He wore it well.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: Frank Jr recalls Derick Daniels

Frank Jr. called to tell me Derick had died. He thought I'd want to know. The obituary that ran in The Miami Herald the next day began: "Derick Daniels, a distinguished newspaper editor and executive whose penchant for fine living and even finer women boded him well as president of Playboy Enterprises during the late 1970s ..." Lung cancer. He was 76.

Frank's daddy and Derick's were sons of Josephus Daniels, who bought The News & Observer in 1894. Derick, who grew up in D.C., never worked in Raleigh. After graduating from Carolina, he was a reporter in St. Pete and Atlanta, then won fame at the Herald and Detroit Free Press, which won a Pulitzer when he was executive editor for its coverage of the '67 riots. The Knight chain, which owned both papers, made him its first corporate vice president for news in 1973.

Three years later, Hugh Hefner hired Derick to save his foundering empire. "He was attracted to Playboy because it had the three things in the world he enjoyed the most: drinking, gambling and women," Frank told the N & O, which the family sold in 1995. Married five times, making and spending several fortunes, Derick January Daniels lived large--flamboyant was a word that stuck to him like ink to newsprint. Charming was another.

I first met him in '86, after he left Playboy. He was doing some consulting for Frank, evaluating some of the News and Observer Publishing Co.'s other properties. One was BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA, which it had bought the previous year, shortly before I started here. I had returned to North Carolina after five years at the Herald to work for a rival publishing venture that was going to make me rich. Instead, it made me unemployed. I landed, if not on my feet then at least on my knees, at the magazine. To my mind, those were dark days. As a city editor at the Herald, I had managed dozens of reporters and editors. Here I managed myself--No. 2 man on a three-person editorial staff.

Then Derick breezed into town, "an aging wunderkind and hired...