Phil Adams has provided this brief obituary
I was saddened to learn belatedly of the death last year at the age of 73 of Joe Naujokas, whom I counted as a good friend and club colleague when we were both keen young chess players.
As I recall, Joe was educated at Cardinal Langley Catholic Grammar School in Middleton, which produced several strong chess players in the late 1960s-early 1970s. Joe and I played for North Manchester CC for a short while around 1970, before both joining Oldham CC.
Joe was good company and we often travelled together to weekend county matches in his car. In those days it was not uncommon for us to travel for a county match to, say Matlock, and enjoy a good pub lunch and a pint before the start of play!
Joe was a strong county-level player (190-ish “in the old money”). His style of play was generally sound and positional, although as Black he specialised for some time in a couple of sharp lines of the Sicilian, namely the Nimzowitsch 2…Nf6 and the Loewenthal 2…Nc6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 e5 5 Nb5 a6 6 Nd6+ Bxd6 7 Qxd6 Qf6.
Joe seems to have given up chess in the mid-1990s, possibly due to the pressures of his work as an IT consultant and we gradually lost touch, to my regret.