Charles Hillinger traveled America and took readers along for the ride
Charles Hillinger had the job most journalists dream about: write about any subject that interests you regardless of its location across the country.
So, that's how Times readers met a 75-year-old sidewalk pickle-maker in Manhattan; learned of the mysterious objects at the bottom of a dry California lake; or followed the Beatles during a 1964 stay at a Bel-Air home, where they swam and played cowboys with toy pistols sent over by Elvis Presley. These were some of the nearly 6,000 stories Hillinger wrote during his more than 40 years at The Times.
On Monday night, Hillinger died in his sleep at a Rancho Palos Verdes nursing home, reports Dennis McLellan and the Daily Mirror blog.
Hillinger was often compared to broadcast journalist Charles Kuralt. In the forward to the 1996 book, "Charles Hillinger's America: People & Places in All 50 States," the former CBS News correspondent praised his print counterpart for his straightforward style:
"He doesn't draw cosmic conclusions from his travels, or bother to puzzle out deep meaning. He shows up and listens and understands, discovers things he didn't know before, then sits down and writes plain stories about plain people which tell the readers things they didn't know before, either, or hadn't thought about."
-- Jesus Sanchez
Photo: Los Angeles Times
