News of a Lifetime

by

Lauren Roberts

The face of Los Angeles news.

Mr. Los Angeles.

Either of those monikers would fit perfectly Stan Chambers, a man whose name may not be unfamiliar to those who have not resided in southern California at any time during the last half of the twentieth century. But for those who have, he is the unmistakable icon of news  in a city that seems to change its television reporters as often as most of us change our underwear. Chambers is the kind of reporter you no longer see on television news programs, but thank goodness he was around during many of the most important stories of the twentieth century. For me and for a lot of people, Chambers was the face of Los Angeles news during the city’s explosive growth years.

Though I no longer have a television—I got rid of it 18 or 19 years ago—I grew up with the evening news. I remember Chambers very well. He was the one you trusted to bring you the correct story, a stable, calm, unglamorous and hardworking television reporter at the station that was and continues to “be” the news home of Los Angeles. KTLA’s News At 10: Sixty Years with Stan Chambers by Stan Chambers with Lynn Price  (Behler Publications; $14.95) is a memoir—what he terms a “personal perspective”—of those years and the stories he covered. It’s a fascinating ride through six decades of news with a reporter who not only covered the events, but understood them.

Los Angeles, when KTLA began broadcasting in 1947, was just beginning its major post-war growth. Many GIs who had passed through on their way to or from the Pacific liked it enough to settle down. Homes could be bought in the San Fernando valley for no money down at a cost of $12,000, and the interest on those loans was a mere four percent. Television was a rarity in homes, and where they were ten-inch screens were the norm. This was the world that Stan Chambers entered from the classrooms of USC.

Newscasts were about 15 minutes long. They were also, by necessity, live. The only cameras were studio ones, massive, awkward, decidedly non-portable. No cameramen, editors, soundmen or reporters were part of it. The news program was a combination of pictures from movie newsreels and voices from radio. Music was scored over some of the stories. Slowly, though, innovations appeared. Some were inventions. Some were disasters.

The story is less well known today, probably even among newscasters, but at the time and for a long time afterward it could be summed up in one word: Kathy. It was April 1949, and Chambers was emceeing a luncheon, when he got a call to rush to San Marino where a little girl had fallen into a deep well the night before. 

New businesses are fortunate in having no standard to follow. Innovations and inventions are often the result of necessity. So it was with this station which found its perfect innovator in a man who simply solved the problems he saw and in doing so created much of what has since become standard news gathering. That man was Klaus Landsberg, manager of KTLA and Chambers’ boss.

“Klaus showed an innate understanding of his audience as well,” Chambers writes, “which was highlighted in 1949 when he dispatched a live television crew to the scene of a dramatic rescue attempt, something that had never been done before.” That occurred less than a month after the station had gone commercial. It wasn’t Kathy, but an explosion at a downtown electroplating company that destroyed many of the nearby buildings as well. “For the first time ever, the station broadcast the news report live. Little did we realize that the face of TV news had just changed forever.”

It also changed KTLA. Awards and accolades arrived, and this was at the same time that the number of television sets in homes grew. People began tuning in to the station in large numbers, and so when Kathy fell into the abandoned well Landsberg decided to cover it as a live event.

Workers were frantically digging, trying to cut a hole in the pipe to get to her while dirt and rock continuously fell in on them. Chambers and another reporter began covering the story. Word soon spread. It actually became an international story with papers and radio stations offering updates throughout the weekend using KTLA’s coverage. The entire broadcast, live and with no interruptions, lasted twenty-seven and a half hours with both reporters there the entire time. That event, writes Chambers, “has long been recognized as the first important news event of the commercial television era.”

Interestingly, Chambers’ career still had a number of derailings before finding his niche as a news reporter—co-hosting City At Night (a program that visited interesting places around Los Angeles) and Frosty Frolics (an ice skating show). But he never lost sight of his goal, and more powerful innovations of Landsberg’s helped him get there.

In 1951, ratings for the station were high. Much of that was due to Klaus who felt strongly that important news should be televised and if that meant throwing out the programming and commercials to do it then it would be done. Atomic bomb tests, the Tehachapi earthquake of 1952 (a major one at 7.8 on the Richter Scale), the return of the Marines from Korea, the pairing of presidential election reporting with musical entertainment to keep viewers from turning to stations with the ability to provide full coverage, even wrestling—all of these and more helped to cement in the public’s mind the dominance of KTLA. It was a blow to Chambers when Landsberg died of cancer in 1956. Two years later, his mentor and former program director died of the same disease as did the news director.

Though the deaths rocked Chambers hard, they also opened up a new possibility—going on air as the new anchorman, albeit a temporary one. Soon changes at a rival station—changes that set a pattern for future news operations—brought another change to Chambers’ life. He was moved out of news and into game shows and then became the station’s “dependable and talented back-up,” called in to do whatever was needed. By 1963, the news department had begun a re-building of itself under a well-known “power behind the scenes.” Though a powerful news operation was created, the lack of an equally fast jump in ratings did not occur. Said executive felt miffed, returned to his old job and Chambers, who had felt himself floating around the edges of the news operations team for many years suddenly found himself as news director. 

The sixties were the era of change, of course, and that change is generally considered to have started with the Kennedy assassination in 1963. For Chambers, it was “the dividing line between the same old world of the fifties and the turbulent times that followed.” Though he found the decade’s stories professionally newsworthy, he also found them to be personally bizarre. The violence became ubiquitous, intimidation routine. One of the most dramatic changes at KTLA in those years was the addition of a newsman named George Putnam to the news operations team.

For those raised in southern California and especially for those of us who identified far more closely with the leftist philosophies of the student generation, Putnam is a name that brings shivers to the spine. Flamboyant and fierce as well as conservative to the point of being to the right of Ronald Reagan, Putnam was a popular reporter (with some) who did try to right what he viewed as wrongs. His addition to the station was an excellent move, but it lasted only two years when he received a generous offer to move. With his departure, Chambers began to explore the  roles of important news vs. visual news. This is, of course, a center point of television news. If it’s visual, is it news? If it’s news, need it be visual? And this is where Chambers and I part ways in our views. “Pictures are the vital element in a television newscast,” he argues. “It is important to take advantage of the visual elements of the television screen.

Perhaps the most disturbing of the stories Chambers relates is one that didn’t just take advantage of visual elements but required them—that of the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the verdict of the Rodney King trial. At least it seems so to me. I am one of the unquestionably few people who has never seen any images—video or still—from the original beating or from the riots or their aftermath. So his words convey a powerful story that to me must surely match the horror of the video. It cannot be any small irony that the original video was given to KTLA, to Stan Chambers. Though he does not mention it, I wondered while reading about it if he ever entertained any doubts about his decision. His regret for the damage it permanently caused the city is deep, but there is no hint that he would have done otherwise. His recollection of the event is so vivid (and parts of it new) that even those for whom the images of the riots are familiar will surely find meaning in the description here because it comes from the personal feelings of a reporter who had to hold his agony in check while trying to maintain the absolute stance of professionalism.

More than 22,000 stories define Stan Chambers career. Only a few can be told in the two hundred pages that comprise this charismatic book. KTLA’s News At 10 is a thoughtful, insightful, occasionally humorous look of a public career and its consequences for the reported, the reporter and the community. Reporters, newscasters and news anchors have published books before. But this different because its author is different. One man. One station. One community. But a whole lotta stories that will interest anyone with an interest in news.

Note: This book will not be officially released to bookstores until early February. However, it is currently available either through Behler or KTLA.


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, nearly 1,000 bookmarks and approximately 1,200 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) and Book Publicists of Southern California as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. You can reach her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it