By Tim Coffey, Special to the On-line Forty-Niner
April 24, 1997
In 1972, pre-season All American basketball guard Ed Ratliff was being compared to future NBA Hall of Famer Walt Frazier, who was then playing for the New York Knicks. His coach, Jerry Tarkanian, was preparing his nationally ranked 49ers for the up coming season.
Current state representative Steve Horn was president of the university and Ricardo Chavira was writing for the Daily Forty-Niner.
Fast-forward 25 years, all four men have left Cal State Long Beach but today, Ricardo Chavira, 46, returns as the featured speaker at Journalism Day. Chavira brings 22 years of professional journalistic experience and five national awards for journalism, including a Pulitzer Prize he won for international reporting in 1994.
Rather auspicious achievements for a man who dropped his first journalism class in high school and almost dropped his second one at Cal State Long Beach. If not for retired journalism instructor Ben Cunning-ham, he might not be the professional he is today.
After receiving several unacceptable grades in Cunning-ham's Journalism 110 class, he said he was ready to give up. Cunningham would not let him. "He [Cunningham] called me aside," Chavira said. "I looked discouraged, he told me: 'You'll be fine, stick with the class.'" Chavira never looked back.
In 1973, Chavira graduated from CSULB with a bachelor's degree in journalism.
In 1979, he got a call from The San Diego Union.
Sometime before the call, there had been a riot in a jail outside of Tijuana and the only reporter who spoke Spanish was an elderly lady.
The Union ended up getting the story by having janitors make phone calls to the jail and then interpreting their conversations to the reporters.
At The Union he initiated a beat in which he reported exclusively on Mexico and the U.S.- Mexico border. He developed so many contacts and sources that The Union established a Mexico City bureau. Unfortunately for them, Chavira had already left to work for Time Magazine.
Time Inc. Magazine Company, which also owns several other magazines including People and Fortune, first contacted Chavira in 1979. They wanted him to work for People, he held out for Time.
In 1983, they offered him a position as correspondent with Time. Time assigned him to their Mexico City bureau. In the next nine years, he would cover stories in 40 countries, including three U.S.- Soviet presidential summits, the Middle East peace process and U.S.- Japanese relations. Chavira said covering the summits made him feel special. "It's not like covering a city council meeting in Stockton. [It was] history in the making."
In 1992, he left to become an assistant international editor for The Dallas Morning News. He said that he had seen the writing on the wall and it was time to move on. The character of the magazine had changed to more features than hard news.
Two years later Chavira, as a member a 30-person team, won a Pulitzer for a series of related stories titled: "Violence Against Women: A Question of Human Rights." Comprised of 14 articles that ran from March 1993 to June 1993, it chronicled violence against women.
The stories came from 10 different countries ranging from India to Brazil to the U.S. The series had such an impact, that in India it led to the arrest of five men charged with rape. The rape victim's story had launched the series.
Chavira has come a long way from writing for the Forty- Niner. He said he feels his accomplishments are due, in a large part, to his training at CSULB. "I was always very thorough," Chavira said. "I was trained to be that way."
He said working on the Daily Forty-Niner helped him sharpen the skills
he would use in the real world. "It's like learning to read and write,
then reading a book.