About the Photographer, Philip Lawrence Ronney

The furious mob raced hysterically back and forth in front of tense, helmeted, riot police. At the corner of 11^th and Figueroa, in downtown Los Angeles, the mob of hundreds of demonstrators, mostly young adults, taunted the baton wielding swat teams, and screamed obscenities towards Staples Center where the 2000 Democratic convention was nominating Al Gore as its flag bearer for the coming election. That sultry summer afternoon in Los Angeles reeked with the acrid smell of half-burned flares, marijuana and human sweat. Police bullhorns whined unintelligible orders at the screaming, chanting crowd. Over the din of noise one man danced half-naked in the street in front of horse-mounted LAPD officers daring them to arrest him. Neither horses nor their booted riders flinched, and the shirtless young man soon disappeared into the crowd. An order was given, and hundreds of police quickly fitted gas masks and plastic face shields into place.

I was there. I am a television news cameraman. I was on the sidewalk, off to the side, in a good position to see it all. To video tape it all. When the riot squad moved moments later, north down Figuaroa, they marched quickly, in a skirmish line formation, batons facing forward. The demonstrators, who moments ago acted tough as nails, in the face of armed police now broke ranks in a panic and dashed back up Figuaroa, north past Olympic, and north to parts unknown. It was not my first riot and probably will not be my last. But I somehow survived that situation in one piece as I have survived so many other dangerous events here in peaceful, sunny California.

There were other dangerous situations I can remember today. Starting in 1965, the Watts Riots. The Berkeley free speech and antiwar demonstrations, often ending in violence, tear gas assaults and arrests. The San Francisco State riots, the U.C Santa Barbara riots, which the California National Guard finally helped to quell. Then more demonstrations and arrests at UCLA when then Governor Ronald Reagan would attend Regents’ meetings in the early 70’s. And I remember carrying huge video recording equipment up and down the hills above Sunset Blvd. in Beverly Hills, when crowds tried to storm the house of the mother of the Shah of Iran. I can still feel and searing heat and smoke from getting too close to raging brush fires that often burned from the Ventura freeway to the Pacific Coast highway.

Then of course there was the civil unrest that followed the Rodney King trials in 1992. That was the only time I was injured covering one of these stories. I had pulled my live Mini-cam van across the street from group of burning stores on La Brea Ave. near Venice Blvd. We established a link with our home studio, KCBS. My reporter, Angela Estelle, and I were asked to go "live" almost immediately. I was portable, (meaning the camera was on my shoulder.) We had been live for about ten seconds when a man, dressed in shabby clothes, perhaps homeless, ran out of the crowd of spectators who were watching the fires. He had a hammer. He struck me with the hammer on my left shoulder. The force of the blow knocked the camera off my shoulder, but I somehow managed to catch it on the way down. With the camera cradled in both of my arms, the assailant banged the camera twice, leaving a crack in the side of the case. I could see the smashed circuit boards inside the camera. I thought we were probably off the air, but I put the camera back on my shoulder, it was still making a picture and we continued the live report. Angela had to spend the next thirty seconds explaining why the picture suddenly was upside down.

In the year 2000, I was again at Staples center in downtown Los Angeles, when violence broke out after the Lakers won the NBA championship. Oh yes, close calls in Helicopters, 2 events. And of course I can’t forget the incident in the Supulveda Basin. I was covering heavy rain problems in a flood control area of the San Fernando Valley on Burbank Blvd. Within five minutes, the waters rose so fast, my truck was trapped under 4 feet of water, I had to wade to safety, with a wet camera on my shoulder, later to be rescued by Helicopter. From the air we watched as the bridge I was stranded on was inundated by flood waters. The good news, I saved the camera and tape which aired just a few hours later.

But there have been other stories, perhaps not life threatening, but as important to the history of contemporary California that I have watched from behind my camera. Let me see if I can remember some of them. There was the Kennedy assassination at the Ambassador hotel in 1968. The arrest and trial of the infamous Charlie Manson. Press conferences with then Governor Ronald Reagan in Sacramento, followed by Governor Jerry Brown. Quite a contrast in styles. There were the Isleton floods, the Patricia Hearst Kidnapping, two Presidential assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford. I was at both of those.

Who can forget the famous O.J. Simpson car chase and later his arrest on murder charges, followed by the two trials. The criminal trial was one of the most difficult stories for everyone in the media to cover. Every day hundreds of journalists and spectators crowded around the Los Angeles Criminal Court building to watch the spectacle as famous attorneys and celebrities paraded up and down the court house steps. Many reporters I have talked to feel in some ways that they have never recovered from the pressure of covering that trial.

Weekly Excursions

I was jolted out of bed in 1971 by the San Fernando Earthquake and covered stories relating to the 1995 Northridge earthquake, although fortunately I was out of town when it originally hit. My last big story was the earthquake in Paso Robles in December of 2003.  That’s the short list. I know I’ll remember some others as soon as this is published.

After thirty-eight years in this business, and almost two years into retirement, you might be wondering: how does all this relate to my serene, desolate still photographs of ghost towns now available to you on this web site? Good question.

It is my way to escape,  my way to calm down, to find peace in a troubled world.   Sometimes, when I stand alone at the edge of a deserted building, surrounded by wild flowers and sage brush, with its weather beaten, sagging timbers silently whispering to me of times past, I feel a deep sense of relief, of healing.

So if you choose to bring one of my Photographs into your home. Put it on the wall in your own quiet place. When the world seems too hectic, to impossible to endure even for one more hour, grab a cold one, sit back in your favorite chair and put yourself inside one of these pictures and escape. Escape backward in time, backward to a quieter place, a calmer place. Escape back with me and visit, if only for a few minutes, the ghosts of Highway 395.

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