LITTLE ROCK — Longtime family physician Charles Hicks, who at 6 feet 8 inches tall often struggled to find clothes that fit, died Sunday at St. Vincent Doctors Hospital in Little Rock.
He was 75 and died of complications from bladder cancer. He had been working at a community health clinic in Wilmot until two weeks before his death, his son Keith Hicks said.
“Being a doctor was all he ever knew,” he said.
Charles Hicks had wanted to be a doctor since the sixth grade, his wife, Beth, said.
Johnny Price, the Monticello doctor who helped deliver him on Jan. 25, 1935, became Hicks’ partner in Monticelloin 1971, Beth Hicks said. Inspired by his grandfather, a doctor who died while he was young, Hicks graduated from Hendrix College in Conway in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.
He then attended what is now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, where he met nursing student Beth Boatright. They married in 1958 and had three children.
In the early 1960s, Hicks joined the Army and was stationed in South Carolina.With Hicks gone, residents in Hamburg suffered from his absence. So they petitioned the U.S. government to cut Hicks’ service short, and the government let him return to his medical practice early.
After his return in 1962, Hicks worked for himself or with partners in Hamburg; Drumright, Okla.; Monticello; and back to Hamburg. He liked the ebb and flow of small-town life, as generations passed through his office doors, and he cared for them all, said Keith Hicks, who pastors a small church outside Hamburg that is filled with congregants delivered by his father.
The promise of a salary and benefits such as paid vacation was one reason he decided more than 22 years ago to join the Wilmot office of Mainline Health Systems, a not-for-profit organization providing affordable medical and dental care to southeast Arkansas residents, his wife said.
Hicks loved to hunt and often took family members with him. “He took off the first week of deer-hunting season and the first and last weeks of duck season” every year, said Robbie Holiman, a nurse who worked with Hicks for 7 1 /2 years at the clinic.
But finding properly sized hunting gear, such as waders, proved to be a challenge because of Hicks’ height and size-14 feet. Hicks favored a Big & Tall store in Monticello, his son said.
His team at the Wilmot clinic, including Holiman, another nurse, an X-ray technician and a receptionist, “had trouble buying him Christmas gifts,” Holiman recalled.
Enjoying his presence, on other hand, came easily.
Hicks was “for the most part even-keeled, very willing to help and very willing to teach,” X-ray technician Joy Cunningham said.
“He coached us on everything from raising our children to the retirement plan we should have,” Holiman added. “He was as much a teacher and friend to us as he was doctor.”
Arkansas, Pages 17 on 02/17/2010