Derick Daniels, 76; Executive Revamped Playboy Enterprises

Derick Daniels, a newspaper and magazine executive who helped turn around financially troubled Playboy Enterprises in the late 1970s, has died. He was 76.

Daniels died Saturday in Miami of cancer.

Highly experienced in newspaper management, Daniels was brought into Playboy in 1976 as president and chief operating officer by company founder Hugh Hefner to correct problems made during rapid overexpansion.

“Playboy had simply outgrown its management and had to be brought from the horse-and-buggy era to the jet age,” Daniels told Business Week in 1980.

While deferring to Hefner in presenting the public face of the then Chicago-based company, Daniels efficiently set about pruning the inflated corporate staff and selling off unprofitable hotels, recording and movie-theater operations, and other properties. He also created an internal auditing department, expanded publishing operations, added casinos in Atlanta and London, and built up the core products of Playboy magazine and key clubs.

Another assignment, Daniels said, was to train Hefner’s daughter Christie to replace him as president, which she did in 1982.

“She’s ready, she’s ready,” Daniels told The Times when her appointment and his resignation were announced.

Then 53, Daniels later dabbled in small magazines, senior care centers, a Santa Fe restaurant and a Denver costume jewelry company.

Born in Washington, D.C., Daniels was the scion of a North Carolina publishing family that owned the Raleigh News & Observer and other newspapers. (Its papers were sold to McClatchy Co. in 1990 and 1995.) After graduation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Daniels began his career as a reporter, working at the Durham Herald, St. Petersburg Times and Atlanta Constitution.

Daniels joined the Miami Herald in 1955 and rose to city editor before taking the same post at the Detroit Free Press in 1961. Six years later he was named vice president and executive editor, and in 1973 became vice president of the Detroit-based Knight Newspapers Inc. (later Knight-Ridder).

Daniels is survived by his wife, Lee; two sons, Leigh and Scott; and two stepsons, Joseph and Dirk Wasserstrom.