When Daniel Fiduccia decided to become an Eagle Scout, people told him it would be too difficult. Diagnosed in infancy with a kidney malignancy, he had undergone a series of intense radiation treatments that left him with a disabling spinal curvature and a weakened immune system. Few expected the young cancer survivor to complete the required one-mile swim. “It almost killed him,” remembers Fiduccia’s longtime friend, Rick Santina. “But he did it.”
From his coordinating role in a constitutional-rights case at the Stanford Daily to his later advocacy for the disabled, “he was a fighter,” recalls Daily colleague Jim Wascher, ’75. “He didn’t just handle adversity; he took it head-on.”
Fiduccia, who died on April 6, lost his final struggle to an aggressive form of abdominal cancer. He was 44.
Raised in Chicago and in Palm Desert, Calif., Fiduccia arrived on the Farm in 1974 and quickly took an interest in a legal dispute raging between the Daily and the Palo Alto Police Department. The dispute arose two years earlier when the police entered the offices of the independent student newspaper to search for photos of a violent clash between officers and demonstrators at Stanford Medical Center. Fiduccia learned so much about the case that he became a one-man information clearinghouse, effectively serving as the Daily’s in-house liaison with lawyers, outside media and students who had been involved in the 1972 incident. In its landmark 1978 decision, Zurcher vs. the Stanford Daily, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the paper, affirming the right of police to search third parties who are not criminal suspects.
A classics and English major, Fiduccia worked as a paralegal after graduation, helping to protect the rights of cancer survivors and people with disabilities. For a while he turned to freelance investigative reporting, seeking to draw attention to gaps in disability legislation. As one of the nation’s oldest survivors of childhood cancer, he went on to inspire scores of sick children through his work with the Childhood Cancer Ombudsman Program, guiding families through complex medical and legal matters. “With Daniel on your arm, things got done,” Santina says. “He viewed himself as a soldier and a warrior.”
Fiduccia’s professional and personal lives became entwined in 1996 when he married Barbara Waxman, a prominent advocate for the disabled, whose own chronic illness, spinal muscular dystrophy, kept her connected to a ventilator and confined to a wheelchair. Together, in a high-profile battle, they persuaded the Social Security Administration to drop its “marriage penalty” restricting aid for couples with disabilities.
Barbara died of respiratory failure at their Cupertino home on April 24, just weeks after her husband succumbed to his cancer. Fiduccia is survived by his mother, Christine.
