Daniel North died at age 89 on July 11, 2024, in Jersey City, New Jersey.
He was born in Brooklyn. Soon thereafter his parents, Joseph and Helen North, moved to the Mount Airy community in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, joining other socialist and communist writers, artists, and activists like themselves.
Dan followed Joseph’s career path as a journalist. He won a Ford Foundation scholarship to Columbia University and graduated at age 19 with a major in Russian and Russian Literature. He served as editor of the Columbia student newspaper, The Spectator. Due to his student activism, and his refusal to disavow his parents’ political activity during the McCarthy period, Daniel was “blacklisted” from many journalist jobs and university graduate programs.
Eventually, he got a master’s degree in American History from Columbia. He went on to become a beat reporter for the Daily Eagle in Claremont, New Hampshire, and the San Francisco Examiner. While in New Hampshire, he married Margaret Stoughton; they eventually returned to his childhood home in Croton with their two young boys.
Initially, Dan had a brief stint teaching history at O’Neill High School in Highland Falls, before joining the 1199 Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union magazine staff. He worked as a reporter and then became editor of 1199 News, the union publication chronicling the struggles, victories and everyday life of thousands of nurses and health care workers in the region. Dan helped write and edit Not for Bread Alone, a memoir by Moe Foner, a labor leader with 1199.
Dan remarried to Tara Levy and settled in Jersey City. In retirement he pursued two of his great loves: being in the natural world and writing. He frequently traveled to wander the trails of the Hudson Highlands and northwestern New Jersey. He was inquisitive and observant of nature and took great advantage of the spiritual healing that the natural world has to offer. He wrote and published two books, The Slow Walker and November Sun, both of which contain musings and observations from his walks. For some years he contributed a column “The Slow Walker” to the Putnam Highlands Audubon Society newsletter.
He was active at his local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and selflessly sponsored several fellow recovering alcoholics. He volunteered at Hudson Cradle in Jersey City, where he would sit and hold infants that were separated from their struggling inner-city mothers.
Dan was an open-minded listener. He was warm, engaging and naturally curious about the life stories of people he’d meet. He loved singing at the piano, good humor and dogs. He will be greatly missed by his friends and family.
He is predeceased by his wife, Margaret North. He leaves behind his wife, Tara Levy. He is survived by his sisters, Susan North (Bob Bender) and Nora North; his niece, Elena North-Kelly (Robert Flaherty), his grandniece, Violet North Flaherty and his grandnephew, Roman Kelly Flaherty; his sons, David North and Samuel North; his daughters-in-law, Martha North and Julie Overskei; his grandchildren, Sage and Theo North, Jack Lundgardh, Tess Lundgardh and her wife, Megan Lundgardh, and a great-granddaughter, Aurelia Lundgardh.
Thank you very much. I knew Danny from the time I was a camper and he was a counselor at Higgley Hill. For a while, his parents and mine were fellow comrades. He was smart, charming and helped to make the world a better place.
I very much appreciate this obituary of Dan North. It reminds me of some of the many reasons he was so well-loved and will be long-remembered.