Saturday, July 05, 2003
By Dennis B. Roddy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Tom Gibb, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter who roamed the mountains of Pennsylvania chronicling the extraordinary lives of ordinary people, died yesterday, two weeks after a heart attack. He was 49. Mr. Gibb was stricken on June 19 after attending a national convention of political cartoonists held in Pittsburgh. Family members said he never fully regained consciousness and later suffered organ failure. Gregarious, unpretentious and dogged, Mr. Gibb churned out stories day after day, reporting from his home base in Blair County but ranging throughout the state's center, filing dispatches on prominent trials and local antics and often focusing on events at his alma mater, Penn State University. With notepad in hand, Post-Gazette reporter Tom Gibb listens to U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Johnstown, speak on Primary Election Night on May 21, 2002. (V.W.H. Campbell Jr., Post-Gazette)

Mr. Gibb was in Somerset County on Sept. 11, 2001, and filed riveting dispatches from the crash scene of United Flight 93, whose passengers had risen up in a battle to thwart terrorist hijackers who seized the plane.

Last July, Mr. Gibb was one of the main reporters covering the rescue of nine miners trapped hundreds of feet below ground in Quecreek, Somerset County.

With his gentle manner and broad sense of humor, Mr. Gibb was able to reach into the minds of people who might never have considered speaking to a reporter. After the miners were pulled out of the Quecreek mine last year, Mr. Gibb landed several exclusive interviews merely by being willing to listen.

"We've lost a person of depth and a journalist of range," said Executive Editor David M. Shribman. "We and his family are the poorer, but so, too, is everybody who reads the Post-Gazette day by day."

Colleagues remembered Mr. Gibb as both hard-driving newsman and genuine friend.

"He had that rare ability to be first and be a nice guy at the same time," said Post-Gazette staff writer Cindi Lash, who worked with Mr. Gibb at the Flight 93 site, on the Quecreek story and on several others.

When not anchoring coverage of major events outside Pittsburgh, Mr. Gibb focused on telling offbeat stories from ordinary life around the mountainous region between Pittsburgh and State College, occasionally scoring a national story simply by looking places others had not thought to go. When a federal court in California struck down the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, Mr. Gibb located, in central Pennsylvania, the retired minister whose sermon had inspired their insertion half a century earlier.

On other occasions he captured the comic travails of life in small towns. He told of the man who won a court ruling that allowed him to smoke naked on his back stoop, described the demise of the Ship of the Alleghenies, a kitsch tourist attraction on Route 30 that burned to the ground after 80 years of minor fame, and gave a lighthearted account of a piece of heavy construction equipment -- a bulldozer -- that was stolen and chased by police in Somerset County.

On a story many reporters might have overlooked, Mr. Gibb last month constructed this memorable opening paragraph: "Should the question arise, the answer is yes, indeed, you can get your arm hopelessly stuck in a prison toilet."

The tale of a prison inmate's ill-starred experiment ran inside the paper's B section -- a rare spot for a reporter whose work often appeared on the Post-Gazette's front page, but a small gem for browsers who often looked for a Gibb report, knowing it would amuse.

People in the newsroom also wondered where he found all those stories, where he found time to write them and how he wrote them so well.

Assistant Managing Editor Tom Birdsong said when he and other editors would tell reporters to "Do a 'Tom Gibb' on it," it meant taking a different approach and doing a good writing job on a story.

"I think anybody ... would agree that he was the hardest-working newspaper man any of us ever worked with," said Neil Rudel, sports editor of the Altoona Mirror, where Mr. Gibb worked in the early years of his career.

Mr. Gibb took up reporting as an afterthought. While earning a degree in English at Penn State, he worked as the political cartoonist for the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian.

A cartoon that showed a confident Gerald Ford astride an attack elephant -- but seated backward -- caught the attention of both national syndicates and the judges of the student cartoon contest of Sigma Delta Chi, the national society for journalists. Mr. Gibb won first place nationally for his work, but said he became a reporter because he felt cartooning was not really work.

At the Altoona Mirror, he captured several state awards for reporting and writing. Eventually, Mr. Gibb was named city editor and later managing editor of the paper before leaving in the 1990s.

During that time, Mr. Gibb's political cartoons -- which leveled shots equally at the foibles of liberals and conservatives -- were syndicated and carried around the nation.

At the same time, Mr. Gibb kept up a freelance connection with the Post-Gazette, finally joining the staff full time in 1998 and commencing to flood the news desk with reports from around the state's center. In a 10-year period, Mr. Gibb's byline appeared on more than 1,800 stories, more than 200 of them on the paper's front page.

In his Post-Gazette biography, Mr. Gibb listed among his accomplishments holding the Mirror newsroom together during the years the Thomson chain, the paper's former owners, slashed jobs and budgets while demanding a higher bottom line; winning five statewide press awards and a Golden Quill from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania; and getting his Toyota to last 300,000 miles.

Following his reporting as part of the Quecreek rescue coverage team, Mr. Gibb shared this year in a third Sigma Delta Chi award for special coverage. He was slated to receive that award this weekend.

Mr. Gibb, though, was more interested in readers' response to his stories.

"In the end," he told Birdsong, "the biggest honor is if a bit of a story is quoted over a breakfast table, becomes debate fodder at a lunch counter or stays with a reader -- maybe emotionally, maybe as news they need -- after the paper's been tucked in the recycling bin."

Mr. Gibb is survived by longtime companion Kay Stephens, a reporter at the Altoona Mirror; and two brothers, Herman and John, both of suburban Washington, D.C.