It still seems oxymoronic. The “late Deanne Roberts.”
The Tampa native and graduate of the Academy of Holy Names and USF has always been here. Always looking out for her home town. Always a presence, always a force, always our better angel. Sage and savvy beyond her upstart youth. Kinetic and can-do through middle age. Eternally optimistic throughout terminal cancer.
There was Roberts Communications. Then Roberts & Hice. Now ChappellRoberts. Public affairs, including work for the Tampa Port Authority, was always a priority. Roberts was the catalyst behind CreativeTampaBay and Emerge Tampa. She found time to chair the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce and Leadership Florida. She made time for two sons. She mentored the next generation of stewards and leaders and served on numerous boards–both private-sector and non-profit. Her business was public relations, but her favorite client was this place we all love to call home. Her calling was to change Tampa for the better.
She was too spirited, too motivated, too involved, too full of vitality to be your basic societal pillar. What generation gap? What impediments to progress? What’s best for Tampa and Tampa Bay was the only question that mattered.
And nobody mattered quite like Deanne Roberts, who left us too soon last week at age 59. She was visionary and creative and inspiring. She wouldn’t let Tampa settle. She personified the axiom of the “busy person” as ideal target for any job of critical importance. She was a natural resource for those who call Tampa Bay home–and those yet to come.
As Tampa Bay Times business columnist Robert Trigaux put it: “With Roberts, I’m reminded of the Jimmy Stewart character in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ who gets to see what his hometown would have been like had he never lived. Tampa would have been much the worse without Roberts.”
I’ll give the last quote to veteran journalist and Roberts’ best friend Diane Egner, who was with her when she passed. “She was ready and had found peace in recent days with the inevitable,” said Egner, “as cancer continued to consume her body–but not her spirit.”
RIP, Deanne–and thank you.