Even school named after him forgot L.A. journalist Del Olmo

Let’s honor the life of the trailblazing Times reporter and editor 20 years after his death.

Staff members at Frank del Olmo Elementary were puzzled when I asked about the school’s namesake.

His name was all around us, after all. On the fanciful mural of books, a falcon (the school mascot), a quill pen and an inkwell with the slogan “Make a Difference in the World.” On school Tshirts advertised for sale on banners in English and Spanish hanging from a fence. On the framed, fancy city proclamation signed in 2006 by then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to mark the opening of this boxy, twostory, three-acre school on the edge of Historic Filipinotown.

But I couldn’t find much that told the world who Frank del Olmo was .A trailblazing reporter, columnist and editor for the Los Angeles Times. The first Latino on the paper’s masthead. A founding member of the California Chicano News Media Assn. An inductee into the National Assn. of Hispanic Journalists Hall of Fame. A longtime champion of the oppressed, and a burr to the powerful.

I visited Frank del Olmo Elementary on Tuesday to pay my respects, a day after the 20th anniversary of his death from a heart attack at just 55 outside his office at the old downtown Times headquarters, which drew condolences from then-Mexican President Vicente Fox and Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez. At Del Olmo’s funeral, then-Times editor John Carroll told an audience of nearly 900 that the paper and Los Angeles would “always remember” Del Olmo. We didn’t.

The only hint of Del Olmo’s accomplishments I could find was on that mural facing Vermont Avenue. Under his name was the

word “journalist.” The inkwell bore a faint outline of the Pulitzer Prize medal, which he and other staffers won in 1984 for a pioneering series on Latinos in Southern California.

I thought I’d find more at the school’s entrance, where two plaques were bolted on columns. Nope. One plaque commemorated “the Americanization of Godzilla,” which took place in 1956 when footage was filmed here for the English-language version of the monster classic. The other saluted the firm that finished building the school, more than a year behind schedule.

A secretary then remembered that there was something scratched out on the sidewalk just in front of the attendance office. I briskly walked outside. A concrete slab bore the name of Frank del Olmo Elementary’s founding principal and imprints of his hands.

Del Olmo never entered the public consciousness like his predecessor, Ruben Salazar, the Times columnist killed in 1970 by a tear gas canister fired by a Los Angeles County sheriff ’s deputy during the Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles. Del Olmo’s work barely registers in journalism schools today. This paper long ago ended its Frank del Olmo Impact Award for a high school newspaper whose work made a difference in the community. One of the only traces of him in the journalism world is a scholarship in his name from CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California. A friend had to remind me that Monday marked 20 years since Del Olmo’s death, and then I had to remind colleagues.

Obsolescence is sadly the fate of most reporters. We write our stories, we hope for a reaction from readers that often doesn’t come, we move on to the next article. Our clips inevitably gather literal and digital dust, remembered only by a few. And that’s a career.

It’s a fate that Del Olmo doesn’t deserve. He and late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl are the only journalists with a Los Angeles Unified school named after them. It’s because of Del Olmo that The Times has as many Latino reporters and editors as we do. He fought for representation in the newsroom and in our stories to the literal end of his life. On that day, Del Olmo was supposed to have lunch with Latino staffers to discuss how management could better support an initiative to cover Latinos, recalled former Times editor Frank Sotomayor and current Times editors Steve Padilla and Nancy Rivera

Brooks.

We’ve never marked the anniversary of Del Olmo’s death in the five years I’ve been here — not a Slack post, not a companywide email, nada. So I wasn’t surprised that the school has forgotten as well. If there’s little to mark Del Olmo’s legacy at his namesake school and the paper where he worked, how can we expect the rest of the city to remember him?

Staff buzzed me back into the office. Waiting for me this time was secondyear assistant principal Veronica Ciafone.

“I didn’t know who Frank del Olmo was before I transferred here, so I read all about him,” the 45-year-old South L.A. native said as we walked across campus toward the library. Someone had mentioned they thought a Del Olmo marker was there. “I wanted to understand why they would name a school after a person and not after a street.”

Just inside the library entrance was a framed yellow poster featuring a black-and-white image of a smiling Del Olmo. “My hope has been for a career that would allow [me] to make at least a small difference in the world,” it stated in Spanish.

“He died young, didn’t he?” Ciafone said before asking the librarian if there was anything else. Nothing.

The lunch bell rang. I expected a rush of kids. I hoped to ask if they knew anything about Del Olmo. No one came.

“Rainy day schedule,” Ciafone said with a smile.

We walked back to her office, decorated with mementos from her career — photos, a small Chinese dragon, a USC pennant. She reached into her desk and pulled out a hardcover edition of “Frank del Olmo: Commentaries on His Times,” an anthology of his work published a few months after his death.

“In college, we heard a lot about Ruben Salazar, but nothing about Frank del Olmo,” she said. “Even where I was before, I remember there was a Ruben Salazar scholarship.”

Ciafone searched on her laptop. She showed me a flier for it.

“It’s unfortunate,” said the daughter of Mexican immigrants, “because Frank del Olmo’s contributions to Latinos were obviously significant as well.”

He was more than just a figurehead Latino, I responded. Del Olmo is pigeonholed as a Chicano voice — but he was an L.A. voice, period.

He wrote about secession fights in his native San Fernando Valley and the rise of labor in city politics. He