‘Brilliant’ former Star-Telegram, Express-News copy editor dies after positive COVID test
Daniel Puckett grew up with a book almost always in between his hands. He was even caught at a ridiculously young age reading a book about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
“He was the most brilliant person I knew,” his cousin Karen Tumulty said on Friday.
It wasn’t much of a surprise that when he went off to college, Puckett worked for the student newspaper and that he eventually earned a degree in journalism from Texas A&M (after studying Russian at Georgetown University and the University of Texas). It was even less of a surprise when he became a copy editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the 1980s.
Puckett, 65, died on Thanksgiving, three days after he was released from a San Antonio hospital with a positive COVID-19 test and a craving for taco salad.
“We spent three days celebrating his release,” Tumulty, a Washington Post columnist, said. “It’s just such a shock. He said he was feeling quite good.”
Puckett was remembered across social media on Friday as journalists and former colleagues began to hear about his death. They called him meticulous, funny, hardworking and remarkable.
Dallas Morning News multiplatform editor Frank Christlieb said he looked up to Puckett when Puckett joined The Battalion student newspaper at Texas A&M.
“He was extremely smart,” Christlieb said. “He was so sharp and was just beloved by staff members and he just automatically became one of the gang.”
Denise Richter worked with Puckett three times, at The Battalion, Star-Telegram and St. Petersburg Times.
“It was in the pre-Google era and he seemed to know a little bit about everything,” she said. “I’ve never seen anybody like that. He pushed you to become better without doing it in an annoying manner.”
Richter laughed a lot when she talked about her friendship with Puckett. Most of her best memories from college and work, she said, include him.
“Sometimes you’d just hear him swearing in Russian,” she said.
Bonnie Berkowitz, a Washington Post graphics reporter and former Star-Telegram employee, said Puckett helped “teach a lot of raw young journalists how to be professionals.”
“I still hear him in my head when I write a terrible sentence (and then I try again),” she wrote on Twitter.
Robert Philpot, a former Star-Telegram reporter, wrote on Facebook that Puckett, who was his first boss at the paper, was brilliant.
“His brilliance informed his copy editing but also went well beyond it,” Philpot wrote. “He could be difficult; he was also often very funny. And he’s the reason I try as hard as I can to find an answer myself before I ask someone else a question.”
Puckett worked at the Star-Telegram from 1987 to 1991, when bustling copy desks were the backbone of newspapers across the country. He shaped reporters as they came in and out of the paper before moving to Florida to work for the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). After 15 years there, he became homesick for Texas and took a job at the San Antonio Express-News.
He left the newspaper business in 2010.
“Danny just loved copy editing and language so much and he wanted it to be precise and right,” Tumulty said.
But Puckett’s interests in life went well beyond reading and editing. He loved languages and could speak Russian and Spanish. And he loved music. He played keyboard for “The Huns,” an underground punk rock band that ruled Austin around 1979. He later played for Radio Free Europe.
It’s not clear how Puckett got COVID-19. His husband, Rafael A. Estevez Dominguez, was also sick with the virus, but his symptoms were less severe, Tumulty said.
The couple had recently celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary.
This story was originally published November 27, 2020 at 2:48 PM.
