Editor Mary Lou Hopkins Hornsby Dies

Mary Lou Hopkins Hornsby, a former feature editor and society writer for the Los Angeles Times, died Friday at her Newport Beach home after a lengthy illness. She was 85.

During her tenure in the Times’ Orange County newsroom, Hornsby chronicled the activities of luminaries such as James Roosevelt, the eldest son of Franklin D. Roosevelt, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and actor John Wayne, with whom she’d occasionally share a game of cards.

“They were pals,” said Scott Hornsby, her husband. “She knew more wheels than they made wheels.”

Fellow journalist and friend Liz McGuinness said Hornsby was a “people person who reached out to the community, not only as a journalist, but as a friend.”

Hornsby’s gregarious and persuasive ways held her in good stead as a journalist, and, after she retired, as a fund-raiser for nonprofit organizations, friends said. As a member of the Fashionables, a support group of Chapman University in Orange, she helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for its All Faiths Chapel.

“She wouldn’t take no for an answer,” said Mary Roosevelt, a close friend and widow of James Roosevelt. “She was feisty and persistent--that was her strength--and she had a delicious sense of humor.”

Hornsby began working at the Los Angeles Times in 1961 after a stint at the Los Angeles Mirror. She retired in 1984.

Besides her husband, Hornsby is survived by her sons, Bob Hopkins, a Newport Beach attorney, and Bill Hopkins, a banker in Santa Barbara.