Ruth Ashton Taylor, the first female newscaster to work in television on the West Coast, has died. She was 101 years old.
Taylor was born in Long Beach in 1922 and worked in radio and television news for more than 50 years. She anchored for CBS Los Angeles in 1951, when the station was known as KNXT.
“The most important thing that happened to me in the early part of my life was when Ed Murrow gave me an opportunity to do a documentary,” Ashton Taylor told KCBS in 2008, recounting the moment that she became the only female member of Murrow’s documentary team in New York.
She was hired by KNXT to cover The Woman’s Angle and started doing features and interviews with celebrities and presidents. Ashton Taylor left the station for a brief time in 1958, but returned in 1962 for The Ruth and Pat Show, which she co-hosted with comedian Pat Buttram for about a year.
She exclusively worked in television after 1966 as a general assignment reporter and as co-host of a weekend news interview show. She retired in 1989 but continued as an occasional contributor, covering stories in the Sacramento area into her seventies.
“I remember how she was always fighting to break the then-conventional role of every female reporter: to cover the ‘women’s angle’ for every story,” her former CBS colleague Joe Saltzman, now a professor at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, wrote on Facebook. “She won the fight and became one of the best broadcast reporters in local news history.”
Ashton Taylor received the Governors Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 1982 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1990.