After suffering intermittent palpitations, increasing weakness and shortness of breath, which required a brief hospitalization in June, Dr. Thomas Hale, Jr. died peacefully of coronary heart disease on July 22, 2026 in his longtime Loudonville, New York residence under the loving care of his wife and family, and with the support of The Community Hospice. He was 88.
Tom was born at Yale New Haven Hospital in October, 1937, where his father Dr. Thomas Hale was a surgical resident. Shortly afterwards, with his mother Mary, the family moved to Taos, New Mexico where Dr. Hale was the surgeon for the Pueblo community and the family lived in the home of the Taos Pueblo chief. Young Tommy grew up loving the mountains and the freedom of the wild open spaces.
During the war years, Dr. Hale (Sr.) was called upon to leave his surgical practice to take up the position of Director and Executive Vice President of the Albany Medical Center Hospital, where he served from 1942 to 1968. Young Tommy grew up in Slingerlands, New York, attending the elementary school there, and then the Albany Academy, until he moved on for senior high school to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
There, during a stroll on a woodland path, Tom had an epiphany hard to describe in words where he clearly felt that God visited him and challenged his self-centered life and political ambitions to follow in the footsteps of his maternal grandfather James Magee, a Congressman from Pennsylvania. An observant Latin professor noticed the profound change in his student and invited him to a local church where he picked up a brochure about the opening of the United Mission to Nepal (UMN). At that time, for a population of eight million people, the country had only 50 doctors and 8 nurses; the mission was calling for medical professionals to rise up and take their skills and the Gospel of Jesus Christ to this remote Hindu kingdom. Tom immediately understood this as God’s calling for his life.
To pursue a pre-medical college education, Tom drove southwest where he enrolled in the University of Arizona in Tucson. After three undergraduate years reveling in the rugged landscapes similar to those he had experienced in early childhood, he entered Albany Medical College of Union University in Albany, New York. On the very first day he met his wife-to-be Cynthia over a body at the cadaver table. Acknowledging their shared commitment to Christian service abroad, they promptly fell in love; they married the next year on December 26, 1959 and then continued their training, Tom in surgery and Cynthia in pediatrics. During this period, they spent a summer in Thailand on Tom’s fellowship from Smith, Kline & French for study and service at a mission hospital in Thailand. This and other international experiences further confirmed the Hales’ calling to serve as followers of Jesus Christ in places of dire medical need.
The couple’s first son Thomas III was born in 1965, followed by Christopher Dicran in 1968, during which time Dr. Hale, Jr. was serving at the very busy 12th Evacuation Army Hospital in Cu Chi, Vietnam. A second year in the Army moved the family to the Southwest to Sandia Base Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Following the resolution of his youthful encounter with God, Dr. Hale, with his wife Cynthia and their two sons, aged four and one, were sent by their home church in Loudonville and the Bible & Medical Missionary Fellowship (now known as Interserve USA) to serve in the UMN’s newly opened hospital at Amp Pipal, a small mountainside settlement in the then roadless foothills of the Himalayas. In a demonstration of his love for his wife Cynthia, an accomplished concert pianist, Dr. Tom hiked three hours down the mountain to meet the plane carrying a small piano found in Kathmandu and guided the team of carriers up the mountain to their two-bedroom cottage at the hospital.
After 12 years as a successful surgeon in Amp Pipal, where Dr. Hale trained local youth to assist him in the Operating Room and OPD, God’s call morphed in another direction and Tom wrote a trilogy of “Adventures in Nepal,” the first volume of which, Don’t Let the Goats Eat the Loquat Trees, was published in 1986. The trilogy and other later books cast light on Dr. Hale’s compassionate character, his caring for humanity in need, his humor and his stalwart faith in Jesus Christ.
In 1985, several Nepali church leaders approached Dr. Tom to write a verse-by-verse commentary on the New Testament in the Nepali language. Tirtha Dhakal, a Nepali Christian, turned aside from a secure government job to become Dr. Tom’s assistant to ensure that the completed text would reflect the Nepali communication style. Dr. Dudley Henderson, a dentist with many years of service in Nepal, created a Nepali font by which Tirtha could type the text using a standard keyboard. Dr. Stephen Thorson, also a missionary doctor in Nepal, provided the General Articles for the volume, which was published by the Nepal Bible Society in Kathmandu in 1993. The two doctors then also wrote the commentary in English, primarily so that it could be translated into other languages. The Applied New Testament Commentary has now been translated into more than thirty languages. Much later, Dr. Hale and Dr. Thorson also wrote The Applied Old Testament Commentary in English; this has been translated into Chinese and Vietnamese.
During brief periods in the USA, the team of Doctors Tom and Cynthia Hale had traveled under the auspices of the Christian Medical & Dental Society (now CMDA) to speak in medical schools in the USA to motivate emerging physicians to use their skills in places of great need. When they returned from Nepal in 1996 to care for aging parents, they accepted the call from Interserve to travel broadly on behalf of the need for medical professionals to serve in a similar capacity in needy places around the world. During this period, the Doctors Hale joined Dr. David Topazian for a tour of fundraising dinner parties for Project MedSend. Dr. Tom issued the call to service and Dr. Cynthia provided the musical interlude. This helped MedSend to raise grants that would pay off the educational loans of hundreds healthcare professionals, thus freeing them to quickly leave the lure of an affluent career in America to serve in places of much greater need.
Dr. Tom never sought the spotlight; he always wanted credit to be given only to God. Nevertheless, the following awards are worthy of mention: the Phillips Academy’s Alumni Award for Humanitarian Service in 1974, Albany Medical College’s Humanitarian Alumnus Award in 1996, alongside his wife Dr. Cynthia Hale, the Excellence in Media organization’s International Angel Award in 1998 for The Applied New Testament Commentary, and the Christian Medical & Dental Society’s Servant of Christ Award in 1998 (again, with his wife Cynthia.)
Using their fluency in Nepali, the Doctors Hale were instrumental in forming the International Friendship Team of their church in Loudonville to help them in the resettlement of more than 500 refugees of Nepali ethnicity who arrived in Albany, New York from 2008 onwards. In full retirement in Loudonville, Tom enjoyed soccer tournaments on TV and lived to see the winners of the 2026 World Cup. He loved classical music, often singing along as Cynthia played hymns or Chopin Nocturnes, and listening at high volume to recordings of romantic music, and especially operas by his favorite composers, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner.
Dr. Hale is survived by his wife Cynthia, their sons Thomas (Becki) of Loudonville, New York, and Christopher (Miranda Stone) of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, a sister Polly (Peter) of Berlin, Massachusetts, a sister Jenifer of Keene, New York, grandsons Thomas (Julie) of New York, New York, and Gregory (Caitlin) of La Mirada, California, and many nieces and nephews.
A service of Thanksgiving and Celebration of Dr. Hale’s life will take place on August 8, 2026 at 1 p.m. at the Loudonville Community Church, 374 Loudon Road, Loudonville, New York where he served as an Elder from 2007 – 2012. The service will be live-streamed on the church’s Youtube channel. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations be made to the Loudonville Community Church or to Interserve USA, P.O. Box 418, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania 19082.
https://www.youtube.com/@loudonvillecommunitychurch https://lcchurch.churchcenter.com/givinghttps://www.interserveusa.org/donate/
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