Christian broadcast stalwart Hickling dies in crash
By Patrick Cloonan
Daily News Staff Writer

[ThomHickling.com note: Pat contributed countless articles to Expression Newspaper over the years. Thank you, Pat.]

Pittsburgh’s evangelical Christian media community — and others from Baltimore to Ireland — were stunned by the death of Thom Hickling.

Hickling, 51, was killed and his daughter seriously hurt in a two-vehicle crash Tuesday in Zambia, east Africa.

“Thom was a tremendous guy,” Cornerstone TeleVision Vice President Tim Burgan said. “A forerunner in a lot of ways regarding Christian media. A visionary in sending out the Gospel in a unique way.”

Hickling was co-creator with former wife Cathy Hickling and the late Tom Green on Wall-based Cornerstone’s long-running diner show “His Place.”

“Thom was a valuable part of our ministry and we loved him very much,” said Cornerstone’s president, the Rev. Ron Hembree, who was the first “His Place” proprietor and turned the show over to Burgan in 1989.

“Thom was totally devoted to his kids,” www.lightmusic.tv Webmaster Rose Capanna said. Thom and Cathy were parents to Holly, David, Benjamin and Jeana Hickling.

“Holly has been living in Zambia for almost four months working in the Meheba refugee camp,” Hickling wrote in a Christmas letter posted on www.lightmusic.tv a day before his death. It was a tribute to Green who died in New Zealand in 2003.

The lightmusic.tv site said Holly Hickling was hospitalized in stable condition with a broken leg and damaged ankle. It said U.S. Embassy officials in Zambia were seeking to arrange for Cathy Hickling to be with her daughter.

“Thom knew how to enjoy life,” wrote Mark Ford, a co-worker with Thom at Agora Publishing Group in Baltimore. “That’s a quality I think I most admired about him and a skill I hoped to learn from him some day.”

Hickling was a free-lance writer who traveled extensively for Agora.

“It turned out to be a huge success,” Agora colleague John Forde wrote. “His writing helped propel our (Ireland-based) International Living division to some of its most impressive growth in 20-odd years.”

“He spent a lot of his time traveling to various destinations, writing special reports on countries we were covering,” Agora CEO Myles Norin said. “His daughter was doing some mission work (in Zambia) and he went to visit her for the holidays there.”

“We have always had a fondness for minstrels, misfits and lost causes,” Hickling colleague Bill Bonner wrote. “At one time or another, Thom was probably all those things. He also had a wonderful habit of being around when you needed him.”

Prior to moving to Baltimore in 1997, Thom was co-publisher with Cathy of Expression, a non-denominational monthly Christian newspaper based in Crafton.

The paper was a spinoff of WPLW-AM 1590, a Christian radio station owned by Thom’s parents, Dolores Hickling and the late Bob Hickling. WPLW was sold in 1998 to Michael Horvath, who revived its original WZUM callsign and moved it to studios in West Mifflin.

“Thom was very thoughtful, very kind and compassionate,” Horvath said. “He was a very genuine person in many ways. And that’s a relatively scarce commodity today.”

“Everything I do professionally today is a result of what Thom did in my life,” said Capanna, a self-employed Web site designer who also posted www.thomhickling.com Wednesday. “Thom was just a very good friend. Regardless of where he was at, he always made a point to write to me.”

Norin said Hickling was able to make more friends in his 81⁄2 years there than some people could make in a lifetime.

“He and Tom Green were the two giants of originality and innovation in the Christian community of greater Pittsburgh,” said Ron Chavis, until recently nighttime host at WLSW-FM 103.9 in Scottdale.

“It’s all such a shock. It hasn’t settled in with me yet. He was a great guy. Anytime anyone put anyone down before Thom, Thom would take that other person’s shortcomings and put them on to himself. I noticed him do that to a number of people.”
Chavis knew the Hicklings for more than two decades, meeting them as they performed at a coffeehouse at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in McKeesport and he did a contemporary Christian music program on WEDO-AM 810.

The couple performed extensively during their marriage. A clip of Thom and Cathy from an Allegheny County Fair can be seen in Rick Sebak’s 2000 WQED-13 documentary “Things That Aren’t There Anymore.”

“He reminds me of a Michael Kelly Blanchard song,” said Chavis, who later worked with the Hicklings at WPLW. “He was dropped from the list, for his beauty was missed, yet his heart sang in spite of the pain.”

Forde found a Bob Dylan lyric appropriate: “It’s for myself and my friends my stories are sung. But the time ain’t tall, yet on time you depend ... And no word is possessed by no special friend. And though the line is cut, it ain’t quite the end, I’ll just bid farewell till we meet again.”

Funeral arrangements were incomplete at presstime.