Ruth Ashton Taylor

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Ruth Ashton Taylor is a fifty year veteran in broadcasting, a career connected from its beginning to CBS News. This has become remarkable in an industry which today uses thirteen-week employment contracts for most on-air employees. This also became remarkable in an industry that, as Taylor observes, does not particularly encourage women to stay in the business past the age of fifty.

At seventy Taylor is still in broadcasting. After her 1989 retirement from KCBS-TV in Los Angeles, she remained on retainer, reporting an occasional story and continuing her weekend "Newsmakers" program. In 1990, she moved from the Los Angeles area to Lincoln, California, a small town forty miles northeast of Sacramento. This arrangement puts her on call for occasional reports from the state capitol, but requests for reports were infrequent in 1992, and she is readying herself to truly retire.

Retirement doesn't seem possible for someone whose career has demanded constant movement--whether she was covering the fires and floods of Los Angeles or the mercurial moves of California politics. Even in the serene Lincoln countryside, she is planning her next projects--to change the landscaping on the six-and-a-half acres surrounding her hilltop house, to play the piano and, perhaps, to write about her career. Her quick movements reflect someone who is accustomed to constant deadlines. Her wide-eyed concentration represents an ability to focus quickly on a subject. "I've been created by my work," she says.

Taylor's career began in 1944, when she graduated from New York's Columbia University with a master's degree in journalism and was hired immediately by CBS. In the era of Edward R. Murrow, Douglas Edwards, and Robert Trout, Ruth Ashton was at the center of CBS radio's most notable decade. (She added the name Taylor later, when she married her second husband). Women weren't allowed on the air because CBS management "just didn't like those squeaky voices," she says, but Ashton welcomed the chance to write news copy for her male colleagues.

In 1951, when she returned to her native Los Angeles to take a job at KNXT (now KCBS)-TV, she became the first woman on the West Coast to work in television news. She was hired for the "woman's angle," she says, but that requirement didn't restrict her because she reasoned that women were interested in the same subjects that interested men.

Through most of the 1950s, Ashton worked simultaneously in radio and TV until the pace became too hectic and she left in 1958 to work as a college public information officer. She returned to KNXT in 1962 to join a program produced by Ralph Story called "Storyline" and she also co-hosted "The Ruth and Pat Show" radio show with comedian Pat Buttram for a year. In 1966 she turned exclusively to television, where she has worked primarily as a general assignment reporter and, more recently, also as co-host of the weekend news interview show, "Newsmakers." The many honors she has collected during her career include the prestigious Governors Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the Los Angeles Sigma Delta Chi 1981 Journalist of the Year Award, and the Diamond Achievement Award from Women in Communications, a special recognition created for the group's seventy-fifth anniversary in 1984. In 1990, Los Angeles honored her with a Star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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