Her greatest contribution to the family legacy

Longboat Key lost its connection to a great family legacy last week with the death of Celia “Cee” Edmundson. 

Cee died after a tough struggle with cancer, a battle she fought quietly, humbly and valiantly. 

She was her father’s daughter.

Cee was best known on Longboat as the daughter of the late Lt. Gen. James V. Edmundson. It was a blessing and, to some extent, a curse. He was a remarkable patriot and Air Force war hero — flying 107 combat missions in World War II, 32 in Korea and 42 in Vietnam; honored with 24 war medals; survivor of Pearl Harbor, Battle of Midway and Guadalcanal.  

After he and his wife, Lee, retired to Longboat Key in 1973, he continued his distinguished service as a private citizen, serving on town boards for 12 years, eventually becoming mayor in the mid-1980s and one of the town’s most revered citizens. 

He, too, struggled with cancer — quietly, humbly and valiantly, dying in June, 2001, at age 86. Cee was 69.

Despite living under the wide shadow of her father, Cee made her own life. She had a career as a doctor of education in California. But in the late 1990s, she answered her ultimate calling, to move to Florida to help care for aging and ailing parents.

Like her father and mother, Cee became part of the Edmundson legacy on Longboat Key. She involved herself in the community. She became president of the Longboat Key Kiwanis Club. And if there was a community event, you could count on Cee to volunteer or be there to support it. One of her favorites was walking with her dog in the annual Fourth of July Freedom Fest parade.

Like her father, Cee was not a grandstander who called attention to herself. Few knew of her illness. But she carried on with life, a giving friend to her circle of Longboaters. Cee frequently called and visited the late Ralph Hunter, founder of the Longboat Observer, after he lost his wife, Claire. And she often drove Longboat’s leading-lady environmentalist, Virginia Sanders, to visits and meetings at Mote Marine Laboratory.

With Cee’s death, we lose that 40-year, living connection to the Edmundson family. But thanks to what had to be the hand of providence, two years after her father’s death, Cee came upon an old trunk in her father’s storage room. 

It was filled with letters — from her father to her mother and to his parents, from 1939 through the end of World War II, chronicling his war service and love for his beloved Lee. 

She was touched, as any child would be, reading about the lives of her parents before she was born. For more than a year, Cee converted this priceless treasure into a poignant book, “Letters to Lee,” memorializing two heroes of the Greatest Generation — her father and mother. 

It was a labor of love. But Cee Edmundson, likely, had no inkling at the time that this book of personal letters would become her greatest and most lasting contribution to the Edmundson family legacy.

And a treasured part of the history of Longboat Key.