Ruth Ashton Taylor, early radio and TV newswoman, dies at 101

Ruth Ashton Taylorwho was the only woman in CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow's postwar radio documentary unit and was widely believed to be the first female news anchor in Los Angeles, died on January 11 in San Rafael, California. She was 101.

Her daughter Laurel Conklin confirmed the death at an assisted living facility.

“Ruth showed what women could do,” Liz Mitchell, who worked with Ms. Taylor as a production assistant and writer at KNXT-TV in Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview. “She could cover small events and big events – all different topics – and nothing held her back.”

As one of the few women in TV news in the 1940s and 1950s, Ms. Taylor faced institutional biases about what to cover and what her reporting should sound and look like.

At CBS, Ms. Taylor heard that women should not be heard on the air because their voices were too “squeaky,” she once said.

In 1951, she was hired in Los Angeles by KTSL-TV (later called KNXT and KCBS) to present the women's side of the news in a half-hour nightly show.

Shortly after her TV assignment began, she auditioned for KNX Radio to produce and deliver a daily five-minute afternoon report from what was promoted as “the women's news desk.”

“It was so new that everyone thought it was the odd one out,” she told a Washington Press Club Foundation interviewer in 1992. “Hey, look at the monkey's performance! We've never seen one like this before. ''

The topics she reported on included cars, airplanes and fashion.

“Taylor says she always approached her stories the way she wanted,” wrote Suzanne Haibach Marteney her master's thesis about Ms. Taylor before California State University, Northridge, in 1986. “She justified her stance by saying she had to represent the woman's opinion because it was her opinion and of course she was a woman.”

Ms. Taylor left KTSL (now renamed KNXT) around 1952, but she continued her women's radio reporting for several years, while also hosting “The Ruth Ashton Show,” a half-hour news and features program, also on KNX. She resigned in 1959 after a confrontation with management when she refused to cover events such as department store openings, she told Ms. Marteney.

She temporarily left journalism in 1960, when she took a job as a special projects editor at the Claremont Colleges. After three years she returned to radio.

Ruth Arlene Montoya was born on April 20, 1922 in Long Beach, California. Her mother, Flora Ashton, sold pastries in Nebraska and later opened Sis Ashton's Cafe in Signal Hill, California, after her husband, Julian Montoya, who worked for a bank, left the family when Ruth was four. She soon adopted the surname Ashton.

Ruth graduated from Scripps College in Claremont, California, with a bachelor's degree in American History. In 1944, she earned a master's degree from Columbia Journalism School while writing news part-time for CBS.

After she graduated, CBS hired her full-time, and she worked for correspondent Robert Trout and wrote for the program “Feature Story.” Mr. Murrow encouraged her to find a subject that fascinated her for a documentary and she chose atomic science.

Her reporting trips for “The Sunny Side of the Atom” took her to numerous places, including Princeton, NJ, where Albert Einstein, who had ignored her letters requesting an interview, lived and worked.

A cooperative taxi driver took her to Einstein's house, where he was walking nearby. She got out of the car and came to him.

“I said, 'Good morning, Doctor Einstein,'” she recalled when interviewed by the Washington Press Club Foundation. “'I'm Ruth Ashton.'”

“Ah!” he said, “The announcer lady.”

He agreed to an interview (although she didn't tape him), and they talked “about things that meant so much to me, what the future of the world is or isn't.”

The documentary was produced by CBS in 1947 as a non-fiction drama, in which actors played various roles. Agnes Moorehead played Mrs. Ashton.

In a review for The New York Times, RW Stewart called it “an eloquent call for broader popular understanding of a clearly crucial issue.”

Mrs. Taylor remained with CBS until 1949. Eager to return home to Los Angeles, she took a PR job at KNX, which later evolved into an on-air news position.

After her time at Claremont Colleges, Ms. Taylor returned to KNX in 1963. She hosted an infotainment show with comedy actor Pat Buttram, a future cast member of the sitcom “Green Acres,” and reported for an afternoon news and features program. , “Storyline.”

In 1966, she was hired as the host of the Saturday afternoon TV news on KNXT, making her the first woman known to hold such a position in Los Angeles.

“Everyone came out of their booths to watch her,” said Ms. Mitchell, who recalled watching the first broadcast in the newsroom. “The response wasn't, 'Holy cow, why is a woman anchoring the news?' but 'Wow, a woman.'”

But many of the calls that came in after that first broadcast on the channel were about her hair.

“Here was a woman who had just done something monumental and this was all they had to say,” Jess Marlow, a local broadcaster, told The Sacramento Bee in 1990. “She was just dejected.”

After about a year of working as an anchor, she focused on reporting, but still had to deal with outdated views about women in journalism.

“Ruth Ashton Proves Girls Can Succeed in News,” read the headline of an article about her in The Valley News of Van Nuys, California, in 1968.

Joe Saltzman, a former senior producer at KNXT, said by phone, “If they sent a man to cover a criminal trial, they would send her to talk to the grieving girlfriend. She said, “I want to be treated like any other reporter. I'm going to report on fires and bank robberies.' And in the end she won that battle.”

She covered political conventions, the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, California state politics, flooding, school board meetings and entertainment.

Connie Chung, an anchor on KNXT, said by phone that although Ms. Taylor was not well known nationally, “Everyone in Southern California knew that every woman who followed her followed in her footsteps. She paved the way for all of us.”

Ms. Chung added that after she became co-anchor of the “CBS Evening News” with Dan Rather in 1993, “Ruth wrote letters to me when the old goats at CBS were giving me a hard time in New York that dumped on them and encouraged me.

Ms. Taylor retired in 1989 but continued to freelance for several years as a political reporter and moderator of the channel's “Meet the Press”-style program, “Newsmakers.”

In addition to her daughter, Laurel Conklin, Mrs. Taylor is survived by another daughter, Susan Conklin; a stepson, John Taylor; a grandson and a great-grandson. Her marriage to Ed Conklin, a news writer, and Jack Taylor, a cameraman, ended in divorce.

Ms. Taylor received the Television Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1982 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1990.

“Mom, I finally made my mark,” she said during the ceremony. “It's right here on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in cement.”