Ruth Ashton Taylor, who was the one girl on the CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow’s postwar radio documentary unit and was broadly believed to be the primary feminine newscaster in Los Angeles, died on Jan. 11 in San Rafael, Calif. She was 101.

Her daughter Laurel Conklin confirmed the demise, at an assisted residing facility.

“Ruth confirmed what ladies might do,” Liz Mitchell, who labored with Ms. Taylor as a manufacturing assistant and author at KNXT-TV in Los Angeles, mentioned in a cellphone interview. “She might cowl small occasions and big occasions — all completely different topics — and nothing stopped her.”

As one of many few ladies in TV information within the Nineteen Forties and ’50s, Ms. Taylor handled institutional biases about what she ought to cowl and what her studies ought to sound and appear like.

At CBS, Ms. Taylor realized that ladies weren’t allowed to be heard on the air as a result of their voices have been too “squeaky,” she as soon as mentioned.

In Los Angeles in 1951, she was employed by KTSL-TV (later known as KNXT and KCBS) to present the ladies’s facet of the information on a half-hour nightly present.

Quickly after her TV task started, she auditioned at KNX Radio to supply and ship a five-minute day by day afternoon report from what was promoted as “the ladies’s information desk.”

“It was such a novel factor that everyone thought it was an actual oddity,” she told an interviewer for the Washington Press Club Foundation in 1992. “‘Hey, take a look at the monkey carry out! We’ve by no means seen one like this earlier than.’”

The themes she reported on included vehicles, airplanes and trend.

“Taylor says she at all times approached her tales any method she favored,” Suzanne Haibach Marteney wrote in her master’s thesis about Ms. Taylor for California State College, Northridge, in 1986. “She justified her angle by saying she have to be giving the girl’s view as a result of it was her view and he or she was, in fact, a girl.”

Ms. Taylor left KTSL (by now renamed KNXT) round 1952 however she supplied her ladies’s radio studies for a number of extra years whereas additionally internet hosting “The Ruth Ashton Present,” a half-hour information and options program, additionally on KNX. She resigned in 1959 after a confrontation with administration when she refused to cowl occasions like division retailer openings, she advised Ms. Marteney.

She left journalism quickly in 1960, when she took a job because the editor for particular initiatives on the Claremont Faculties. After three years, she returned to radio.

Ruth Arlene Montoya was born on April 20, 1922, in Lengthy Seaside, Calif. Her mom, Flora Ashton, bought baked items in Nebraska and later opened Sis Ashton’s Cafe in Sign Hill Calif., after her husband, Julian Montoya, who labored for a financial institution, left the household when Ruth was 4. She quickly took the Ashton surname.

Ruth graduated from Scripps Faculty in Claremont, Calif., with a bachelor’s diploma in American historical past. In 1944, she earned a grasp’s diploma from Columbia Journalism Faculty whereas writing information part-time for CBS.

After she graduated, CBS employed her full-time, and he or she labored for the correspondent Robert Trout and wrote for this system, “Characteristic Story.” Mr. Murrow inspired her to discover a topic that fascinated her for a documentary and he or she selected atomic science.

Her reporting travels for “The Sunny Facet of the Atom” took her to quite a few locations, together with Princeton, N.J., the place Albert Einstein, who had ignored her letters asking for an interview, lived and labored.

A cooperative cabdriver introduced her to Einstein’s home, the place he was strolling close by. She received out of the automotive and approached him.

“I mentioned, ‘Good morning, Dr. Einstein,’” she recalled when she was interviewed by the Washington Press Membership Basis. “‘I’m Ruth Ashton.’”

“Ah!” he mentioned, “The broadcasting woman.”

He consented to an interview (though she didn’t tape-record him), they usually talked “about issues that meant a lot to me, which is the way forward for the world or not.”

The documentary was produced by CBS as a nonfiction drama in 1947, with actors enjoying varied roles. Agnes Moorehead portrayed Ms. Ashton.

Reviewing it for The New York Occasions, R.W. Stewart known as it “an eloquent attraction for broader in style understanding of an clearly important situation.”

Ms. Taylor stayed at CBS till 1949. Desirous to return house to Los Angeles, she took a public relations job at KNX, which later developed into the on-air information place.

After her time on the Claremont Faculties, Ms. Taylor returned to KNX in 1963. She hosted an infotainment present with the comedian actor Pat Buttram, a future solid member of the sitcom “Inexperienced Acres,” and reported for a day information and have program, “Story Line.”

In 1966, she was employed because the anchor of the Saturday afternoon TV information on KNXT, making her the primary girl identified to carry that sort of place in Los Angeles.

“All people got here out of their cubbyholes to observe her,” mentioned Ms. Mitchell, who recalled watching the primary broadcast within the newsroom. “The response wasn’t ‘Holy cow, why is a girl anchoring the information?’ however ‘Wow, a girl.’”

However many calls that got here in to the station after that first broadcast have been about her hair.

“Right here was a girl who had simply accomplished one thing monumental and this was all they needed to say,” Jess Marlow, an area anchorman, advised The Sacramento Bee in 1990. “She was simply crestfallen.”

After anchoring for a couple of yr, she targeted on reporting, however she was nonetheless had to deal with outdated attitudes towards ladies in journalism.

“Ruth Ashton Proves Women Can Reach Information Area,” learn the headline of an article about her in The Valley Information of Van Nuys, Calif., in 1968.

Joe Saltzman, a former senior producer at KNXT, mentioned by cellphone, “In the event that they despatched a male to cowl a prison trial, they’d ship her to speak to the grieving girlfriend. She mentioned, ‘I wish to be handled like some other reporter. I’m going to cowl fires and financial institution robberies.’ And she or he lastly received that battle.”

She coated political conventions, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, California state politics, floods, college board conferences and leisure.

Connie Chung, who was an anchor at KNXT, mentioned by cellphone that whereas Ms. Taylor was not well-known nationally, “Everybody in Southern California knew that each girl who adopted her was following in her footsteps. She paved the way in which for all of us.”

Ms. Chung added that after she turned the co-anchor of the “CBS Night Information,” with Dan Somewhat, in 1993, “Ruth wrote letters to me when the previous male goats at CBS have been giving me a tough time in New York that dumped on them and cheered me on.”

Ms. Taylor retired in 1989 however freelanced for a number of extra years as a political reporter and moderator of the station’s “Meet the Press”-like program, “Newsmakers.”

Along with her daughter, Laurel Conklin, Ms. Taylor is survived by one other daughter, Susan Conklin; a stepson, John Taylor; one grandson and one great-grandson. Her marriages to Ed Conklin, a information author, and Jack Taylor, a cameraman, resulted in divorce.

Ms. Taylor acquired the lifetime achievement award from the Tv Academy in 1982 and a star on the Hollywood Stroll of Fame in 1990.

“Mother, I lastly made my mark,” she mentioned on the ceremony. “It’s proper right here on the Hollywood Stroll of Fame in cement.”