Tucker, Floyd A.

Floyd A. Tucker Jr. a former international vice president of the Newspaper Guild and a veteran Bay Area newsman, died Monday after battling a brain tumor for several months. He was 76. For 12 years until his retirement in 1997, Mr. Tucker served as the editor of the California Labor Federation's bulletin, which won several national awards during his tenure.

Mr. Tucker's newspaper career began in 1951 in Sacramento, when he started work as an office boy for United Press Associations, a news agency formed in the early 1900s. Mr. Tucker went on from there to work for six Northern California newspapers as a reporter or editor that included the Oakland Tribune..

 In the newsrooms of those papers, Mr. Tucker, a man with twinkling eyes and bushy eyebrows, eased the tensions of daily deadlines for his colleagues with his story-telling, his wit and his dry asides about life. He loved to tell yarns about the oddities of human nature, the characters he encountered in the newspaper business and trips he took to places like Santiago de Compostela in Spain and Machu Picchu in Peru.

 He was also known for surrendering to the tensions of approaching deadlines by rising out of his chair and raising his voice, bit by bit, until he was in a standing position in the final moments before deadline, calling loudly for a "copy boy!" in the days before they became known as "editorial assistants."

A two-term president of the San Francisco-Oakland Newspaper Guild, Mr. Tucker also served as an international vice president of the Newspaper Guild from 1979 to 1985.

Mr. Tucker was born March 11, 1926, in the Mendocino County town of Willits, the son of Floyd Tucker, a truck driver, and his wife, Nora. Mr. Tucker grew up in Sacramento, where he attended Christian Brothers High School. From 1944 to 1946, Mr. Tucker served in the Navy in the South Pacific. In 1950 he graduated from St. Mary's College in Moraga.  Floyd die September 30, 2002

In recent decades, Mr. Tucker lived in Oakland with his wife, Marilyn Tucker, a former Chronicle music critic. After his Sacramento job with United Press, during the 1950s Mr. Tucker worked as a reporter or copy editor at the Lodi News-Sentinel, Oroville Mercury, Vallejo Times Herald, San Francisco Call-Bulletin and New York World- Telegram.

 In the early 1960s he worked as a copy editor at the San Jose Mercury News and then at the Oakland Tribune, where he was a copy editor, women's page editor, assistant news editor and Sunday editor from 1961 to 1985. Because of his job on the women's page, friends sometimes called him "Mother Tucker."

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his children, Rebecca Tegenkamp of Clayton, Christopher Tucker of Spokane and Timothy Tucker of Oakland. He is also survived by a sister, Nora Anne Grassmeyer of Placerville, and three brothers, Fred and Jack Tucker, both of Sacramento, and Ray Tucker of Torrance.