Ruth Ashton Taylor, Los Angeles' first female television host and one of the first in the country, died Thursday in Northern California, her family announced. She was 101 years old.
Originally from the Los Angeles area, Taylor pioneered a 50-year journalism career, during which she interviewed the likes of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, worked with industry icons like Edward R. Murrow, and earned a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“She was certainly that woman who did something that none of us saw other women do 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 studies.
Almost immediately after graduating from Columbia, Taylor was hired to join a CBS documentary team led by Murrow, Conklin said.
Despite being in her early 20s at the time, Taylor proved to be an intrepid reporter.
“He was trying to do a paper on the peacetime uses of nuclear energy and he went and found Dr. Einstein,” Conklin said.
Taylor had been trying to contact Einstein for some time before traveling unannounced to Princeton University, where he worked.
Taylor bumped into Einstein while walking down a hill.
She introduced herself.
“He said, 'Oh! The Broadcasting Lady,'” Taylor recalled in a series of interviews conducted for the Washington Press Club Foundation.
Taylor returned to Los Angeles in 1951 and was hired as the first West Coast television reporter at KNXT, now KCBS.
He left journalism for a short time in the late 1950s before returning to KNXT in 1962, where he spent the rest of his career before retiring in 1989.
Taylor covered a variety of topics during her career and hosted a variety of segments and shows.
During one fire, Taylor recalled, a Los Angeles County fire chief said, “This is the first time a woman has interviewed me on a fire line.”
“But not the last one,” Taylor replied.
After officially retiring from KCBS, Taylor continued working as a retainer for the station into the 1990s.
Among the honors he received in recognition of his decades-long career was a Lifetime Achievement Emmy.
Despite Taylor's demanding work schedule, Conklin said her mother was always there for her family.
“The job was very important to her,” Conklin said. “She worked hard, but I never felt like she forgot that she had children. “We continue to come first for her.”
“She just showed up as a mother… and then she showed up as a grandmother and then she showed up as a great-grandmother,” Conklin added.
Taylor is survived by her daughters Susan, Sadie and Laurel Conklin, her stepson John Taylor, a grandson, a granddaughter-in-law and a great-grandson.
