They say celebrity deaths come in threes.

The local journalism community has recently lost three people who had an outsized role in doing journalism as well as teaching it. While they weren’t celebrities, they touched people’s lives in a meaningful way.

George Gruner, former executive editor of The Fresno Bee, died on Aug. 25 at 99. A veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, Gruner enjoyed a 44-year career in journalism, including 33 years at The Bee. He’s best known as a member of the Fresno Four, a group of Bee journalists who went to jail rather than reveal the source in a story about possible corruption in government contracting.

His name will live on through the George F. Gruner Awards for Meritorious Public Service in Journalism, awarded annually by the Department of Media, Communications and Journalism at Fresno State. The awards honor outstanding Central Valley journalism, and The Business Journal has been fortunate enough to win some Gruner awards over the years.

It was a treat when Gruner himself was able to make the awards ceremony, as he did this past April on the Fresno State campus. He talked about his start in journalism as a copy boy in January 1942, back when newspapers were profitable. He also talked about the modern fight against artificial intelligence, and protecting news content in the current information ecosystem — or what he just wanted to call the news business.

His message to the room of journalists was that we still had an obligation to bring another generation into the fold, to continue the tradition of journalism. He was poetic in describing his legacy and those of his colleagues, including Donald Slinkard, former Fresno Bee managing editor who died a year ago.

“Last year I was a relic. This year I’m just a footprint — frozen in a piece of lava-like hot type from long ago,” Gruner said at his namesake awards ceremony in April. “Not a T-rex but more like a brontosaurus, but just a little one.”

Another journalist we lost recently, Lloyd G. Carter, contributed to a story that shook the environmental and farming worlds. GV Wire special contributor Jim Guy said Carter’s reporting on the environmental disaster at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge near Los Banos in 1984 rattled the Reagan administration.

 

Carter worked for United Press International and the Fresno Bee from 1969 to 1990, becoming an expert in California’s water system. In 1984 he witnessed firsthand the mutations of migratory waterfowl at the Kesterson refuge, where farm runoff contributed to high levels of salt and harmful minerals in the soil. He tangled with officials in the highest levels of the Reagan Administration — and even his own editors — to get the story out, Guy reported.

Carter had a mid-career job change, going to law school in his 40s and becoming a deputy state attorney general. It was there when I had a chance to interact him. He passed along some encouragement and story leads. I appreciated the former but wasn’t equipped to take on the latter.

Over the weekend we lost Kathy Bonilla, public information officer for Fresno City College and a local television news veteran. Bonilla was always a helpful resource for local journalists reporting on Fresno City College, and was also an incredible resource for the journalism program there and the award-winning Rampage student newspaper.

 

Bonilla’s passing came as a shock to many, as expressed on social media. That’s where she shared in 2018 six months of successful recovery from a kidney transplant at UCSF Medical Center. She had returned to work, and continued sending out email news releases up until Aug. 9. Prior to that, she worked as a news producer for local television stations including KSEE 24 and KJEO, which is now KGPE 47, according to LinkedIn.

Researching an incident I remembered from my childhood in Fresno, I found a piece of history related to Bonilla. She worked at KJEO in 1987 when a man wielding a toy gun forced his way into the studio and made sportscaster Marc Cotta read a religious message.

United Press International reported that the man was jailed on a charge of false imprisonment. The incident also highlights the dangerous nature of journalism, as a possible target of any number of groups, from the mentally ill to elected officials and criminals.

These journalists serve as a link to another era of the news business, and each gave back to the industry in varying and invaluable ways. I’m glad to have encountered them in my own career.