June 30, 2008 Kenneth I. Reich

Ken Reich, our extraordinary class secretary, died at his home in Van Nuys, California, on June 30, 2008. He was 70.

Ken was raised in Palm Springs, and from an early age he had an intense interest in current affairs. One of his camp counselors recalls that, at the age of ten, during free time at the camp Ken would be buried in Time magazine, while his fellow campers would be off playing ball. Ken remained a voracious reader all his life, which certainly contributed to his deep understanding of world history and world affairs.

As a Southern Californian, Ken had a hard time adjusting to winters in New Hampshire. Indeed, in Musings Ken wrote that “Upon graduation from Dartmouth, I told myself I never wanted to live outside California again….” But he was a stellar student at Dartmouth, graduating summa cum laude with Highest Distinction in Government. He also was in Army ROTC at Dartmouth.

After our graduation from Dartmouth, Ken served in the military in California. He then attended the Harvard Law School for a few months, and he also earned a master’s degree in political science at UC Berkeley in 1962. But his true calling was journalism. He began his career as a journalist during his freshman year in high school, when he worked as a sports reporter for the Riverside Press-Enterprise. He also worked on The Dartmouth our freshman and sophomore years. In 1962-63, Ken was employed at the Sacramento bureau of UPI, then he reported for Life magazine in 1963-65. But most of his journalism career was spent with the Los Angeles Times.

Ken was hired by the Los Angeles Times in 1965 as a reporter in the newspaper’s Westside bureau. He served as Atlanta bureau chief from 1970 to 1972, after which he spent five years as a political writer, an area he continued to report on occasionally later on. Ken covered the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, George Wallace and Jimmy Carter. He was known as an extremely outspoken and tenacious reporter, one who was meticulous in getting the facts of his story straight.

Ken considered his most important professional accomplishment to be his coverage from 1977 through 1984 of the 1984 summer Olympics held in Los Angeles. He reported on everything about those games except the sporting events themselves, e.g. site selection, finances, traffic, economic impact, pollution, etc. His editor at the time wrote recently that, aware of the financial disaster of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, Ken wrote to ensure “that the L.A. taxpayers would not foot the bill” for the games. And they did not – those games ultimately were very profitable. Ken’s book about the L.A. Olympics is Making It Happen – Peter Ueberroth and the 1984 Olympics (Capra Press, 1986).

Photo 28: Caption: Ken Reich at our Boston 70th. Ken’s Olympic reporting took him to more than 25 countries. He always loved visiting foreign countries, and in fact spent his junior year at Dartmouth as a student in France. Shortly before his death, Ken achieved his goal of visiting 100 countries during his lifetime –Malta was number 100. This happened during a 73-day cruise around Africa, one he took despite being by then in very poor health. He had heart problems as well as diabetes. Ken’s tenacity also led him to attend our recent class gathering in Boston, where he was confined to a wheelchair and assisted by his caretaker.

At his funeral service in Los Angeles on July 3, 2008, one attended by over 150 people, a longtime friend mentioned that for many years Ken considered himself “more politically Jewish than religiously Jewish.” But in recent years he became close friends with the rabbi who presided at the funeral service for his mother, and he later not only joined that rabbi’s temple, but also was a particularly active member of the congregation.

Ken was married in 1970, but divorced in 1978. He was an extremely devoted Dad to his children, Kathy and David, often taking them along on his travels to cover the Olympics and elsewhere. Together, also, they climbed much of the Pacific Crest Trail. Ken was fiercely proud of Kathy and David’s many accomplishments, including David’s service in naval intelligence in Anbar Province, Iraq. Ken was also extremely close to his parents, Ruth and Herman; his sister, Carolyn; and his two grandchildren, Abigail and Jonathan (“Jack”), the young children of Kathy and her husband, Ken Meyer.

In his later years at the Los Angeles Times, Ken became involved in, as he put it in More Musings, “a struggle to maintain the quality of the paper…against advertiser intrusions in the editorial product.” Later he was ferocious in his opposition to actions by an outside company which had bought the newspaper from the Los Angeles family which had owned it. Ken’s strongly worded views on the paper’s new management, as well as many of his political opinions, can be found on his blog: takebackthetimes.blogspot.com. That blog also now has postings of many remembrances of Ken from readers of his blog and others.

Ken became our class secretary in 1995, and he loved that assignment. In More Musings, he wrote that through writing the 1960 class notes for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, “I’ve made many new friends in the class and have come to feel even more at home in the Dartmouth community. It’s been a constant joy to me.” In 2006, he was named Class Secretary of the Year by the College. The commendation read in part, " Well-researched, well-written stories delivered on time. No doubt that’s all in a day’s work for a reporter with 40 years of experience at the Los Angeles Times. But we don’t take your efforts for granted. Ken Reich, we thank you for the outstanding columns you bring to your class, the College and the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine."

Ken Reich was one of a kind – tenacious, thoughtful, generous and idealistic. Many examples of his sometimes off-the-wall sense of humor were given at his funeral service. He will be missed enormously by his many friends in the Class of 1960 and others around the world.

Hap Dunning