Dave Lopez has been an enduring local television news fixture on channels 2 and 9 for the past 42 years, except for a nine-month period when he worked for a San Diego station.
He has earned many honors across the decades – 11 Emmys, eight Golden Mikes, the Los Angeles Press Club’s prestigious Joseph Quinn Award for Lifetime Achievement – in covering all the major Southern California stories, such as earthquakes, fires, landslides, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the O.J. Simpson saga, the “hillside strangler,” the “night stalker,” the “freeway killer,” political corruption, political races and political figures.
“About the only big story I missed was the (Christopher) Dorner one,” says the 66-year-old Long Beach resident, who is the longest-tenured TV newscaster in Los Angeles. “That happened last February, when my wife was in the hospital. She was suffering from pulmonary fibrosis, and would be on a ventilator for 11 days and in ICU (intensive care unit) for 18 days. She would remain in the hospital for 73 days.”
While Lopez eventually would return to work to carry out his varied assignments – he also has covered many athletic developments over the years, befitting his sports writing pedigree – the health of his wife of 43 years, Elaine, continued to decline to the point in which she would need 24-hour care after coming out of Long Beach Memorial Medical Center in April.
His high school sweetheart – they met when attending South Gate High, from which they graduated in 1966 – and mother of their two children had been diagnosed 20 years earlier with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), a liver disease that occurs in people who drink little or no alcohol.
“All the many health challenges she faced in recent years stemmed from NASH,” says Lopez.
Elaine Lopez would pass away last Aug. 13, and Dave Lopez is still deeply grieving her loss, admitting not a day elapses without his thinking of her kindliness, her warmth, her generosity, her strength, her rapturous smile, her constant optimism and joyfulness.
“Elaine was the kind of person that if you met her just once, you wouldn’t forget her because she had such an uplifting, charismatic personality,” says Lopez. “Everyone who met her loved her. She was one of those rarest of human beings – no one ever spoke ill of her.”
At her funeral services at Messiah Lutheran Church in Downey, which has a seating capacity of around 150, more than 500 people attended. Many watched the proceedings outdoors on two closed-circuit televisions that were set up by Lopez’s Channel 9 production crew.
Since his wife’s burial, Lopez has maintained a weekly ritual, driving to Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier on Wednesday and Sunday and placing two vases of flowers at her grave.
He also has instituted an annual $12,000 scholarship in his wife’s name to Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy, a magnet school in Wilmington for students seeking to become teachers.
“Elaine taught in both the Long Beach and Downey school systems for years, and absolutely loved working with the kids,” says Lopez.
And this morning at 11:30 at Messiah Lutheran Church, 10711 Paramount Blvd., Downey, there will be a dedication ceremony of “Elaine’s Garden,” located on what had previously been a strip of lawn alongside the church.
It now has on it a playground for kids 5 and under, 400 planted flowers, a running fountain and a plaque with a picture of a smiling Elaine Lopez on it with the inscription: “Elaine loved this church. She loved making people happy and she wore a perpetual smile on her face. Enjoy these grounds, smile, be happy and thank God for all the blessings He has given you.”
Lopez funded the project and hired an architect to design it.
“I’m still heartbroken,” says Lopez. “We were together for 47 years. We went through so much together. She always was so supportive of me, and so understanding since I was away from home so often working. She even stopped teaching for nine years when the kids were young. She was an incredible person.”
So, too, is Dave Lopez, who has survived in a notoriously fickle trade in which longevity is a novelty and who delved into the media in high school, earning 10 cents an inch writing sports articles for the South Gate Press and then earning 25 cents an inch for the Huntington Park Daily Signal while in college. Both papers are now defunct.
He was a full-time employee at the Signal for six years under Sports Editor Cliff Gewecke – Lopez earned a journalism degree from Cal State Los Angeles during that period – and, on the side throughout 1970, he performed announcing chores for the Times Mirror cable outlet in Long Beach.
“I just walked in one day at its offices at Fourth and Redondo, and told the guy I was interested in doing some on-air work,” says Lopez. “And soon I was doing a daily show, as well as announcing the Long Beach State basketball and football games. Jerry Tarkanian then was the 49ers’ coach, and they, obviously, had a terrific team. The football team also was good with people on it like Leon Burns and Jeff Severson.
“My boyhood dream was to be either a sports writer or sportscaster and, suddenly, I was doing both. What also stood out in 1970 is that I married Elaine on June 20.”
Elaine Ekberg was a straight-A student at South Gate – she would obtain her teaching credential from UC Santa Barbara – and Lopez met her in their senior year after he had transferred from Pius X High School.
“We were in a physiology class together, and she happened to sit next to me,” recalls Lopez, who played basketball and baseball at South Gate. “And one day she showed up after having a date the night before and forgot to do her test paper. She asked me if she could see mine. She copied it, and wound up getting an A. And I got a B. When I questioned the teacher about the disparity, he said, ‘Because you copied Elaine’s test paper.’”
One afternoon in the spring of 1972, Lopez happened to be watching a fellow on Channel 9 mangle a news report – and felt he could do better.
He immediately called the station and a gentleman named Fernando Del Rio answered. Lopez told Del Rio he’d like a tryout.
And, lo and behold, he was given one for a week – he took vacation time from the Signal – and management at the old KHJ station decided to hire him at the princely amount of $275 a week.
“My first assignment was going out and covering the Democratic primaries as George McGovern came to town,” says Lopez. “I remember seeing famous media people like Dan Rather and Connie Chung, and there I was, a young untested man from South Gate, right there among them.”
Lopez initially did general assignment duty, but soon became Channel 9’s full-time sportscaster, and wound up covering spring training with the Dodgers for three years in Vero Beach, Fla., where on one memorable occasion he played 18 holes of golf with the team’s then-owner, Walter O’Malley.
“I remember one time Walter hit a drive that rolled far off the fairway, and he went and retrieved it and put it near the hole,” recalls Lopez with a laugh. “He said to me, ‘I own the golf course, so I can make my own rules.’”
Lopez departed Channel 9 in August 1976 to work for KFMB in San Diego, but at the urging of its news director, Pete Noyes, whom Lopez says played an influential role in his career along with Gewecke, he returned to Los Angeles in June of the following year and signed a three-year contract with Channel 2 starting at $42,500.
“I never dreamed I’d ever make that much money,” he says.
He has been at Channel 2 ever since – he also often appears on Channel 9, which is owned by CBS – and was its Orange County correspondent for 32 years.
But he has hopscotched all over the Southern California terrain over the years and has even done duty in foreign venues like Somalia, where he spent a week in December 1992 reporting from Mogadishu on widespread starvation, and Mexico City in September 1985 covering its horrific earthquake.
“Scariest I’ve ever been was in Mogadishu, where you could feel the danger at all times,” he says. “But, still, I’ve been so fortunate in my life. I’ve had great parents who raised six boys (one, Danny Lopez, is a respected Los Angeles County Superior Court judge) and two girls. And I had a wife who was an absolute angel I’ll think about every day for the rest of my life.”
Contact the writer: doug.krikorian@gmail.com
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