Rich Archbold: Dave Lopez, star TV reporter, talks about storied career, life in new book (2024)

For almost half a century, there wasn’t a major story happening in Southern California without the signature television reporting of Dave Lopez.

He covered everything and anything that people cared about, from earthquakes and fires to freeway killers, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Los Angeles Olympics, the World Series, human interest stories and political corruption. He was a masterful storyteller, charming, tough and fearless. With a casual and easygoing — but commanding — style, he became one of the most recognizable TV reporters in Southern California history. He also was one of the first Latino reporters on a major TV station.

It would take a book to tell all of the professional and personal stories in the extraordinary life of Lopez, and that’s exactly what he has done in his recently released, very readable autobiography, “It’s a Great Life If You Don’t Weaken” — a quote taken from his lovable-but-stern father, Al Lopez.

It’s hard to imagine that Lopez, who lives in Long Beach, might have ended up in the upholstery business with his father, instead of following his heart and winding up on televisions in thousands of living rooms throughout the Southland.

“At an early age, I had this burning desire to tell stories about people,” Lopez told me in a recent phone interview. “In the fifth-grade, I wrote an essay about how I wanted to be a sports announcer or a TV reporter when I grew up.”

Lopez’s book is really two books in one, weaving in his personal life with his professional career until he retired from his longtime home at KCBS Channel 2 on June 30, 2020.

His goal was not to rehash in great detail the thousands of events he covered, Lopez said, but to write about the families that shaped him: The family he grew up in. The family he and his late wife, Elaine, raised together. And the family he enjoys today with his grandchildren and current wife, Diandra.

Lopez credited his families with giving him everything he needed to go after his dreams in television journalism.

Lopez was born on Feb. 10, 1948, in East LA, the first of eight children, to Al and Matilda Lopez, the latter of whom was known to all as Tilly. Both of his parents were born in Mexico and moved to Los Angeles.

In his book, Lopez wrote that his father was a tough street kid who was always in a scrap and became a boxer at 17, fighting under the name Al Santini. His father joined the U.S. Army during World War II. He and Tilly married in 1947.

Al Lopez had a job as a sheet metal worker before enrolling in an upholstery school. He became a master upholsterer, eventually owning his own business, Garfield Upholstery, in South Gate.

The younger Lopez, meanwhile, spent his early years learning Spanish from two grandmothers and English from others. He was “pretty confused” about what language he was supposed to think in and speak, Lopez said, and it caused him to stutter in kindergarten. By first-grade, Lopez said, he began speaking predominantly in English and never had an issue with stuttering again.

In 1955, his family moved to South Gate, where Lopez got his first job as a paper boy for the old Los Angeles Herald Express.

He loved baseball and grew up listening to famed Dodgers announcer Vin Scully on TV and radio, dreaming that that’s what he wanted to do.

“When I was in high school, I would listen to Scully, Dick Enberg, Chick Hearn and Curt Gowdy, never doubting I would get on TV some day,” he said. “At home, I used a hair brush and pretended it was a microphone, with me announcing games in front of my mirror. I did that in the car, too. People must have thought I was out of my mind.”

Lopez’s first real journalism job came while he was in high school, not from television but print, covering sports part-time for the Huntington Park Daily Signal. When the Signal offered him a full-time job in the summer, he decided to take it but took days to work up the nerve to tell his dad, who wanted him to join the upholstery business.