This Obituary contributed by Kari Kandoll. Published in The Daily News on 7/6/2004. Tom Dearmore 1927 - 2004 Tom Dearmore, who rose from weekly journalism in the hills of northern Arkansas to distinguished newspaper positions in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, died Friday. He was 76.Dearmore retired in 1991 as editorial director of the San Francisco Examiner. He'd moved to Cathlamet in the last year to be near his son.He began his newspaper career on his family's then-weekly newspaper, the Baxter Bulletin at Mountain Home, Ark., and wrote editorials for the Washington Star and the Arkansas Gazette before joining the Examiner.The son of Benjamin and Ethel Shiras Dearmore, Thomas Lee Dearmore was born Sept. 11,1927 in Mountain Home, Ark. He attended New Mexico A and M College at Las Cruces, N. M. in an Army Air Corps program and served in the U. S. Air Force from 1944 to 1946, editing the base newspaper at Spokane, Wash. He also attended Drury College at Springfield, Mo. He married Reba Byrd on Nov. 5, 1950, and she was a distinguished teacher, accomplished musician and recognized businesswoman in Mountain Home before her husband's career took them out of state.As a young Ozarks newspaper editor- publisher, he was friends with Orval Faubus, who published a nearby newspaper, but after Faubus, as Arkansas governor, began to stridently defy federal desegregation orders, the Baxter Bulletin took a strong stand against him. Faubus had placed Dearmore on the state Publicity and Parks Commission and a recent Arkansas newspaper history says Dearmore was told to leave the commission. Dearmore refused to resign and used the rest of his term to aggravate Faubus. In part because of his stand in the desegregation crisis, he became Arkansas' first Nieman Fellow, studying at Harvard University in 1959-60. He left Arkansas to write editorials for The Washington Star in the nation's capital from 1970- 76, returned as associate editor of the Arkansas Gazette from 1976-78 and became editor of the opinion pages of the San Francisco Examiner in 1978. In 1980, he was one of five finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing and the same year, he won the national Walker Stone Award for distinguished editorial writing from the Scripps-Howard Foundation, one of the highest national honors for editorial writers. Reg Murphy, his editor at the Examiner, once wrote that Dearmore "has been one of the nation's leading practitioners of editorial writing ever since he started newspapering on the family-owned Baxter Bulletin in Mountain Home, Arkansas. "His service took him from Mountain Home to the Washington Star for the stormy years of the Nixon presidency. It was his editorial writing that distinguished the Star in those days. A true craftsman with words, Dearmore bleeds at the keyboard, where he writes an average of a thousand words a day, but he works even harder at reading. His desk is a clutter of everything from the Economist to the New Republic to pamphlets from all the cause groups. A burly, rumpled story-teller, Dearmore is as likely to quote from Rolling Stone as from Ralph Waldo Emerson." On his retirement as editorial director of the San Francisco Examiner, Publisher William Randolph Hurst praised Dearmore's "thousands of editorials" in his "award-studded tenure that has had an impact on many issues on both the national and local levels." Dearmore was a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, Society of Nieman Fellows, National Conference of Editorial Writers and American Society of Newspaper Editors. His articles have appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and other magazines. Dearmore was preceded in death by his wife. He is survived by a daughter, Diana Dearmore of Woodland, CA., and a son, Jonathan Dearmore of Naselle, WA., and Jonathan's wife, Lori, and their daughter, Kaelee, Tom Dearmore's beloved granddaughter. Roller Funeral Home at Mountain Home is in charge of arrangements.