Add me to the long list of people stunned and saddened by the news that Tommy Shea—the long-time Republican columnist and reporter and all-around best of the good eggs—is packing up and leaving town. And I mean really leaving town.
As reported over the weekend by his Republican colleague Patrick Johnson, Shea is moving to the United Arab Emirates to take an editor’s job at an English-language newspaper called The National.
Shea joined the then-Union News as a baby-faced sports reporter (for photographic evidence, check out the adorable photo that ran with Johnson’s article, showing a circa-1973 Shea sporting his trademark excellent head of hair—albeit several shades darker than it is today). He went on to the news desk, making his name covering the Catholic church abuse scandals, and started writing his popular and personable column in 1995. His last column ran, with little fanfare, in Sunday’s paper, with a quintessential Shea topic: the Sisters of Providence.
I’ve had the good luck to meet Shea a couple of times—and the equally good luck to interview his equally good-eggy wife, the writer Suzanne Strempek Shea, on a number of occasions—but, like a lot of people who read his column, I feel like I know him and consider him a friend. So it’s bittersweet to think that I’ll no longer be able to open the Republican (or, as I’m more apt to do these days, click on its website) and see his familiar face and column, but exciting to think about the adventures that no doubt await him halfway around the world.
Besides, I tell myself, this ain’t the last we’ll see of him. Because I’m pretty sure you can’t take Hungry Hill out of Tommy Shea.
