In my mind, Tom Shuford will always wear a pink tutu. He was adorable, lumbering around in his white tights with coarse black leg hair crawling out the woof and weave. And he was confident enough to pull off the look.

Donna Fielder

Tom died late last month. He was 63 and should have had a lot of good years left, but cancer stole them.

I knew him through his wife, Lanette, who once was the news editor at the Record-Chronicle. She’s the one who coerced him into the tutu, and I really don’t think it had anything to do with their divorce several years later. They remained loving friends.

The Shuford name should be in lights somewhere at the University of North Texas. Tom’s dad, Cecil Shuford, founded the journalism department and ran it with an iron hand for many years. He was gone before my time at UNT, but his reputation hung in the hallways like smoke to remind my good teachers how to make a student newspaper bleed red ink the next day in editing class and how to convince an aspiring journalist that he was not Mike Royko.

Tom inherited those genes and used them well after he graduated from UNT to work here at the Record-Chronicle, his first job. He taught journalism for nearly 30 years at the University of Texas at Arlington and, on his own, acquired the same kind of reputation as his dad.

He taught at UNT for a while and once showed up in the newsroom to beg cash from his wife. He’d filled up with gasoline and then discovered he’d forgotten his wallet. He wasn’t sure how much time he had to return with the money before being fetched by the police.

Tom also was director of the Texas Freedom of Information Foundation. That job and those issues meant a lot to him. The organization couldn’t have picked a more fierce warrior in the battle to maintain journalistic freedom.

I remember him most from the daily stories Lanette used to regale me with. They were raising three of his children, two of hers, and one they had together. Their home was a madhouse, and we used to trade stories of hiding olives and chocolates in our underwear drawers from the ravaging appetites of teenagers.

When money was tight, Tom supplemented finances by carrying a paper route. It was always about the news for him.

After Cecil Shuford died, his children were preparing the house for sale. Lanette called me one Saturday morning. She asked if I would like to have some of Pop Shuford’s tulip bulbs. Of course I did. What newspaper writer wouldn’t be honored to have them?

So I joined Tom and Lanette at the house, digging up the bulbs and carrying them home to plant in my own yard. I called my tiny plot the “Cecil Shuford Memorial Tulip Garden.”

On a day in early spring when I started over to UNT to accept a Cecil C. Shuford award from the journalism department, I walked outside to discover that the tulips were blooming. Then I called Tom and Lanette to share the news.

I can’t remember what year we went to the Halloween party together. It was long enough ago that I still looked good in my Cleopatra costume. I talked Richard into wearing a toga and some sort of plastic wreath on his head. A sheet is not an easy thing to keep from falling off a skinny frame like his was, and we had a couple of near misses and a few emergency rewrappings as the evening wore on.

I cannot recall what the hostess wore. I know there were witches and scarecrows and the requisite male pregnant nun. I don’t even remember what Lanette had on. But Tom — how can you forget the sight of a bespeckled, hirsute, scholarly man with chest hair peeking out of his shell-pink leotard?

Tom was a journalistic hardliner, a grammar Nazi, a comma curmudgeon. He was feared and sometimes hated by students who nevertheless became better writers because of his pedantic purism when it came to the inverted pyramid.

I shall remember him in terms of flame-red tulips and Swan Lake.

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com.