Daniel F. Cuff

 Daniel F. Cuff, a former reporter and editor at The New York Times and other newspapers, died in Lee, Mass., November 11, 2024, after a fight with cancer.  He was 91. 

 Dan was born in Springfield, Mass., and lived with his wife, Reneta, in New York City and Lee, where the Cuffs owned a second home. He graduated from Classical High School in Springfield, attended the University of Vermont and graduated from Boston University with a degree in English literature.  In sixth grade at Tapley Elementary School in Springfield he conceived and edited The Tapley Times, an experience that launched a journalism career that took him to The Springfield Daily News, The Holyoke Transcript, The Providence Journal, The Associated Press in New Haven and New York, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, where he worked from 1970 to 2009. Before he attended B.U., he was editor of the Fourth Infantry Division weekly newspaper in the Army in Germany. Some of the jobs he held before that: newspaper boy,  movie usher, shade-grown tobacco picker, taxi driver, city of Springfield laborer.  He met his wife, a fellow English major, at B.U. They graduated in 1959 and married that same year before a justice of the peace in Boston. This year they celebrated their 65th anniversary. They moved to Springfield after college, where Dan embarked on his newspaper career as a reporter, while his wife worked at Merriam-Webster dictionary in Springfield. 

 Then followed itinerant moves through New England and New York. From a job at The Associated Press in New Haven, during which he covered the Connecticut legislature in Hartford and wrote news scripts for Connecticut broadcast stations, he was then transferred to The Associated Press headquarters at 50 Rockefeller Plaza in New York.

 The city was the big time for journalism, but the A.P. job turned out to be the opposite of glamorous — working midnight to 8 a.m. with three other editors in an otherwise deserted newsroom. But the work was important, as the skeleton crew ran the worldwide A.P. overnight operation, editing the foreign and national news onto the main A wire for morning papers and broadcasters throughout the nation.  The odd hours, though, disagreed with him and he soon moved to the dayside, working in the A.P. Bureau covering New York City. Later he moved to The Wall Street Journal copy desk, where he wrote the column-long news summary on page one, and then wangled a tryout on the foreign copy desk of The New York Times, which hired him in 1970. He retired after 39 years in 2009.  Most of his work at The Times was as a reporter and copy editor for the business news desk covering the steel and other industries. He also wrote a daily feature highlighting business people in the news. 

 One of his early assignments on the foreign copy desk was on the hush-hush Pentagon Papers project in which The Times exposed the Government’s deceit in covering up the true facts of the Vietnam War. Preparing the 7,000-page report in secret resulted in a bounty of overtime pay, and, together with his wife’s income as a social worker at Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx,  helped to make a down payment on a second home in the Berkshires.   The Cuffs took to city life — plays and ballet, jogging in Central Park,  apartment living, getting around by subway — but by this time they had three children and needed an escape, especially in summer. The house in the Berkshires, in a development called Leisure Lee on a beautiful body of water called Goose Pond, filled the bill. 

 The children — daughter Reneta and sons Daniel and David — grew up swimming and boating in the summer and downhill skiing in the winter. Their father last skied, with his daughter, in 2022 at age 88. He was also a jogger, a gardener, a DIYer, a maintainer of an old Bay Liner boat and an old Chrysler convertible, among other pursuits. 

 Besides his wife Reneta (Morgan), he leaves his daughter, Reneta, of Albany, N.Y., sons Daniel of New York City and Becket, MA, and David of Brooklyn, N.Y.  

 His son Daniel and his wife, Maki (Mitsui), have two children, Elizabeth and Daniel. David and his wife, Connie (Loo), have sons Patrick and Jackson.  His parents were Daniel and Mary (Flynn) and his sisters, all deceased, were Helen, Ruth and Mary. He also leaves Ruth’s children, Jean Gasperini of Cupertino, CA, Mary Fortin of San Jose, CA, Susan Jackson of Corpus Christi, TX, and Michael Douglas of Redland, FL.  

 At age 88 he developed Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare skin cancer on his leg, in addition to a bout with bladder cancer. He received treatment at Fairview Hospital in Great Barrington, MA, Phelps Cancer Center of Pittsfield, Berkshire Medical Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, Dana-Farber of Boston, and Hospice of the Berkshires. Thanks 
to all! 

A memorial service will be held on Monday, November 18, 11AM at the Kelly Funeral Home in Lee. In lieu of flowers those wishing may make a donation to the Phelps Cancer Center in Pittsfield or Dana-Farber in Boston. Checks made out to either charity may be mailed in care of Kelly Funeral Home, 3 Main St., Lee, MA 01238.