Roy Ringer, editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times from 1974 to 1984 and speechwriter for Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, Pierre Salinger and Robert Kennedy, died May 20 of pneumonia at Santa Monica Hospital. He was 88.
Ringer was born in Pittsburgh and moved to Huntington Park where he was a cub reporter on The Signal at the age of 17. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Coast Guard on PCC 469, a convoy escort and anti-submarine vessel involved in the invasions of Leyte Gulf and Okinawa. The 469 sank the last Axis submarine five days after the war was over.
Discharged in 1945, he joined the Los Angeles Daily News as a copy boy and quickly moved ahead as sports writer, rewriter, crime reporter, drama critic, book editor and night city editor. When the newspaper folded in 1954, he joined the Los Angeles Mirror. During his journalism career, he won six major awards.
In 1961, he signed on as staff secretary to Gov. Brown in charge of his Los Angeles office, spending legislative sessions in Sacramento for four years. Brown gave him frequent leaves of absence to work on local and statewide campaigns as a media specialist, including those for Sen. Clair Engle and Sen. Alan Cranston. During Pierre Salinger’s brief tenure in the U.S. Senate, Ringer was press secretary to the man who had been John F. Kennedy’s press secretary.
Robert F. Kennedy’s quest for the Democratic nomination for president was Ringer’s last political campaign. He was writing speeches for the senator at the time of his assassination.
His final stint in journalism was 10 years with the Los Angeles Times as an editorial writer on politics, government and the environment.
After retirement, he devoted his talents to his first love-poetry. A volume of 97 witty, elegant poems was published by Santa Monica Emeritus College. The title poem, “The Anchovy and the Pelican,” won the Malibu Poetry Prize for 2007. Ringer also contributed many poems to The Malibu Times Life & Arts section.
Ringer resided in Malibu for more than 40 years with his wife of 52 years, Vivian. Other survivors are his brother Harry, sister-in-law Evalyn, sister June Spotts, nephew Walter, and nieces Kristy Grawunder and Darlene Hansen.
A wake is planned at a later date for this exuberant Irishman.
Following is one of the last poems Ringer had written. Another is published on page B3 in the Life & Arts section this week.
Of Worms
and Graves
and Epitaphs
After standing at many another’s grave,
Heaping shovelfuls of dirt on a friend,
I have come to a firm conclusion
Cremation’s a more desirable end.
Burying me under six feet of topsoil,
The dank habitat of weeds and worms,
Doesn’t strike me as an after-life
With which I am eager to come to terms.
Shove me instead into a microwave
With the temperature set at high,
And when there’s nothing left but ashes,
Inurn me on the mantel, high and dry.
It will save you trips to the graveyard
To trim the grass and leave new roses,
While my corpus, always snug and warm,
Over the fireplace reposes.
I have no wish to molder away,
Blind and deaf to the world I knew,
Among strangers in a lonely place;
I would rather stay at home with you.
-Roy Ringer