This Newsman Makes News Himself After 40 Years at KTLA

Back in 1947, Stan Chambers had visions of becoming an attorney. But when he went to register at the USC Law School, the line was so long that he chucked the idea. He wound up going to work at KTLA-TV Channel 5 just a few months after it had gone on the air as the first commercial television station west of the Mississippi.

Since then, Chambers, 64, has reported, often live, on practically every momentous news event Los Angeles has experienced--from the 1949 Kathy Fiscus well tragedy to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to a movie set at 20th Century Fox, from the 1961 Bel-Air fire, the 1965 Watts riots and Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 to the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and the visit of Pope John Paul II in September.

Today, Chambers celebrates his 40th anniversary at KTLA.

In a business where news personalities routinely jump from station to station and city to city, surviving 40 consecutive years at the same station is, according to most observers, nothing short of incredible.

“My basic goal was to work in Los Angeles,” Chambers said. “And after a while I knew that I had a big Channel 5 stamped on my forehead and I didn’t think anyone else would take me with that big Channel 5.

“And here I’ve just become part of the tradition. Over the years the audience gets comfortable with you. We’ve been through a lot together.”

Some in the Channel 5 newsroom affectionately joke that there really have been four men playing the role of Stan Chambers, KTLA reporter, just as there were many dogs that played the role of Lassie. It’s their way of marveling that over the last 40 years, Chambers has probably covered more than 20,000 stories.

While many television reporters become jaded after a few years of covering murder after murder, fire after fire, Chambers’ unparalleled longevity is often credited to the fact that he has never lost the gusto that he brought to his work back in the early days, when every television broadcast was about as miraculous and exciting as sending a man to the moon.

“He’s survived because he’s the most adaptive person I’ve ever met,” said Jeff Wald, KTLA’s news director for the past six years. “He cares about his job and his profession, and even today he has more enthusiasm for his work than most kids just out of journalism school.”

When he started working at KTLA, Chambers pushed cameras around the studio and helped the chef on Channel 5’s cooking show. Soon, however, he became one of the station’s small stable of announcers--no one called them reporters back then--and he found himself improvising on the air, participating in such live shows as “Meet Me in Hollywood,” which featured interviews with people on the street, and “City at Night,” which brought the night-time world of newspapers, breweries and the Los Angeles harbor into people’s homes.

He hosted an ice-skating variety show called “Frosty Frolics,” anchored newscasts at all times of the day and night, and served as KTLA’s news director for seven years in the 1960s.

But the event that changed his life and secured his place in the history of L.A. television news occurred when 3-year-old Kathy Fiscus fell down a well shaft while playing in a field in San Marino. Klaus Landsberg, KTLA’s pioneering founder, rolled equipment to the field and, with Chambers and Bill Welch reporting everything they saw and heard, broadcast 27 1/2 hours of continuous live coverage of the ultimately unsuccessful rescue attempt.

“Up to that point television really was a toy,” Chambers said. “But here was the first time there were enough sets out there for a story to capture the attention of the entire community. People were watching for hours and hours in neighbor’s homes or out on street corners peering through store windows, and they became as emotionally involved in the story as we were.

“That was the first time anyone realized that television had this remarkable ability, and it was then that I decided that I really wanted to be in news.”

With its Kathy Fiscus coverage, KTLA revolutionized TV news and pioneered its long-standing tradition of broadcasting live whenever disaster befell the city. And the reporter who’s usually been on the scene for Channel 5 has been Chambers.

“What Stan represents, and the reason for his success,” said Dan Gingold, assistant professor of broadcast journalism at USC and the director of KNXT-TV Channel 2’s (now KCBS-TV) first newscast in the 1950s, “is the truest form of basic journalism--simply reporting events that are occurring in our time. And there was never any guile. He didn’t politicize, didn’t editorialize. There was a kind of likable, believable quality in him that people trusted.”

In a fanciful twist of fate, one of the people who found him likeable and trustworthy while watching his marathon coverage of the Kathy Fiscus tragedy was his future mother-in-law, who pointed him out to her two unmarried daughters. One of the young women knew Chambers from his college days at USC and invited him to dinner the next week. There, as Chambers recounts the story, he met the other daughter. Shortly thereafter, Stan married that other daughter, Beverly, and they were on their way to rearing 11 children.

Today, Chambers probably could settle down to quiet days of golf, gardening at his home in Hancock Park or occupying an office at KTLA as resident good-will ambassador.

But Chambers still makes his office in the front seat of his mobile unit. And with the energy of a high school track star, he still spends his days scurrying for as many as six stories a night as Channel 5’s on-the-spot street reporter, often scribbling his broadcast copy while his news van speeds off to the next location.

With unbridled optimism running through his every recollection, Chambers said that he never tires of tracking down the facts of Los Angeles’ daily human dramas, no matter how big or how small they may be.

“I’ve enjoyed the last 10 years as a field reporter more than any of them,” Chambers said, “and as long as that’s true, I’m good for another 10 years. It’s much more fun than playing tennis or golf.”