81, old-fashioned newspaper editor served on Mountain Medical board Tom Rawlins, who fulfilled a childhood dream of being a newspaper editor and spent nearly four decades with the St. Petersburg Times, died Dec. 19. Rawlins died at Suncoast Hospice and had moved back to Clearwater about 2 years ago to be near family after spending his retirement years in Buena Vista. Rawlins was born Oct. 10, 1939, in Winchester, Kent. Two years later, his family traveled by train to look for work in Florida and arrived to the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The family settled in Miami, where Rawlins graduated from Miami Senior High School in 1958. He followed the advice of a church youth director and joined several friends in attending Mississippi College, a small private Baptist college.