Daniel W. Pucillo Jr., a manager for an import-export company, needed a way to reduce the work stress that he thought was giving him ulcers.
So one day in the early 1970s, Mr. Pucillo “closed the office door and put up a dart board,” said Don Torgersen, his brother-in-law.
He took to darts as he had few other activities. He won three national championships for dart throwing and traveled to several countries, including England and New Zealand, to compete professionally in tournaments.
“The darting circles know him,” Torgersen said. “He was a devastating darter like [former Cleveland Indians pitcher] Bob Feller threw a devastating fastball.”
Mr. Pucillo, 59, died Tuesday, Oct. 18, at his Chicago home of a heart attack, his family said.
He was born in Chicago. After his mother died when he was 14, his father moved to Florida and remarried. Mr. Pucillo and his younger brother and sister remained in Chicago, living for a time at their grandmother’s Northwest Side home and then in a series of children’s homes, where more than once caretakers tried to separate the siblings.
“He was the one who kept us together,” said his sister Kathleen Torgersen. “He was sort of the head of the family.”
He was drafted into the Army and stationed at Ft. Hood in central Texas for two years. After he left the military in 1968, he returned to Chicago and worked as a customs broker for Arthur J. Fritz & Co.
He quit after six years and bought Win-Sum Ski Shop, an outdoors store that sold ski equipment and camping gear and became the main outlet for dart supplies in Chicago, said his longtime girlfriend Lianne Fritz. He sold the shop, which was at 455 W. Armitage Ave. in Lincoln Park, in the early 1980s to a developer who tore it down and built condos, she said.
He began earning a living at darts, winning the American Darts Organization’s first national championship in 1979 for amassing the highest number of points on a circuit of tournaments around the country. He would be champion again in 1980 and 1981, said Sandi Cain, a past president of the organization.
Mr. Pucillo also joined U.S. teams competing at the World Darts Federation’s World Masters tournaments in 1979, 1980 and 1982.
The qualities that made him a great darter, his girlfriend said, were his meticulousness–he imported feathers from England and made sure each one was fastened “straight and true” to his darts–and his intense focus.
“He just had an amazing capacity to block things out and focus on that throw and guide that little arrow right to the spot,” she said.
James Askham, treasurer of Windy City Darters, said he bought his first set of darts from Mr. Pucillo’s store in 1974 and competed against Mr. Pucillo many times.
“He was a very fierce competitor; he didn’t like to lose,” Askham said. But when the match was over, Mr. Pucillo was jovial and friendly, he said.
Eventually the rigors of the competitive darts circuit wore on him. “He just got tired of living out of the suitcase,” his girlfriend said.
He then took up cooking and in the late 1990s he graduated with an associate’s degree in culinary arts from Chicago’s Kendall College, his girlfriend said. He collected hundreds of cookbooks and he would spend hours a day gleaning recipes from the Internet.
“I can’t tell you how many stacks of recipes there were here that he still hadn’t cataloged,” she said. “Food consumed him.”
In recent years, he volunteered at the Veterans Affairs’ Department Lakeside Clinic, passing out books and magazines to patients, his sister said.
Visitation will be held from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, followed by a 4 p.m. memorial service in Cooney Funeral Home, 3918 W. Irving Park Rd., Chicago.
