Ruth Ashton Taylor, the trailblazing journalist who was the first female TV reporter on the West Coast and an inspiration to generations of women covering serious news, has died. She was 101.
Ashton Taylor died Thursday in San Rafael, California, her daughter Laurel Conklin told The Hollywood Reporter.
After getting her start at CBS Radio alongside Edward R. Murrow in the 1940s, Ashton Taylor returned to her native Los Angeles and, in 1951, became the first woman on the West Coast to work in television news when she took a job with KNXT-TV (now KCBS).
Ashton Taylor exited in 1958 to work as a college public information officer but came back to the station in 1962 to join a program produced by TV personality Ralph Story and to co-host The Ruth and Pat Show on the radio with comedian Pat Buttram (Mr. Haney on Green Acres) for about a year.
Ashton Taylor turned exclusively to television in 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 70s.
“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.
Ruth Ashton was born in Los Angeles on April 20, 1922. She graduated from Long Beach Polytechnic High School and Scripps College in Claremont, California, then earned her master’s degree from the Columbia Journalism School in 1944.
She quickly landed a job as a news writer at CBS Radio alongside original members of a documentary unit led by the legendary Murrow and made it on the air in 1949 despite the fact that management, she said, “just didn’t like those squeaky voices.”
One of her favorite interviews, she noted, was with Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Glenn Seaborg for a piece on atomic science.
Ashton Taylor was married twice; her second husband was a colleague, camera operator Jack Taylor, whom she wed in 1968. Survivors include her daughters, Laurel and Susan; her grandson, Damon; and her great-grandson, Demare.
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