A Reporter’s Journey:: One Enjoyable Life

By Bob Rawitch

This memoir traces his family from 18th century Vilnius, Poland, but focuses on his life in the post-World War II San Fernando Valley, a collection of mostly chicken ranches and citrus groves that grew explosively to 1.2 million people in four decades. If it were a separate city, “the Valley” would be the sixth largest in the country. His memoir traces his development as an L.A. Times reporter and editor and provides the backstory to some of the more notable of his several thousand stories during a 13-year reporting career and commentary on his accomplishments as an editorial executive, a leader in California newspapering and protecting the First Amendment. His reporting career paralleled sweeping U.S. social changes, including demands for women’s rights, gay rights and civil rights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798369400562

Bob Rawitch

Bob Rawitch grew up in the San Fernando Valley in the 1950s and 1960s in a middle-class home and had a 28-year career as a reporter and senior editor at the Los Angeles Times, becoming a leader in the newspaper industry and a journalism educator. He served on the national board of the Society of Professional Journalists and was chair of both the California First Amendment Coalition and the California Society of Newspaper Editors. He was twice personally nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. At The Times, Rawitch started and oversaw the Valley and Ventura editions of the paper and started METPRO, the Minority Editorial Training Program, which has brought about 400 journalists of color into The Times and the newspaper industry. He is married for 54 years to Cynthia Rawitch, retired vice provost of California State University, Northridge, and has three children and six grandchildren.

Book preview

A Reporter’s Journey:

One Enjoyable Life

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A Rawitch Family History

Bob Rawitch

Copyright © 2023 by Bob Rawitch.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/21/2023

Xlibris

844-714-8691

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Rawitch Family Roots

And More About Coming to America

Papa Sam

Grandma Jean

Rawitch Family Home

Move to the San Fernando Valley

A Loving Home

My Big Brother

Pets Galore

Home Run Bob and Boy Scout Bob

A Tennis Lesson

The Roots of a Future Career

Jewish Values

First Love and My Criminal Record

Showbiz Was My Life!

The Back Rooms

The CSUN Years

Applying to Northwestern

The Summer at the L.A. Times

The Northwestern Year That Changed My Life

Our Wedding

Mom’s Career Start

Years of Protest

My First Really Big Story

Young and Carefree

First International Travel

Dana’s Birth

Mom’s Second Career

Established at The Times

Smokey and the Bob

TV Anchor? No, Federal Court Reporter

Most Scary Moment As a Reporter

Staff Sergeant Bob

M*A*S*H* or the Fighting 222?

Federal Court Becomes Home

The Mafia and Me

Suspected Russian Spy?

Twins? Twins?

The Gypsy Princess

The Falcon and the Snowman

The Scientology Saga

The Mobster Next Door

Is Daddy a Spy?

A Shift in Career to Editing

Bob the Politician

The Birth of METPRO

The San Fernando Valley Is My Home

The Home Front: Foreign Exchange Students

Call Me an Executive?

The Valley Edition Is Born

We Move to Northridge

1984 But Not Yet Orwellian

The Late ’80s: A Period of Growth

The ’90s Bring Continued Change

Life After The Times

A New Career As a Flak

To Russia with Love

The Winner Years

The 21st Century

Final and Random Reflections

Acknowledgments

For my grandchildren, who hopefully won’t have to search for many answers about the Rawitch family history after I’m gone.

FOREWORD

F OR YEARS MY sons have urged me to write a memoir, given the exciting times in which I lived and my career as a reporter in the 1960s and 1970s. Approaching 75, I decided to do it, whether anyone reads it or not. What follows is based on my memories, aided sometimes by L.A. Times clips to refresh my recollection of my professional career and the stories I most enjoyed doing. I apologize in advance if others remember things differently. I alone am responsible for any errors of fact.

They have been seven and a half great decades.

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RAWITCH FAMILY ROOTS

O UR BRANCH OF the Rawitch family, as best as I can determine, can be traced to at least 1792 in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Korostyshiv, Russia, 65 miles from Kiev. Throughout the 18 th and 19 th centuries, the name was often spelled Revitch.

I say our branch because there are many Rawitches who I have not connected directly to the family, some from Russia and some born in the United States in the 1800s in the northeast and South. Rawitches clearly were in the country before the Civil War.

Sit back and try to absorb what is a dizzying array of names and dates.

It was in Vilnius that Iosel (a.k.a. Josel/Yossel) Revitch (1792–August 17, 1846) married Chaye, maiden name unknown, (1807–?). Vilnius was founded in the early 14th century and quickly became one of the most important cities in the region, known for its tolerance of people from various backgrounds: Muslim Tartars, Lutheran Germans, Jews, Catholics and the Polish elite. Originally a Polish city, Russia annexed it in 1795 and controlled it for 120 years. Lithuania, like Poland, was under Russian control for most of the 20th century, but finally gained its independence in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I know nothing about Iosel and Chaye other than they had three children:

• Ovsey Ravitch (1830–1875)

• Lev Ravitch (1830–1884)—twins?

• Yankel Ravitch (6/20/1841–?)

It was in the Kyiv area of Russia that Yankel Ravitch (a.k.a. Sheftel Rawitch) married Surah Raiza (unknown given name and birth/death dates). They never came to the United States, although most of their six children did with yet another spelling of the name:

• Ruchel Rawitch (1863–1920)

• Sheftel (a.k.a. Samuel) Rawitch (1864–1904)

• Barnett Rawitch (1881–1930)

• Gershon (a.k.a. Harry) Rawitch (5/15/83–10/30/62)—my grandfather

• Joseph Rawitch (who never came to the U.S.)

• Moishe Rawitch (1903–?)

With a 17-year gap between Yankel’s sons Sheftel and Barnett, I wonder whether Yankel might have had a second wife, but I can find no indication of that. If there was not a second wife and if Surah Raiza was about Yankel’s age, she would have been about 60 when she gave birth to Moishe in 1903. That seems unlikely, but another mystery that may never be solved.

All but Gershon, who I will call Harry going forward, died before they were 60, but the causes are unknown. The average lifespan of someone born in 1890 was only 42.

Until the last few years, conventional wisdom in the family was that there were no Rawitches that were not direct members of the family. That changed in the early part of the 21st century when I started to do some genealogical research.

But kudos are owed to Cousin Betty Rawitch (Marvin’s wife), who years before me used the Internet and Ancestry.com (owned by the Mormon Church) to do genealogical research. The direct line of descendants from Yankel and Sarah—who never came to the United States—is clear, but not much else is, because many other Rawitches came from Russia even earlier. I have not been able to link our line to many of the other Rawitches or their descendants, who, according to Ancestry.com, appear to be from second or third to sixth or even eighth cousins.

The oldest U.S. line I have located traces back to Louis and Sarah (Brown) Rawitch, both of whom were born in 1825 in Hanover, Germany, and Bavaria, respectively. It is unclear when they came to the U.S., but they lived in Columbus, Mississippi, in the 1850s and had three children born there: Jacob, 1857; William, 1859; and Ida, 1862. A fourth child, Oscar, was born in 1865 in New York.

Newspaper accounts in 1865 reported that Louis and his brother (name unknown) imported cigars and traveled throughout Mississippi by horse-drawn cart selling tobacco. By 1870 they had moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In the 1870 U.S. census, Louis reported having property valued at $40,000 (quite a lot back then), with two servants born in Virginia and Alabama. It is not too much to assume their servants may have been former slaves, possibly owned by the Rawitches before the end of the Civil War.

By the 1880s, Louis and son Jacob owned the Rawitch Cigar Shop in Philadelphia. Daughter Ida married Walter Hart Blumenthal in 1883. They were living in Iowa, where Blumenthal was born. Also in the cigar business, Blumenthal had a son from a prior marriage, and together he and Ida had a son, Ralph. Ida, who never attended school and could not read or write, died in Philadelphia on August 1, 1942. Louis and Sarah’s youngest son, Oscar, joined Henry Cohen and opened a tailor shop in the 1890s. Oscar fought in World War I and according to the 1930 census, lived in Los Angeles at 1031 S. Grand View, working as a hardware salesperson at age 65. I could find little of substance about William Rawitch and have not been able to link any of the Louis Rawitch family to our branch of Rawitches.

Through DNA analysis, my brother Allen learned of another descendant from the family tree who is a match to a distant cousin, Jon Pareles, who grew up in Connecticut and graduated with a degree in music from Yale University. Since 1988 he has been the chief music critic of the New York Times. Around 2015 Mom and I met Jon and his wife for the first time in New York. Jon is also a match to Barnett Rawitch’s son Marvin Rawitch, a fourth or fifth cousin, so even more distant than to me.

We arranged to have dinner together at a small Italian restaurant. We had never seen one another, of course, and didn’t know what to expect. But when Jon and his wife Mary Anne (Cartelli) walked in, she said, pointing to me, Jon, that must be him, he looks just like your uncle.

We had a pleasant evening together appreciating the irony that both men were in the newspaper business and both women had been university professors. Mary Anne was teaching Chinese in the Department of Classical and Oriental Studies at Hunter College at the time, and it was she who had also done genealogical research on Jon’s family. She recalled how Jon’s grandmother, Bernice Pareles of Newton Centre, Massachusetts, had spoken of Morton traveling from New York to Chicago to see relatives. But Mary Anne could not recall any names.

Bernice’s mother was Gertrude (Herman) Rawitch (3/15/1892–9/10/1991), who, with her husband Morton, owned several grocery stores through much of the 1900s in Queens, New York, and later in Fairfield, Connecticut. Gertrude was born in Ukraine in 1894 and came to the U.S. in 1910. Morton was born on September 20, 1890, in Russia, the son of Issac (sic) Rawitch (1847–1935) and Esther Feinberg. I can find no evidence they ever came to the United States. She married Morton in 1914. They were married for 48 years when he died in 1962. Gertrude died of cancer in her home in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Morton had two brothers, Milton and Sam, who also owned grocery stores at various times in Chicago and New York. Sam, who spelled his name Ravitch, married Lillian Gordon. They had three children: Esther Ravitch Talley, Shirley Ravitch Votra and Jacob Ravitch. The family lived in Chicago, where Sam in the 1940s sold insurance, and the census reports that he had a graduate degree. Lillian moved to Miami in the 1940s after Sam died, according to Jayne Ravitch, Sam’s granddaughter.

In a June 27, 1978, letter from Esther Ravitch Talley to her niece Kim, she recalled that her father Sam lived in a suburb of Kyiv called Kovner Geberna. Grandfather Issac was said to be an overseer for a forest or part of one for the czar—highly unusual for a Jew to be given that kind of responsibility. The family had a farm and raised cattle, she said her father told her.

Morton’s brother Milton (about 1882–11/21/1935) came to the United States from Russia in 1907 and worked in a paint shop in 1910. His native tongue was Yiddish, but he said he could read and write English. He married Fannie Sakon Dakon in 1908, and by the 1920 census, he owned a grocery store. In the 1930 census, he reported he had a cheese route and owned a home worth $11,000 at 5 S. Kolin Avenue in Chicago. He and Fannie had two children, Esther, born in 1911, and Leah, born the next year.

On September 7, 1916, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about a dispute Milton had with the distributor of the newspaper. Milton said the distributor tried to collect fees for 156 papers when he had only ordered 130. The story reported that the distributor grabbed Rawitch by the collar and struck him several times. Later, from outside the store, the distributor shouted, You —— Jew, I’ll kill you, but the dispute went no further.

I think it is most likely that when Bernice’s father, Morton, came to visit relatives in Chicago it was her uncle Milton that he was seeing, not the Harry Rawitch side of the family.

Harry’s brother Sheftel or Sam (yes, I know there are a lot of Sams to keep track of—and at least three Sheftels and two Mortons) had three children with Rebecca Mozer Rawitch (9/20/1866–3/12/1958):

• Morris (March 24, 1896–1965)

• Anna (1898–1/18/1974)

• Sadie (1902–?)

Sheftel died in 1904, leaving Rebecca with three young children. She married Bernard Revitch (1872–?), a furrier from Russia (what else?) and clearly a relative of some sort. They had a daughter, Ethel, in 1907. In the 1930 census, Sadie, 23, worked as a typist; Anna (who apparently changed her name to Bessie), 26, was a secretary; and Ethel, 21, was living at home and not working at the time.

Morris, sometimes Moishe or Maurice, lived in Joliet, Illinois, in the 1930s and worked as a draftsman for the Illinois Central Railroad. He also became a high school teacher and lived as a boarder with another teacher and his wife. His military draft card described him as short, slender, gray eyes and brown hair. In 1940 he lived in Los Angeles and worked as a production manager, but records don’t indicate what kind of business.

This Morris should not be confused with another Morris Rawitch born in 1860. This other Morris came from Russia to Brooklyn, New York, sometime before 1910 and was married to Pearle. In 1910, the census lists him as a presser in a clothing shop and he worked for 25 weeks of the year. Pearle didn’t work then, but daughter Fannie, 25, was an operator in a skirt shop; sons Isador, 25, and Sam, 21, were both carpenters; Rebecca, 18, was an operator in a waist shop; Joseph, 15, was a shipping clerk and William, 10, was in school. (FYI, operators worked sewing machines, pressers ironed, and a waist shop made U.S. blouses, i.e., shirtwaists.)

But, of course, it doesn’t end there. There are other Rawitches of whom we know little history:

• Aaron Rawitch (4/10/1899–7/2/1964) was born in Korostyshiv Zhytomyr, Ukraine, the son of Khaya and Yosef Chaim Radomysilky. A sister, Masya, was born a year later. He came to Maryland in the U.S. as a child in 1912, but by 1917 he lived in Chicago. Aaron lived in L.A. in the 1950s and 1960s with his wife Anne Holzman Rawitch (1901–1974).

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Ann and Aaron: Aaron Rawitch, raised by Grandpa Harry Rawitch, with his wife Ann.

I recall he had a food truck route, and I would see him and Anne at family gatherings. Cousin Phil Freshman recalls his mother, Miriam, telling him that Grandpa Harry adopted Aaron (formally or informally, we don’t know) and took him in as a child. Anne and Aaron had two daughters, Miriam (born Mollie, 7/25/1922–2003) and Ruth (5/7/27–2008). I’m still in touch with Miriam’s son, Phil, a retired writer/editor in Minneapolis, and his brother Ron, who is a superb classical guitarist and attorney in San Diego. Another brother committed suicide in his 20s. Miriam’s husband, Gene Freshman, retired as a guard at the original Getty Museum in Malibu.

• Like Aaron Rawitch, Isaac Rawitch (1847–1/10/35) was born in Radomyshl to Gitel and Noach Tsodek Ravitz. He and Esther (last name unknown) had two children, Milton Rawitch (1886–1935) and another Sam Rawitch (1886–1940). Isaac died in Chicago at the age of 88.

• Carl Rawitch, born in Austria in 1885, appears in the 1910 New York census living in a guest room in Queens and working as a clothing salesman, but I find no subsequent trace of him.

• Jim Rawitch, once in public relations for the L.A. County Museum of Art in 2005, is now an independent fund- raising consultant. In later 2021 he lived in Pasadena, and while I’ve reached out to him, I have not heard back.

• Peter Rawitch, grandson of May Rawitch, in 2005 was a country/folk musician and played with a group called Andy Gallo. I can’t locate him either.

• David Rawitch, grandson of Chicago piano teacher Hazel Rawitch (1/7/05–5/2/95), moved at the age of 3 to California to live with his father and was last known to be living in San Ramon in Northern California. He was about 70 in 2021, and I’ve reached out to the last known address, but the letter was returned as undeliverable.

• Don Rawitch, a professor and online game inventor, is said to live in Minnesota, and I have reached out to him through online sources but to no avail.

• Josef Rawitch in Germany ([e-mail]) has reached out to me to see how we might be related.

In my research, I found vague references to a poet, Meylek (Melech) Ravitsch. Further, in a 2004 Red Devil Digest newsletter about the military there is a reference to Capt. Doc Rawitch, who worked in a medical dispensary at Camp Wood, and filmed a parachute jump by troops.

I can’t connect any of the above Rawitches to our branch.

Finally, the Rawitch name has even made it to Hollywood. For reasons no one alive knows, a well-known actor named Lionel Atwill played a character named Rawitch in the 1942 film "To Be or Not to Be," clearly not the Shakespearean version. The film, starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard, among the biggest film names of the era, is about an acting troupe embroiled in a Polish soldier’s effort to track a German spy. A friend who is a well-known screenwriter, about whom you will hear more later, also incorporated the Rawitch name into one of his TV comedy scripts, but I can’t remember which one.

AND MORE ABOUT COMING TO AMERICA

H ARRY RAWITCH, MY grandfather, came to the United States by ship, the Friedrich del Grosse , by way of Bremen, Germany, to New York on September 18, 1901. He was 18. He became a naturalized citizen on February 1, 1906. Two years later, he married his niece, born Lena (a.k.a. Leah) Slutsky (1880–1965), who was the daughter of his sister Ruchel (1863–1920) and her husband, Benzion Slutzky (1863–1912), in Chicago. Ben Zion’s father was Aaron Slutzky (1835–?), but I have not been able to find Aaron’s wife. As strange as marriage to a niece would be today, marrying a relative was not uncommon back then. In fact, in Jewish Orthodox tradition in the last century, a single man was obligated to marry his sister-in-law to take care of her if his brother died. This, of course, is not the same as marrying a blood relative.

We don’t have an exact date for Harry and Lena’s marriage, but we always celebrated their anniversary with a big family gathering on Thanksgiving. They had three children, Jack (1909–1995), Sam (1911–1988) and Beatrice (1919–1982).

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Harry Rawitch family: Grandpa Harry Rawitch and wife Lena (sitting) Left to right are daughter Beatrice, Vena and Jack Rawitch and Sam, circa early 1940s.

Grandpa Harry was a furrier who started working with older brother Barnett in his Chicago fur shop, then broke off to have his own retail shop at 209 S. State Street. He and the family lived at 3343 W. Van Buren Street.

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Fur Shop button: A great find on the Internet that Josh bought for $95.

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Rawitch Fur Shop: On a trip to Chicago, Josh took this picture of the building that now stands where the Rawitch Fur Shop was located.

All three of his kids eventually worked in the shop; Sam and Jack learned to make and remodel fur coats for chilly Chicago winters, and Beatrice was a finisher, the one who sewed silk linings into the finished furs. Ironically, one of Mom’s mother’s first jobs was also working as a fur finisher.

At the Harry Rawitch Fur Co., 3405 W. Roosevelt, in Chicago, the local media reported that he and eight employees were lined up by bandits, who stole $16,000 in furs. The head of the gang, Walter Needs, 29, was shot and killed fleeing another fur store he and his associates had robbed. The date of the robbery was not in the clip, and clearly the fur shop had moved from the earlier address.

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Fur Shop Holdup: About $16,000 in fur coats were taken in an armed robbery at the Rawitch Fur Shop.

As quiet and gentle as Grandma Leah was, that’s how temperamental and tough Harry was. He was old country in that he didn’t talk a lot, particularly to his grandkids. Once they moved to L.A., Harry favored my brother Allen. They spent hours fishing off the Santa Monica Pier in the early ’50s. Very early most Sunday mornings my father would drop us at our grandparents’ house and Harry and Leah would drive us to the pier. Allen, who was about 13, would drink coffee made by Grandma and fish all day. Meanwhile, bored with fishing after 10 or 15 minutes, I would whine and ask for 50 cents to go to the bottom level of the pier and play pinball machines at five cents a play. Grandma Leah, who was a wonderful baker, like many women of that era, sat in the car until Grandpa and Allen gave up or caught their fill of fish.

Grandpa Harry had his blacklist of family members he didn’t like, including his brother Barnett, whom he didn’t talk to for decades. You could easily end up on his blacklist just by talking to someone else who was on it. Indeed, my mother, Jean, ended up on it for a number of months, and she was not allowed to join her husband and sons on the ritual Sunday visits to Harry’s Hauser Avenue home, just blocks south of Wilshire Boulevard.

During most of World War II, and still in Chicago, both Jack and Sam, who were in their 30s, worked in the defense industry. Sam worked a full day at the Rawitch Fur Shop before working a shift at Sunbeam Electric, which made universal joints for planes. He was drafted but declared 4F, ineligible to serve because he didn’t have full lung capacity. The reason, while unclear, was connected to a missing rib removed by doctors when he contracted pneumonia during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.

In 1944, Jack moved to Los Angeles and worked at a defense plant owned by a cousin, Dan Meepos. A retired Harry and Leah had moved to L.A. shortly before. Sam and Jean subsequently joined the rest of the family. Sam had been left to run the Rawitch Fur Shop on Roosevelt Avenue, but it was no longer viable as a one-man operation. So, Sam, Jean and four-year-old Allen followed the family west, sharing a duplex with Jack and Vena in Boyle Heights, the center of the Jewish community during the post-war era. The duplex cost $5,500.

PAPA SAM

I