Ruth Ashton Taylor, the first female television newscaster in Los Angeles and one of the first in the country, died Thursday in Northern California, her family announced. She was 101.
A Los Angeles-area native, Taylor trailblazed a 50-year career in journalism, during which she interviewed the likes of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, worked with industry icons including Edward R. Murrow and earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“She was certainly that woman out there doing something that none of us saw other women doing at the time,” Susan Conklin, one of Taylor’s daughters, said in an interview with The Times.
Taylor was born in Long Beach in 1922 and graduated from Long Beach Polytechnic High School and Scripps College in Claremont before heading east to attend Columbia University for graduate school.
