Walk across the TCU campus on any given spring morning — past the tulip beds along Campus Commons, around the purple and white blooms at the base of Frog Fountain — and you are seeing Donald Blackshear’s handiwork. The flowers were once less than an inch tall. He grew them.
This year, the TCU Faculty Senate has named Blackshear the 2026 recipient of the Beto Cruz Award, honoring a non-exempt facilities employee whose service to the university goes beyond the everyday. For Blackshear — an equipment operator on the greenhouse crew who will mark 45 years at TCU this November — the recognition lands in a career that has, quite literally, helped shape what the campus looks like.
A Career Measured in Growing Seasons
Blackshear started at TCU on Nov. 23, 1981, as a groundskeeper in Worth Hills. Forty-five
years later, he is still doing what he describes simply as “the same good work” —
though the campus around him has transformed almost beyond recognition. Buildings
have come and gone. Old has given way to new. Through every wave of construction and
renewal, the flowers have kept blooming. The work he is proudest of is the slow, patient
kind.
“We take tiny flowers that are less than an inch tall and grow them in the greenhouse until they are large enough to plant on campus,” he said. “Then we care for them throughout the growing season, keeping them beautiful all year.”
It is the quiet labor behind a campus that the Princeton Review ranked No. 4 in the nation for Most Beautiful Campus — and that U.S. News & World Report named TCU one of the country’s most beautiful college campuses, citing its landscaping and its status as a continuously recognized Tree Campus USA. It is the kind of work that rarely gets a spotlight, which is exactly the point of the Beto Cruz Award.
Created by the Faculty Senate in 2020 to honor the memory of Beto Cruz, a facilities employee lost to COVID-19 complications, the award exists to recognize the dedicated staff who, in the Senate’s words, are “often seen but rarely acknowledged.” Recipients receive a $1,000 award and have their names engraved on a permanent plaque. Blackshear’s name now joins that list.
What Keeps Him Here
Ask Blackshear what has kept him at TCU for four and a half decades, and the answer
comes quickly: the students.
“It’s exciting to work at a place like this,” he said. “So much activity keeps this job exciting. I know the students appreciate my work.”
That appreciation runs both ways. Generations of Horned Frogs have posed for cap-and-gown photos at Frog Fountain, walked through the Brown-Lupton University Union archway on move-in day and crossed Campus Commons on their way to class — most without knowing the name of the man whose work made those backdrops what they are. The Beto Cruz Award, in a small way, closes that gap.
Off the Clock
Blackshear’s commitment to caring for a place extends well beyond TCU. Since 1968,
he has been a member of The Church of the Living God off South Freeway, where he cleans
the interior and tends the landscaping outside — the same patient, hands-on work he
has spent a lifetime perfecting. He is an avid roller skater. And he keeps his cars
in immaculate condition, including a 1993 Honda Accord with just 72,000 miles on it,
kept in what he describes as perfect shape. The man who has spent 45 years caring
meticulously for TCU’s grounds, it turns out, brings the same care to everything else
in his life.