Dave Lopez Calls It A Career After Nearly A Half-Century In SoCal TV News
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) - From the O.J. Simpson saga and the Freeway Murders to the L.A. Riots and dozens of disasters, for the last 48 years, if there has been news in Southern California, Dave Lopez has been in the middle of it.
Dave began his legendary career as a sportswriter at the Huntington Park Daily Signal newspaper. After six years there, he decided to make the move to TV, signing on to do general assignment and sports reporter at KHJ - now KCAL9 - and then KFMB in San Diego.
"A wonderful man named Pete Noyes hired me and in his gruff wonderful voice, he said, 'I'm not gonna have you do sports, you're gonna be a newsman! You're gonna have a lot longer career in news than in sports!" Lopez recalled.
After only nine months in San Diego, Dave returned to L.A. and started at CBS2 in the summer of 1977 and immediately began showing off his versatility and incredible storytelling ability.
"I got wonderful advice one time from a gentlemen, he said, 'Davey you gotta write like ya talk, you gotta tell a story, you gotta be conversational'," said Lopez. "That was a piece of advice that I always remembered. You gotta talk to your audience not at them and that's what I've tried to do."
And when Dave wasn't covering the news, he was making it, like when he went public with his battle with prostate cancer in 1997.
But there was one story that Dave didn't cover.
"I missed the Christopher Dorner story. My wife, God rest her soul, was very, very sick at that time and she was in intensive care and I't work that month," he said. "But that's the only major story that I didn't cover in Los Angeles, every one else I've been apart of somehow, some way."