Ruth Ashton Taylor Dies: First Female Television Newscaster In Los Angeles Was 101

Ruth Ashton Taylor, a pioneer as the first female television newscaster in Los Angeles and one of the first in the country, died Thursday in Northern California. She was 101.

Taylor had a 50-year career in journalism and earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Among the honors she received in acknowledgment of her decades-long career was a Lifetime Achievement Emmy.

Born in Long Beach in 1922, she graduated from Scripps College in Claremont and Columbia University for graduate school.

Taylor was hired to join a CBS documentary team led by Edward R. Murrow. She returned to Los Angeles in 1951 and was hired as the West Coast’s first female television reporter at KNXT, now KCBS.

She left journalism for a short time in the late 1950s before returning to KNXT in 1962, where she spent the rest of her career before retiring in 1989.

After retiring from KCBS, Taylor continued to work on retainer for the broadcaster into the 1990s.

Taylor is survived by her daughters Susan, Sadie and Laurel Conklin, her stepson John Taylor, a grandson and granddaughter-in-law and a great-grandson. No memorial plans have been revealed.