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.
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.
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. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on June 24, 1916 under the name Osborn Louisiana Roux Goforth, Junior., he had difficult childhood. Throughout his life, Jay Nelson Tuck was a strong-willed man guided by his moral convictions.
During World 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.
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 racially charged murder trial of the Scottsboro Boys in Florida. As a television critic in the 1960s, Tuck authored the column “On the Air” daily for the New York Post. His sharp-tongued opinions became a major force in the East Coast media of the time.
He was a prominent critic of the McCarthy Era.
Known for his humor, he also contributed cartoon ideas and satires to the work of his journalist colleagues, for example at the humoristic Yuk Yuk Department of the Post. of Hamburg, Germany.
