There will be a memorial service Thursday for trailblazing Los Angeles journalist Bob Navarro, who was one of the first Hispanic on-air reporters on the West Coast and spent most of his lengthy news career at Los Angeles television stations, including KNBC, KCBS and Spanish-language KVEA.
Navarro died Aug. 21 at a North Hollywood care facility at age 92, according to longtime friend and onetime colleague Joe Saltzman, a journalism professor at USC who met Navarro when they both worked at KNXT Channel 2 (now KCBS). Saltzman said Navarro had fallen and suffered a broken hip and was unable to recover.
“Bob was always one of the friendliest and nicest guys in the news business, a business in which he experienced racism and intolerance,” Saltzman wrote in a Facebook post announcing his death. “But through it all, he never lost his smile, his sense of who he was. He once told me, `I put my head down and do my job and ignore the racial taunts and idiocies of some of the people around me. And I like to smile and I have so many good friends in the news business. I’m not going to let those bigots get me down.”’
Navarro told the Los Angeles Times in a 1994 interview that he was a high school dropout living near USC in 1967 when he landed a coveted job as a news writer for KNXT, writing for “The Big News.” He later became an on-air reporter.
Starting in 1978, he worked for 10 years with NBC4, reporting from Sacramento and Orange County. He followed with reporting stints at KTLA and KCAL, and also spent time as the news director at KVEA. He later returned to KCBS, where he produced the “Bob Navarro’s Journal” weekly program that took an in-depth look at major new stories. Earlier in his career, Navarro was the first Hispanic anchorman at a television station west of the Mississippi, according to Saltzman, and he also worked for KPIX in San Francisco.
Navarro told The Times in 1994 that when he joined KNXT, “there was a woman reporter, a woman writer, no woman on the desk, no woman producer. That was it. There was an African American, but no Chicanos. I was the first one.”
Saltzman noted that Navarro was a friend of Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar, who was killed during the Chicano Moratorium march in East Los Angeles in 1970, when he was struck by a tear gas canister fired by a sheriff’s deputy into the Silver Dollar Bar. Navarro, who was also working that day covering the march, went into the bar and saw his friend’s body, writing later that with Salazar’s death, “the beacon for the handful of Mexican American journalists had been snuffed out.”
Navarro was a founding member of Nosotros, a nonprofit organization that advocates for Latino representation in the entertainment industry, and played a key role in establishing the California Chicano News Media Association, which provides scholarships to Hispanic journalism students, according to Saltzman.