Daniel North died at the age of 89 on July 11, 2024, in Jersey City, NJ, after a brave and long struggle against lymphoma and Parkinson’s disease. He was a gifted writer and editor, a lover of nature, committed to his community, and a devoted husband, father and grandfather.
Dan was born in New York City on June 6, 1935. Soon thereafter, his parents, Joseph and Helen North, moved their family to the Mount Airy community in Croton-on-Hudson, NY, joining other socialist and communist writers, artists, and activists like themselves.
Dan stood for social justice at an early age. In his elementary school cafeteria, a bully once told him, “I’m not sitting with any Jews.” Young Danny, Jewish by ancestry but raised in an atheist home, stood up and replied as he walked away, “Then, you’re not sitting with me.” A few years later, he wrote a letter to The New Masses, a paper edited by his father, demanding living wages and benefits for professional athletes.
Dan entered Columbia University at age 16 through an experimental Ford Foundation scholarship. While there, he worked on the Columbia student newspaper, The Spectator. He graduated in 1955 with a major in anthropology. Apparently, the government was aware that his parents were communists. He was given a permanent military deferment because, first he had “a close and continuing relationship” with his mother and second, he had “a close and continuing relationship” with his father.
After college, he hitchhiked and drove around the United States for four years, working mostly in construction. Once, an African American truck driver took him to his grandmother’s house in Chester, PA. Dan went in first to ask if it was okay to bring the driver into the house. He said that this was the only time that his grandmother ever got angry at him; she was offended that he thought he had to ask permission to bring a Black person into her house.
Eventually, he earned a master’s degree in anthropology from San Francisco State University and worked as a reporter for the daily San Francisco Examiner. To get his next newspaper job, he wrote 100 letters to newspapers across the country, hand-typing on a manual typewriter using two fingers. He got a job at the Daily Eagle in Claremont, New Hampshire. His editor there, Nelson Bryant, ultimately became the New York Times outdoors reporter and a family friend, regaling Dan’s sons with feats such as setting his chest hairs on fire.
While in Claremont, he married Margaret Stoughton, a teacher, and they eventually returned to his childhood home in Croton with their two young sons, Dave and Sam. Dan had a brief stint teaching history in Highland Falls, NY, to sons of military officers from nearby West Point. He said that even if he included some of his progressive views in his lessons, his students parroted back whatever he said!
In 1968, after responding to a help-wanted ad in The New York Times, he began working for 1199, the New York healthcare union, as a reporter for 1199 News, the union publication chronicling the struggles, victories, and everyday lives of healthcare workers in the region. Later, he became editor. He worked for the union full-time until his retirement in 1999, and part-time afterward. His goal for the union’s publication was to focus on the work, the lives and the views of union members. While at the union, Dan helped write and edit Not for Bread Alone (Cornell University 2002), a memoir by Moe Foner, an 1199 leader.
Dan remarried in 1992 to Tara Levy, a labor lawyer, and settled in Jersey City, NJ, near the Hudson River. They frequently enjoyed long bike rides in the countryside, stopping to look at birds on their way. They repeated their honeymoon in rural France during each of many summers.
In retirement, Dan pursued two of his great loves, being in the natural world and writing. He frequently walked in the Hudson Highlands, in Liberty State Park and in western New Jersey. He wrote two books about his observations on his walks, The Slow Walker (Black Trumpet Press 2011), and November Sun (Black Trumpet Press 2017). He contributed a column titled The Slow Walker to the Putnam Highlands Audubon Society Newsletter. He also taught journalism for fifteen years to working adults at the Center for Labor Education at The City College of New York.
He volunteered for many years at Hudson Cradle in Jersey City, a facility for boarder babies, where he held homeless infants. He also devoted much of his time to supporting people in rehabilitation programs in Jersey City.
Ten years ago, Dan diagnosed himself with Parkinson’s disease based on what he read on the Internet, and he turned out to be right. Five years later, he was briefly hospitalized for shortness of breath. As he was discharged, while walking out the door, a physician’s assistant suggested, based on his scans, that he undergo testing for lymphoma. Ultimately, Dan elected to be treated for cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering in Basking Ridge, NJ, near some of his favorite walks. He was treated by all of the staff at MSK with extraordinary kindness and intelligence. After his options for treatment ended, he eventually died in a hospice in Jersey City near his home. During much of his illness, he received kind care from home healthcare workers employed by a New Jersey agency.
Dan was smart, kind and curious, especially about other people. He forgave freely. He will be missed by his friends, community, and family.
In addition to his wife and sons, Dan is survived by his sisters Susan North of Rome, Italy, and Nora North of New York City, and his grandchildren Sage and Theo North, and Tess and Jack Lundgardh.
