Jay Nelson Tuck
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jay Nelson Tuck (1916–1985) was a journalist, television critic and president of The Newspaper Guild of New York City. He held reporting and editing posts at the New York World-Telegram and Sun, The New York Post and at Medical World News, a magazine of McGraw Hill.[1]
Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on June 24, 1916, under the name Osborn La Roux Goforth Jr., he had difficult childhood. His mother Natalie was a dancer with the Ziegfeld Follies in the Roaring Twenties, his father, Osborn Goforth, a salesman who abandoned the family. When his mother resumed her maiden name, Natalie Tuck, she renamed her son Jay Nelson Tuck. In 1928, Natalie went bankrupt and her young son was sent to the orphanage “Sheltering Arms”.[2]
Education
Despite childhood poverty, the young Tuck was admitted to the prestigious Lincoln School, associated with Columbia University, and later to Horace Mann School, an elite educational institution for the wealthy. His college studies at Columbia University in New York were interrupted by the Great Depression. Like millions of others, Tuck hitched rides on freight trains, shared campfires with the homeless and survived on Salvation Army soup. After two years, he was able to return and graduate from Columbia in 1938. He married Margaret Cox in New York and later had two sons, Travis Tuck and Jay Tuck.[citation needed]
Conscientious Objector in WW II
Throughout his life, Jay Nelson Tuck was a strong-willed man guided by his moral convictions. During World War II, he took a pacifist position. Refusing military service he became a conscientious objector and organized rallies for the pacifist movement. He was an outspoken leader of the War Resisters League and edited a monthly newspaper, The Conscientious Objector.
New York Post
Jay Nelson Tuck held reporting and editing posts at the World-Telegram and Sun and The New York Post. He was a strong believer in unions. Between 1950 and 1952, he co-founded the Newspaper Guild of New York, was elected its president and presided over a 10-week strike at the World Telegram and Sun. As investigative reporter for the New York Post, then a politically liberal newspaper, he covered the shooting of two defendants in the racially charged Groveland rape case (dubbed the "Little Scottsboro case" because of its resemblance to the notorious 1931 case in Alabama) by Sheriff Willis McCall in Florida. His reporting won Tuck the George Polk Award for distinguished journalism in 1952.[3][4]
