Talk:Richard Armour

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So sad he seldom got his due!

What a drag, to publish brilliant doggerel like those catsup and mustard poems, only to have Ogden Nash so often be credited by posterity!

By the way, as the final journalist to interview the ailing [from Parkinson's Disease] Armour--for the Los Angeles Times, at his condo in Claremont, California on Thursday, January 21, 1988--I can report first-hand that he didn't sound the least bit bitter regarding his work being so often misattributed to Nash, whom he not surprisingly personally knew.

What struck me most about Armour, aside from his remarkable career, of course, was that even at that advanced age, how much effort he still devoted to revising his work; while his living room, where we conducted our chat, showed only minimal evidence of his work, his and his wife's bedroom as filled to the gills with stacks of books and papers, many of which he explained, he was still working on, revising and improving bits of verse published decades ago. What an inspiration for a hack writer such as myself!

And here's one of my favorite Armour pieces, the one in fact with which I concluded my L.A. Times piece, regarding President Zachary Taylor, the second sitting American president to die of natural causes:

After sixteen months in office, A short while indeed, His term hadn't expired, But he'd.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida RadioactiveSeattle@hotmail.com