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Pete Noyes today walked out of his last newsroom, at age 77, saying goodbye to several generations of colleagues and admirers, here at Fox 11 News.

It was a sad day, losing a living legend, a raconteur, a keeper of the flame, an encyclopedia of journalism lore. Pete won innumerable prizes and awards over his distinguished career; I won’t attempt to catalogue them. Suffice it to say, there are few – if any - in the TV-journalism business in Los Angeles these days who can match his achievements (below, a photo of Pete with his wife, Grace).

Despite his years, Pete’s love of journalism, energy in pursuit of a story, resourcefulness in digging up sources and documents, and enthusiasm for beating the competition was never dulled by age. Pete was a breath of fresh air in a business that too often has taken the easy route to getting a story, too often been content to follow the pack, too often exalted the pretty-face and the live-shot, and too often cared too little about underdogs, government corruption and official abuses.

I’d heard about Pete Noyes for years in Los Angeles. But our paths didn’t cross until a few years ago when his station, UPN/KCOP Channel 13, merged with Fox 11 News. It was a great pleasure to come to know him and a great honor to actually work with him on several stories, including a series about real estate fraud.

Pete was often heard before he was seen.

“Godddammnnnit! I’ve been in this business 46 years, and that’s a lot of nonsense!” Something like that would often rip through the newsroom just as I was trying to down my first cup of morning coffee. It was like sugar in my Java to hear Pete, on the phone or in the house, giving some stubborn bureaucrat or wet-behind-the-ears city desk assistant a piece of his mind.

Pete was the horror of the modern-day, corporate human resources department manager, who would rather have employees high on horse-tranquilizers, sedated and content, than hot on the trail of a good story, full of grit and indignation, breathing fire.

And there were the Pete stories. Hundreds of them.

Over a farewell lunch with him today, Pete told me about the time in the 1960’s
when he worked for the NY Daily News and got a call from his editor that Barbara Graham – a murderess who’d been executed at San Quentin – had cast a curse on all of her accusers, jailers and prosecutors and, as a result, they were dropping like flies. The sensational story of this wrathful curse was published in the Herald-Examiner, and Pete’s boss told him to go down and get that story – at any cost.

“So, I drove over to the Examiner, talked to the city editor, and he told me the reporter could be found in the 11/11 bar. Sure enough there was this guy – who wrote the story – slumped over the bar. I politely tapped him on the shoulder and told him I was following up on his story. ‘Was it true? The Graham curse?’ The guy was three sheets into the wind, sloppy drunk and looked at me through big, sleepy eyes and said – ‘Nahhh. I made the whole damned thing up!’”

At this point, Pete began cackling over the beauty, the craziness of the whole goddamnnned story.

And then came Pete's second punch-line: “I called up the Daily News editor up and told her it was hoax. She didn’t want to believe it! Said I wasn’t being a team-player! Fired me on the spot!” More peals of laughter from Pete – who then revealed that the same editor re-hired him six months later.

Of course Pete was rehired - because he was indispensable….because he was the rare producer/reporter/investigative impressario who could – and did – break the story that Charles Manson had been arrested for the Sharon Tate murder, who dug up the dirt on Mayor Sam Yorty helping Occidental Petroleum founder Armand Hammer position himself to get a lucrative oil drilling lease in the Pacific Palisades, who won a prestigious Peabody Award, in 1975, for an investigative story about a notorious confidence scheme (“The Dale Car: A Dream or a Nightmare?”) that resulted in a 39-count indictment against the perpetrator. The list of his accomplishments, the stories Pete broke, could fill dozens of pages. But I’m on deadline and have stories of my own to do – I'm sure Pete will understand.

One last thing. One of Pete’s trademark expressions came from World War II when Navy Admiral Charles Lockwood messaged one of his youthful submarine commanders, then engaged in a deadly struggle with a Japanese warship: “Good luck. God bless you. Your picture is on my piano.”

In good humor, with a week’s worth of solid journalism under his belt, Pete would frequently swing through the newsroom on a Friday, telling his colleagues: “Okay
kid. Good work this week. We kicked some ass. Your picture is on my piano."

Well Pete, goodbye and good luck.....and you can be sure your picture will always be on our piano.

John_Schwada's Blog

Pete Noyes: Journalism Legend

John_Schwada

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