While some television stars shine brightly behind the scenes, their contributions to the industry are no less impactful.
Such was the case with Price Hicks, the Television Academy Foundation’s director of Education Programs & Services (EPS) from March 1985 to January 2007. Hicks passed away on May 10, at 98, of age-related causes.
Under Hicks’s oversight, the Foundation’s annual summer student internship and College Television Awards programs blossomed — with more intern categories and higher stipends for the former and more awards categories for the latter. She also created the College Awards Festival to showcase award-winning filmmakers. Hicks also instituted (and, later, expanded) the annual Faculty Seminar, now called the Media Educators Conference. Both the internship and faculty programs offer participants immersive learning experiences in the television industry.
During Hicks’s nearly 22-year tenure, more than 1,000 students and almost 400 faculty members benefited from Foundation programs.
"I would hear the way Price talked to the incoming interns, when they met with her for orientation, and get them so excited about what it was that they were going to be doing," recalls Nancy Robinson, the current director of the internship program. "She let them know that she would be available — that we would all be available to them — to help answer any questions and make any connections."
Robinson adds that Hicks was an advocate for both faculty and college students. "She would do her yearly college tour in the fall, where she would go out and speak at schools, to drum up interest in our programs. She taught me to be fearless when it came to making industry connections that could benefit our programs. She was so passionate about everything that we do, and that really rubbed off on me. And she was an early supporter of the underdog — it wasn’t just about seeing students from big film schools make it, it was anybody from any part of the country."
Hicks came to the Foundation after spending 14 years at Los Angeles’s local public broadcasting station KCET. There, she won four Los Angeles Area Emmy awards as a producer.
The Alabama native had other talents as well: In 2014, she published the book Thursday’s Child and Other Stories. This collection of seven short stories centered on growing up in a small Alabama town during the 1930s and ‘40s. As a young woman, Hicks designed her own clothes — including her wedding dress.
On the day of her college graduation, she married Paul Hicks, who would become a computer systems architect. (He died of cancer in 1991.) They are survived by two daughters: Pamela, a retired opera singer and voice teacher, and Leslie, an actress with Broadway and regional theater credits.
Photo by: Invision/Phil McCarten/Mathew Imaging
"My mom was a very different kind of mother, because she was a career woman, from the time we were in junior high," Pamela says. "She became a minor celebrity. She was [among] that first wave of women to be producers with their own shows."
One of the news programs that Hicks produced was the Emmy-winning Citywatchers, a weekly hour-long show on local issues, places and events.
"She was a strong, tough, fierce woman, and she could be very funny and charming," her daughter says. "She went to a women's college in Alabama by choice, and was able to do things that she never would have gotten to do had she attended a coed college — such as be president of the student body, or hang lights [for school theater shows]. They never would have let a girl go up there."
According to her other daughter, Leslie, Hicks carried that influence into her post-college life.
"I think my mom's determination was to do what she wanted to do and be what she wanted to be," Leslie says. "She was one of the women in that generation who paved the way. My mom had this inner life energy in her, this inner life force," Leslie adds, “and she put that in the world.”
One person who noticed that force in action is 1987 Foundation alum Stephen Toback, the first Foundation intern in Sound, who later designed the computer animation systems for such series as Dexter’s Laboratory and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. Upon learning of Hicks’s passing, he posted a heartfelt tribute on LinkedIn:
"Even long after the formal internships ended, Price never stopped being a resource, a cheerleader and a trusted advisor to the alumni she so proudly championed," Toback wrote. "She kept in touch, offering career advice and personal encouragement whenever it was needed."
He continued: "Price’s brilliance, kindness and unshakable belief in young talent changed the trajectory of countless lives. Her influence ripples across the television landscape through the people she guided, believed in and fought for. The shows we’ve made, the stories we’ve told and the voices we’ve elevated are, in part, thanks to her.
“She was one of a kind, and she will be deeply missed.”
