It was fitting that the Greensburg Salem Golden Lions presented the game ball from their 700th football victory to “Huddie” Kaufman on Saturday, just hours after the game.

The retired Tribune-Review sports editor who spent a lifetime chronicling and promoting youth sports was among their most ardent supporters. Kaufman had spent months ginning up anticipation for last Friday’s win.

“If he had been writing his life story and penning the final chapter, I don’t think anything could have made him happier,” said David Zilli, Greensburg Salem High School principal.

Zilli accompanied the team, coach David Keefer and several school officials to Kaufman’s Northmont Avenue home, where they presented him the ball.

Kaufman, who was in hospice care, managed to smile as Keefer handed him the ball.

Howard “Huddie” Kaufman died at home on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2020, surrounded by his wife of 69 years, Doris D. Levin Kaufman, and their family.

He was 92.

The son of Alexander F. and Mary Gordon Kaufman, he was born Feb. 11, 1928.

He retired from the Greensburg Tribune-Review in 1994 after nearly 40 years at the paper.

“Huddie was a community institution,” said Westmoreland County Common Pleas Judge John Driscoll, who worked with him on the annual Westmoreland Scholar Athlete banquet.

Driscoll said Kaufman, who raised funds and promoted local recreation projects, was genuinely interested in the kids they honored.

“He always asked questions and wanted to know about them,” Driscoll said. “He cared. We’ve been doing the banquet for 64 years now, and Huddie was on the original board that founded it.”

Kaufman’s youngest son, Bill, said he remembers wondering why his dad wasn’t interested in covering major league sports, a beat many sports writers considered the apex of their trade.

“I finally came to understand that his true love was scholastic sports,” Bill said. “He knew the coaches, their families and kids. One of the greatest things that came to us as a result of his work was all the people my dad knew and associated with. He knew just about everyone.”

Kaufman, always upbeat, learned to live with polio as a youth. Although the disease left him with a limp, it didn’t dampen his love of sports.

He put his love of youth sports, his dedication to kids and his skill as a wordsmith to work when he was hired at the Tribune-Review in 1957 and began a long career as one of the region’s most beloved sports editors.

He and Wash Gjebre, a retired journalist who was hired at the Trib that same year, became fast friends. Gjebre said Kaufman graciously showed him the ropes when the newsman who knew nothing of sports writing had to double as a sports writer during high school football season.

“He kept me from embarrassing myself many times over,” Gjebre said.

Kaufman had an encyclopedic knowledge of local high school sports that he gladly shared, said George Beidler, retired Tribune-Review executive editor.

“He was a terrific person,” Beidler said. “If you had a kid in sports and Huddie wrote about your child, he always treated the kid with dignity and gentleness.”

Bill Kaufman said his dad passed that wisdom on to his own children.

“One of the most important lessons he passed along was, ‘Don’t be the parent in the stands screaming at the kids,’” he said. “Just be there for the kids. Support the kids.”

Zilli, who was a teacher and athletic director before becoming principal, said he came to revere Kaufman in the early 1980s when he played high school football.

“I knew him then as ‘Mr. Kaufman,’ a gentleman who wrote about us. I had him on a pedestal. I always looked up to him because he made you famous. When I became athletic director he became ‘Huddie,’ my friend. We spent a lot of time together. Despite the 40 year span in ages, we became friends,” Zilli said choking back tears.

Tribune-Review sports writer Joe Rutter remembers Kaufman as a role model and mentor who helped when he began covering high school sports for the Trib as a college student.

“He was such a gentleman. He made me a better writer,” Rutter said. “… Huddie also realized we were dealing with high school kids, not professionals. He would give credit to the other side rather than making a kid look bad.”

Lynn Jobe, who was Greensburg Salem’s first female athletic director, said she became good friends with Kaufman when he accompanied school officials on long van trips to away games.

“He helped raise funds for our training center and he opened a lot of doors for me,” she said. “He was a dear friend.”

Retired Tribune-Review sports editor Mike Dudurich, who went to work for Kaufman in 1981, said he and his late wife, Ann, eventually became good friends with Kaufman and his wife, Doris. As time went on the Kaufmans, who by then had three grown children, became like an extra set of grandparents to his daughter, Cassie.

“They were just great, caring people,” Dudurich said. “Everyone knew Huddie and he knew everyone. I think the whole WPIAL knew him.”

Trib sports writer Paul Schofield said Kaufman had a talent for bringing people together.

He gathered his many friends in scholastic sports — coaches, trainers, athletic directors and sports writers — together once a month to reminisce about sports history and talk about local sports, community needs. The group of about three dozen met monthly at DeNunzio’s until the pandemic hit, Schofield said.

Trib Total Media Executive Editor Susan McFarland, who began working with Kaufman in the early 1980s, said the sports editor “always made you feel like you were the most important person in the room.”

And he stayed in touch.

“Even though he had been retired for many years, he’d often call me to offer some interesting piece of trivia about Greensburg Salem or to give me a little jab about a story that we missed or typo in a story. It was all good-natured joking. It was just Huddie being Huddie.”

In addition to his wife, Doris, and son, Bill, Kaufman is survived by his daughter, Becky Belefski, of Denver, Colo.; son, Jeff Kaufman, Plymouth, Mass.; eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are being finalized by Kepple-Graft Funeral Home in Greensburg.

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