Chambers reported live from the scene of a 1951 refinery fire in L.A.’s Wilmington district. AP Images
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Stan Chambers, the local TV broadcast legend whose reporting career at KTLA spanned more than six decades, died this morning, the station announced. He was 91.
Chambers died at his Holmby Hills home surrounded by family, according to his daughter, Mary.
Chambers joined KTLA, then a new station, on Dec. 1, 1947, and continued to report until his retirement on his 87th birthday on Aug. 11, 2010.
“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Chambers family,” KTLA president and GM Don Corsini said in a statement. “Stan was a brilliant journalist and one of the best in the business.”
Chambers covered more than 22,000 stories during his 63 years with the station, KTLA noted.
With TV still a relatively new medium, he was on the scene in April 1949 for the station’s landmark live coverage of the ill-fated attempt to rescue 3-year-old Kathy Fiscus, who had fallen into an abandoned water well in San Marino, Calif.
He also covered the June 5, 1968, assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Chambers had served in the U.S. Navy and was working on the campus magazine at USC when he head about KTLA, the first commercial television station in L.A. and the seventh TV station overall in the U.S. “I didn’t even know that television was on the air,” he said in 2010. He suggested that KTLA do a story about the magazine, then was offered a job.
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