KPIX TV 5

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 4:53pm on Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Wanda Ramey, a pioneering TV news reporter for KPIX TV, has died. Stephen Miller of The Wall Street Journal wrote an obituary on August 26, 2009:

"She was an experienced broadcaster when she took a job as one of the nation's first female local news anchors in 1959, yet Wanda Ramey was billed as KPIX-TV in San Francisco's "Girl on the Beat."

Ms. Ramey, who died Aug. 15 at the age of 85, had been on the air for more than a decade by the time "Noon News" had its debut. She specialized in reporting from the scene at a time when newscasts were conducted mostly from the studio. She rode along on a night police patrol in a high-crime zone, peered into the exotic haunts of a Beatnik from Greenwich Village, and reported on the construction of San Francisco's latest high-rise from inside the emerging building's skeleton.

Within a year Ms. Ramey's hard-news leanings led to a different slogan: "The Woman on the Beat."

"People sometimes mistook her soft manner and didn't notice that she had a steel back," says Belva Davis, a veteran Bay Area broadcaster who counts Ms. Ramey as a mentor."

The full story:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125123739250558343.html