Always a journalist and writer, Wendy Tucker was already working for two Nebraska newspapers, the McCook Daily Gazette and the Fremont Guide and Tribune, while still in high school and continuing into college. After graduating from the University of Nebraska School of Journalism—where she served as the university’s Daily Nebraskan news editor and also completed a summer internship in New Mexico at The Albuquerque Tribune—Tucker, raised in the Cornhusker State, worked as a Miami Herald intern before moving to New York City and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She received a master’s degree with High Honors from that institution. Tucker then worked as a reporter and photographer, again for the Herald, and eventually became that newspaper’s Boca Raton (Florida) bureau chief. She later served as a reporter in Charleston, South Carolina, at the News and Courier, then moved in the early 1970s with her Navy husband to Key West, Florida, joining the staff of the Key West Citizen as a reporter and photographer. She rose to assistant managing editor of the Citizen. Tucker was also a correspondent for United Press International (UPI), the Associated Press (AP), and Reuters, and broke the wire service news internationally of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha discovery in 1985. She then worked for the City of Key West, ultimately in an assistant city planner role, before her retirement in the early 1990s. Meeting Mel Fisher in summer 1964 during her Herald internship, and again later in Key West, Wendy became a close friend of the family; she conducted and transcribed more than one hundred hours of interviews with Mel Fisher, now collected in this book and using the late adventurer’s own words. Tucker worked closely with the Fisher family to provide in-depth color to his life and their collective experience.
TODAY’S THE DAY! AND WENDY TUCKER