2022. (photo by Erin O. Smith)

L.C. Langford Auditorium, on the Medical Center Plaza between Light Hall and Eskind Biomedical Library, is VUMC’s largest meeting place and is also a performance hall.

It has hosted dance troupes and chamber groups, plays and poetry readings. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Biden, Ashley Judd and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have spoken there. A live national broadcast of ABC News’ “Nightline” aired from its stage. Arlo Guthrie, Dave Brubeck, Take 6 and Elvis Costello have played there, though not at the same time. Various university and Medical Center leaders have declaimed at length from its lecterns. The morning in 1986 that Stanley Cohen, PhD, won the Nobel Prize, he spoke to the press from its stage.

It all may not have happened if it were not for malted milkshakes.

Lilburn C. “Ed” Langford, for whom the auditorium was named, was a businessman from Clarksville, Tennessee, who developed a chain of soda fountains and restaurants, some of which operated under the name Langford’s, and some housed within drugstores and department stores.

L.C. Langford from a 1978 edition of the publication “Vanderbilt Today”

At the company’s peak in the 1960s, it operated 139 restaurants in 18 states.

Langford was born in 1893, and after his mother died when he was 11, the boy left school in the middle of the seventh grade and, as he put it in a 1965 story in The Nashville Banner written by Lee Callaway, “I struck out on my own.”

He moved around a lot — St. Louis, Atlanta, Birmingham — and worked at a variety of jobs, including at soda fountains. While living in Mason City, Iowa, he saved and borrowed enough money to open his own sandwich shop, which did well. His ambitions were bigger than Mason City, though, and Langford moved to Minneapolis in 1921 and in short order (!) he had 14 sandwich shops all over the Twin Cities.

Over the next few years, he opened restaurants and/or soda fountains in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and, among other places — Nashville.

In the 1930s, Langford had two restaurants in Nashville, one downtown and one on Gallatin Road. Both sold various flavors of ice cream, and one day Langford was inspired to take one of the most popular, a mixture of chocolate and malt, and sell a softened version of it in a glass instead of in a bowl.

Langford’s culinary innovation — the malted milk — caught on nationwide, and his establishments had the claim on inventing it.

If you were a child who bought a malted milk at the Gallatin Road location, the treat also included a free pony ride — all for a nickel.

Without those malted milks, there might not be a Langford Auditorium.

Langford and his wife, Elizabeth Michaud Emmons Langford, met when she began working at his office in Minneapolis and they were married in 1940. The couple decided to settle in Tennessee, despite the company’s headquarters being in Chicago. The Langfords lived on a 365-acre farm off Lebanon Road bordering Old Hickory Lake and raised Guernsey cattle.

Langford sold his company to the food company Del Monte in 1969 and died in 1977. Honorary pallbearers at his funeral included members of the Nashville Rotary Club and the Board of Directors of the National Restaurant Association.

Elizabeth Langford made a substantial donation toward the construction of the 1,200-seat auditorium in his memory. It was dedicated in 1978 and underwent a complete renovation in 2008, including expanded and improved dressing rooms, a refurbished lobby, updated restrooms, and improved acoustics and seating inside the auditorium.

The view from the audience.
The view from the stage.
(photo by Susan Urmy)