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An ode to Terry Armour


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Posted by chicagomedia.org on June 08, 2008 at 16:21:51:

Ode to Terry

A bigger-than-life guy leaves a big empty space

Death is no way to end a year and dying at 46 is no way to end a life.

Terry Armour was 46 when he died on December 29, 2007. Maybe you read about it in the papers or heard about it on radio and TV. Armour, who wrote for this paper, had been a star in all mediums.

The death was sudden: pulmonary embolism. The shock was hard and intense and, a few days later, the funeral was a shower of tears.

Perhaps you haven't thought about him in a while. That's OK, understandable. Things move on.

Armour's desk and cubicle in the Tribune Tower sit vacant, awaiting another reporter, perhaps, or just more emptiness.

Sometimes, someone around here will say, "Hey, remember when Terry . . . ," but it happens less and less often.

There is one person, however, who thinks about Armour all the time.

"If you have a choice, be the one to go first," says LaNell Armour, who was Terry's wife. "Being a survivor sucks."

She is sitting in Stefani's 437, a restaurant on the corner of Rush and Hubbard Streets. This was the place Terry took her on their first date.

"We sat at that table near the door and he was so proudly introducing me to everyone who came in the door," she says.

She smiles at that memory but many times over the next hours tears well in her eyes and she will stop talking, pull a piece of Kleenex from a small pack and touch it to her cheeks.

"He was . . . He is unforgettable. Other than our jobs, we did everything together. When he died, my life ended, and I'm still here," she says. "Everything that mattered to me is gone. I thought it would get easier but it just doesn't."

She has yet to return to her profession and to the 60-some kids she had been teaching to play the piano. She keeps busy planning a memorial set to take place Sept. 22 at U.S. Cellular Field, which was, for Terry, a kind of heaven on earth. That date would have been his 47th birthday.

"I want anybody who wants to come to come. The whole city can come," says LaNell. "I was overwhelmed by all the lovely messages and notes and letters I got after Terry . . . " She stops, again. "What keeps me going is knowing that there are all these people who loved Terry and that he loved me."

There is comfort too in the dog, Kramer, that she and Terry took home from the Anti-Cruelty Society late last year. And there is comfort in her Downstate parents and Terry's in-town family, especially his lively mother, Elaine. They talk at least once every day.

Stefani's 437 was once called Riccardo's and it was a hangout for, among other lively types, many of the reporters and editors who worked at the four nearby newspapers. The more famous of these are memorialized by photos on the restaurant's walls.

"Terry was a great guy," says the restaurant's owner, Phil Stefani. "He lit up a room."

A few days after LaNell visited the restaurant, Stefani and manager Frank Giannelli put a framed photo of Terry on the wall: Big smile and immortality, of sorts.

You can see it, next to Carl Sandburg.

(Chicago Tribune)


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