Pauline Royal Langsley

LANGSLEY, Pauline Doris (nee Royal) –

Pauline R. Langsley, M.D., 96, passed away peacefully on October 21, 2023.  A practicing psychiatrist, who always told her children to “act well-adjusted,” she was the daughter of psychiatrist Paul A. Royal and the wife of psychiatrist Donald G. Langsley.  She was born in Lincoln, Nebraska and was raised next door to the hospital where her father worked, Green Gables Sanitorium, where she played with the patients and learned that they are just fine as people.  She attended Mills College in Oakland, California between 1945 and 1949, a period she said was the happiest of her life.  She attended the University of Nebraska School of Medicine, and trained in psychiatry at the U.C. San Francisco Langley Porter Institute.  When her future husband asked the nurses at Langley Porter who was the best resident to know, they all told him, “Oh go find Dr. Royal – she’s playing pool with the patients.  She’s a lot of fun!”  She relished good humor, football (Go Huskers!), and opera, mountains, green leaves, trees, fresh homegrown tomatoes, summers in Burns, Wyoming, and that she lived in “10 different cities” (we count more than that). 

Her career started at the Student Health Service of U.C. Berkeley.  With family moves, she opened a private office in Denver; returned to the Student Health Service of U.C. Davis, and thereafter opened a private practice in Cincinnati, Ohio.  With another family move to Chicago, she elected to spend two years in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, now the Federated States of Micronesia, on Pohnpei Island, where she established the new nation’s mental health services and learned to pilot small airplanes.  She returned to the mainland and completed a fellowship in geriatric psychiatry in Chicago, at the age of 61, and thereafter practiced in the Chicago area until retirement at 70.  Known as Polly to her friends, she was known to her family as the Patron Saint of the Parking Space.  She would bestow a good spot on any who prayed for her intervention.  She changed parties from Republican to Democrat after the Second Gulf War, and never looked back.  Polly returned to Denver near her beloved Rocky Mountains after her husband passed away in 2005.  She traveled widely before and after retirement, visiting Iran, China, Singapore, the Philippines, France, Germany, Denmark, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Japan, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, in addition to her work in Micronesia.

She is survived by her three daughters: Karen Langsley of Denver; Dorothy (Dorrie) Langsley of Cambridge; and Susan Langsley of Redmond; four grandchildren: Zachary; Kimberly; Jennifer; and Calvin; and one great-granddaughter: Olive.  The Christmas cards she had made for 2023, which she did not live to send out, read, “Merry Christmas and Vote Democrat.”  We will be true to blue, always.