Veteran journalist and journalism educator John Heckathorn died Wednesday morning at Straub Clinic & Hospital after suffering a heart attack Christmas morning at his home in Kalama Valley. He was 65.
Heckathorn had been in Straub’s intensive care unit since Christmas and never regained consciousness, said his wife, Barbara Heckathorn.
Heckathorn had separate stints as editor for sister publications Hawaii magazine and Honolulu magazine, where he continued to write a popular food column.
In the fall, Heckathorn joined the journalism faculty at Hawaii Pacific University, where he embraced the concepts of modern-day journalism using social media tools, Barbara Heckathorn said.
"One of his talents was teaching and developing young people," she said. "And he just loved gadgets and new technology. He loved Facebook. He loved to blog. He embraced all the new media. At home, he was our in-house IT guy. He could do anything with technology."
In the 1980s, Heckathorn was known as "the dining critic" in Hawaii, said A. Kam Napier, who worked for Heckathorn at Honolulu magazine and succeeded him as editor.
Heckathorn also was known for a booming laugh and upbeat, gregarious personality.
"He definitely had a big presence," Napier said. "You knew when he was in the room with his strong voice and that laugh."
John Gene Heckathorn was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1946, and raised in the northern California town of Orinda.
He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, in 1968 and went on to earn a doctorate in English at the University of Pennsylvania.
"He always wanted to be a writer because he loved books and it made him want to write," said his wife, who is a spokeswoman for Hawaiian Electric Co.
Heckathorn arrived in Hawaii in 1976 as an assistant professor in the University of Hawaii’s English department, where he trained a generation of journalists who took his expository writing classes to hone their skills, Barbara Heckathorn said.
He had freelanced some articles for Honolulu magazine at the time and was later hired as a full-time staff member, en route to becoming editor from 1993 to 2005.
"He was a great editor — tough but fair," Napier said. "He really knew how to help writers find out what was working and what was not working with their writing and how to make it better."
It helped Heckathorn’s credibility among his staff that he continued to report and write on a range of subjects — and experimented with different writing forms — while editing the magazine.
"The writers all knew that here was someone doing what they were trying to do — write good pieces on deadline," Napier said.
Heckathorn edited Ron Jacobs’ copy for eight years at the magazine, where Jacobs referred to his friend and boss as "Heckster."
Heckathorn "was one of the millions who found their way here to sample paradise and stayed to live and write about the people, places and pilikia he discovered along the way," Jacobs wrote in an email to the Star-Advertiser on Wednesday. "… ‘Heckster’ (as I always called him for 35 years) was an onolicious guy whose wisdom and friendship I treasured and who taught me when to end a sentence."
Over the years, Heckathorn appeared on radio and television and wrote for several national and island-based publications, including a weekly column in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
But he developed a following chronicling the birth and evolution of Hawaii Regional Cuisine.
"People would say, ‘What a great job! He gets to write about food,’" Napier said. "But he really took it seriously, as work, as a job. He never stopped learning about food and dining and restaurants. He would crack the books and learn about new cuisine and new cooking techniques. He put a lot of homework into each piece. He had a tremendous work ethic and that’s what he responded to about restaurants. He really admired and respected people who can succeed and be excellent at what they do under the pressures of long hours."
In the kitchen himself, Heckathorn always strived to prepare a better meal for those around him.
"Showing love to him was about preparing food for other people," his wife said. "He would prepare a wonderful meal and taste it and say, ‘I think I can make this better next time.’ He always said that."
In a Christmas email this year, Heckathorn apologized for sending a digital holiday greeting and began with, "If it makes you feel better, think of it as printed out on green paper and arriving in your mailbox with a Joy to the World stamp."
He was excited about teaching again and was unfazed by his newest class of students.
"If you haven’t been on a college campus lately, it might come as a shock," he wrote. "This year’s entering class of freshmen have never lived without cellphones, Internet and texting, have never seen dial phones, typewriters or vinyl records, don’t know George Bush’s daddy was also president, and were born 28 years after the Vietnam War ended. One of my students came to class, opened up his Macbook Pro, heard Steve Jobs had died and asked, ‘Who’s Steve Jobs?’
"It’s odd to be turned into a living history lesson, but rather fun in its own way," Heckathorn wrote.
Besides his wife, Heckathorn is survived by daughters Jennifer DeGuzman of Brooklyn, Paige, who works for U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye in Washington, D.C., and Mallory, who teaches first grade at Pearl City Elementary School; and younger brothers Peter of Florida and Alex of Oregon.
Services are pending.
