To call him the dean of Southern California TV reporters is to lowball what he was. He was, for one thing, the sweetest man ever to hold a microphone. When you swapped Stan stories with others in this trade, you learned that you weren’t the only wet, bedraggled competitor he gallantly invited into his news van to dry off while we were all covering a storm or flood.
He was a pioneer who started on TV the same year that the Black Dahlia was murdered, and didn’t retire until four and a half years ago. To the millions of Angelenos who watched him on KTLA every night, he was a friend and neighbor. He wore a shirt and tie even covering a fire because he believed when you’re invited into people’s houses, as he was, you should wipe your virtual feet and behave like a guest.
Chambers spent his entire career, more than 60 years, at the same TV station. He started off doing the kind of hokum that fell out of fashion for reporters but has now come back as TV journalists become “personalities” – ice skating and being the taster on a cooking show.
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