(CNN) -- Garrick Utley, who worked as a globetrotting foreign correspondent during the flush decades of network news, has died at age 74 of prostate cancer, his wife of 40 years said Friday. 

"He has been fighting -- as you always call it -- prostate cancer for two years," Gertje Utley said. "He had a very, very rare, very aggressive kind." 

He died Thursday night at his home in New York overlooking Central Park, she said. 

"He was really the old kind of journalist," she said of her husband, who reported from more than 75 countries. "He was the old kind of trenchcoat-clad journalist who wrote his own copy -- always wrote his own copy." 

During his early years at NBC, the network did not scrimp on devoting resources to newsgathering, she said. "That's what he always talked about: The early days were the lucky days." 

Born in Chicago in 1939 to a radio and television news couple, Clifton and Frayn Utley, Garrick graduated from Carleton College and studied at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, before winning a Fulbright Scholarship and moving to Berlin to study East-West relations, she said. 

In 1963, NBC's John Chancellor -- who had worked for Utley's father -- hired him as an office assistant in the network's bureau in Brussels, Belgium, she said. 

After NBC News's "Huntley-Brinkley Report" expanded that year from 15 minutes to half an hour, the network was looking for more material, and Utley caught the eye of the brass. "He covered a couple of stories for the Common Market, as it was called then," she said of what is now the European Economic Community, and did some work in London. 
Did he have parents?
 Utley's father