I didn’t know U.S. Magistrate Judge Tom Reid well before he died this past Sunday, but my wife did. This week she remembered him with a personal story. It is about him. And me.
Gaye Tibbets and I had been dating, but were not yet married, when she ran into Judge Reid at the federal courthouse four years ago, as she prepared for one of the many cases that she’s argued during the past 20 years as a Wichita lawyer.
“Something is different about you,” she remembered the judge saying.
“Well, judge, I’m in love,” she said. “Maybe that’s what you’re seeing.”
“I know that feeling of falling in love,” Judge Reid said. “You might not think so, because I’m in my 70s, but I remember it well.”
Reid, 79, is survived by the woman he never forgot falling in love with some 50 years before — his wife, Sharon — and by his daughters, Jennifer Reid and Amy Schell, and their extended families.
His funeral mass is set for 10:30 a.m. Thursday at St. Mary’s Church, 106 E. Eighth, in his home town of Newton.
Do you have a story about Judge Reid? Please share it in the comments below or at his guest book.