My mother was a newspaperwoman and lived up to her own romantic vision of that title. She didn’t want to be celebrated. She didn’t want an obit, but I believe her old friends in print journalism from The New York Herald Tribune and other illustrious papers would want to know of her passing, as would the hundreds of students she shepherded through Advanced Reporting and Writing at Columbia’s J-School, thereby influencing journalists… and journalism all over the globe, as well as her friends on Fire Island.

Born in California, brought up in Savannah, Ga., New Hampshire and St. Petersburg, Fla., she fell in love with journalism while in high school, working at the St. Petersburg Times as a reporter. She went on to study at Vanderbilt and Edinburgh University, continuing her reporting at the Edinburgh Scotsman. She worked hard to lose her elegant southern accent of a debutante and be one of the boys while working at the Quincy Patriot Ledger in Massachusetts. Her newly acquired Boston Brahmin accent soon transformed into her own brand of New York patois while studying at the Journalism School at Columbia University, one of the happiest times of her life. Upon graduation she was hired as a reporter and editor at The New York Herald Tribune. During the 1966 transit strike, she piled her fellow reporters in her red Volkswagen Beetle and zipped around the city, collecting stories about New Yorkers’ odysseys without the subway and giving them lifts. As a young reporter and editor, she could flaunt awards for excellence in reporting for such diverse subjects as harness racing, being the first woman on the Verrazano Bridge and her travels to Ethiopia, dining with Haile Selassie. During this time, she married Frank Guy de Furia, a hematologist finishing his residency at New York Hospital and had a daughter with him: me! When The New York Herald Tribune folded, she worked freelance and traveled extensively.

When her husband died in 1973, she started to tailor her career to accommodate taking care of a daughter. Her experience as a single mother in the ‘70s and ‘80s was reflected in her writing and editing and found an audience at Redbook, The Trib, her work as a freelance travel writer, as well as in her book of biographies of important American newspaperwomen, Brilliant Bylines. At the same time, she started as an associate professor at the Journalism School where she taught reporting and was instrumental in creating the Magazine Production workshop. She grew there, earning tenure and extending her maternal instincts to her students.

She was a gracious and generous host of the southern tradition and she hosted many students out at her beloved cottage house in Seaview.
While still teaching at the J-School, my mother immersed herself in other lives and other times and started writing biographies. Her first biography focused on Violet Hunt, Victorian author, seductress and self-proclaimed wife of Ford Madox Ford. She received wide praise for her biography of Bram Stoker; a classic reference for vampire aficionados. Her biography on Oscar Wilde in 2000 drew controversy but wide praise overseas for immersing the reader in the smells, sights and sounds of the Victorian era of Oscar’s time.

Mom has been coming out to Fire Island since 1970. She always loved the ocean... and she needed something to do with me during the summer. She got a spot in a "Single Parents' House" in Ocean Bay Park right on the beach (it has since been swept out into the ocean).  It was a magical summer. I even remember the summer and I was only four.

Then in 1972, she rented in another single parents' house on Ocean Breeze Walk in Ocean Beach.  This was an incredible summer which she would talk about fondly as “the summer of '72.” Grateful Dead [music] floated out of windows of the large group house which seemed like hippie commune living with lots of “free-range kids!” Mom had a summer full of lovers and adventures. There were a full 30 days of rain in June where she taught the kids in the house how to read tarot cards and helped us market our own suntan lotion and sell it out from a wagon in “town” (to a profit). In the afternoons and evenings, everyone would go dancing barefoot at the Sea Turtle. Sunrises were spent on the beach. Fire Island had hooked her. She searched around for a house to call her own and fell in love with “our little house,” an old cottage-style house in “Old Seaview” that she filled with the blue beach glass she found.

Friends will remember Barbara as an original—strong and opinionated. She would fight ferociously for the people she loved, and yet no one was spared her criticism, not even her closest friends. But then she would feed those same friends her unique creations of condiments, salads, and spicy snacks and raise a glass to them. If you ever introduced her to someone new, she would give him the third degree, asking leading questions, then listen carefully to file as many facts as she could away in her mind.

A friend of hers for 38 years, Bill Kutik said to the News, “I will miss her ability to frame a perfect question. She had a precision of mind and thought.” Bill met Barbara as a Fire Island News editor in the early 70s while editing copy on the village green. “She came by and said, “Are you editing copy here?””
Of course, for me, my mother’s most important, challenging and, I hope, rewarding role was being Mom. She was the “cool mom” growing up. Our apartment had two pinball machines and a pool table instead of a dining table. Her loud laugh would turn heads in movie theaters. Then the clickety clack of her typewriter from the study would lull me to sleep at night. To fill the void of a traditional family, she surrounded me with friends, parties, and evenings out and she took me to adventures in far-off places. I love to tell the stories of our travels throughout Asia, Africa and Europe – mother and daughter, terrified, zooming across the desert in Egypt on New Year’s Eve in a drunk stranger’s car; tossing and turning on the floor in a house with hundreds of cats during a heat wave in Greece; laughing while accidentally falling into an open grave near her family plot in a rainy Irish cemetery; fighting off a monkey attack in Kathmandu; celebrating Vaclav Havel’s inauguration kissing students in the streets of Prague; in awe at sunrise together watching the pilgrims in the Ganges at Varanasi and just as much in wonder at sunset on the beach on Fire Island.

She taught me to seek out adventure and scintillating conversation. She taught me to accept the juggle of career and motherhood with joy and a sense of humor— “It doesn't matter how hard you try, you will fail... but try hard, so you can fail fantastically.” And more succinctly, “Cope or die.” I loved watching her with my sons, making books with them, reading Dr. Seuss with her booming voice on her enormous bed which she jokingly called her ‘office’. My mother taught me to love fiercely, gently and unconditionally… and to choose my words with care and passion.

Fire Island was my mother's favorite place. And she had traveled all over the world. When she was diagnosed with cancer and the doctors told her there was nothing to do, I asked her what she wanted to do.  Go to China? Back to India? Africa? And she answered that all she wanted to do was spend one last summer on Fire Island with her grandsons. Right before she died, she made me promise that I'd spend the summer with the boys even if she couldn't. I said that I would and that we would continue to celebrate life in the “little house” for years to come. Fire Island is a great gift she has given to us, a beautiful legacy.

Barbara Belford is survived by her daughter Deborah Belford de Furia, her son-in-law Giuseppe Mancini and her two adored grandsons, Giacomo Belford Mancini, 9, and Nicholas Oliver Mancini, 6, of Rome, Italy. A memorial ceremony was held on Saturday, July 17, at the ocean, at B Street, in Seaview.