Schaumburg's first cultural services director retires

Schaumburg's first and only director of cultural services, Betsy Armistead, retires this week after 32 years of service to the village.

In her role, she has overseen all the programming at the Al Larson Prairie Center for the Arts - which hosted 926 individual events and a combined audience of 94,581 people just last year - as well as special events such as Septemberfest and the Volunteer of the Year Awards Luncheon.

Armistead joined the village six months before the Prairie Center opened its doors in June 1986 and has been either directly responsible for or approved the variety of arts programming that has emerged there over the years. She also researched and wrote the "Images of America - Schaumburg" book published in 2004 that chronicled the village's history up to that time.

"Betsy was the driving force who made the Prairie Center the success it is today," Mayor Al Larson said in a written statement. "Her passion and vision to bring cultural arts to this community has had long-standing impacts in Schaumburg, and, because of her contributions, we have one of the best performance arts venues in the Northwest suburbs. She will be greatly missed."

Armistead received a retirement plaque and standing ovation at Tuesday's village board meeting, where Village Manager Brian Townsend added his voice to the accolades.

"She's done a tremendous amount of work and put forth a tremendous amount of effort over those 30-plus years to really grow the Prairie Center and the cultural services programming here in the village," he said. "We have tried to recognize her in more public ways and she has begged off.

"In closing, I will just say that in talking with Betsy about her retirement over the past several months, she has described her work here for the village several times as a labor of love," Townsend added.

"I think that's very important and very telling about the type of person she is and about the type of leadership she's provided."

A permanent successor has not yet been named.