RICK REINDEL, 27

His `Indiana Jones' spirit loved by family, colleagues

By Meg McSherry Breslin

Tribune staff reporter

Published January 15, 2003

Rick Reindel was one of those rare people with endless energy, and he

applied his enthusiasm to a wide range of interests, from skiiing, drawing

and travel to unexpected adventures for his friends and family.

Mr. Reindel, 27, an architect for the Chicago firm Perkins & Will, died

Wednesday, Jan. 8, while on board a Turkish airliner that crashed en route

from Istanbul to Diyarbakir Airport.

At the time of his death, Mr. Reindel, an associate at the firm, was on a

business trip, planning to pick out stone in Turkey for an office building

in India. Afterward, he had planned to meet his wife, a pediatric intern at

Children's Memorial Hospital, in Rome for a vacation.

It was just the kind of trip that Mr. Reindel loved, combining his passion

for travel and new cultures with time for his new wife, Rebecca Reindel.

"He was a young man who had a unique blend of talents," said Wally

Bissonnette, a project director at Perkins & Will. "He had the intelligence,

the personality and the drive to be a good employee and to really excel in

front of clients. He was an unusual mix, a sort of Indiana Jones, at times."

A native of Cleveland, Mr. Reindel moved to Colorado in elementary school

and fell in love with the outdoors. He was a sports enthusiast who hiked,

mountain-biked, skied freestyle, and slept in tents on mountains during

trips with his dad.

As a young boy, he also loved to draw and he took that creative energy with

him to college at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he majored in

environmental design.

"He had an eye for things like you wouldn't believe," said his wife, who met

Mr. Reindel in the campus bookstore, where they both worked part-time jobs.

"He loved to create beautiful things and [his career] was a way to create

something that existed and was beautiful and that was functional."

After college, Mr. Reindel joined his future wife in Chicago, her hometown.

While she was busy in medical school at the University of Chicago, he threw

himself into his work. In Chicago, he helped design the University of

Illinois at Chicago's Center for Ambulatory Care.

"He was a charming person and he could adapt to any situation," said a

former co-worker, Patrick McCurdy. "He could walk into any country that he'd

never been to but look like he'd been there a dozen times."

"He was just so much fun," his wife said. "Everything fun in my life was his

idea, and he had so many great ideas, just things that you would think would

be an impossibility."

A few years ago, for example, he persuaded his wife to travel to Egypt. And,

as always, he dove into the Egyptian culture. At another time, what was

normally a quiet visit to Cape Cod to visit Rebecca's grandparents turned

into an exhilirating deep-sea fishing trip.

"He'd wake up every morning singing," his wife said with a laugh. "He was

exhausting in a wonderful way."

Mr. Reindel is also survived by his father, Richard; his mother, Phyllis; a

brother, David; a sister, Kelly; and three grandparents, Carrie Turner and

Walter and Helen Reindel.