"He taught me so much about ball writing even before I got on the beat," said now-retired Everett Herald reporter Kirby Arnold. "Just reading his work was such a pleasure. And when I took over the beat in 1999, I felt like a kid at Disneyland, not because I was covering big league baseball, but because my seat was next to his."
After leaving the Mariners beat in 2013, LaRue worked for two more years as a news columnist at the News Tribune before retiring in 2015.