Virginia Schnitt

1943 - 2020

Virginia Schnitt
February 3, 1943 - December 24, 2020
Sacramento, California - Virginia Schnitt, an award winning newspaper journalist whose career spanned more than 45 years, including 21 years with the Los Angeles Times, died on Christmas Eve. She was 77.
With the Times, she worked those years out of the newspaper's state Capitol bureau in Sacramento -- 16 as a reporter, and the last five as bureau chief. Throughout her career she wrote under the name Virginia Ellis.
At the time of her promotion to bureau chief, Dean Baquet, then the Times managing editor, described Virginia as the "quintessential statehouse reporter...She's covered the biggest of them, (Texas, Florida, California), and she broke the best investigative story in the state last year (2000)."
Over several months, Virginia's stories exposed misconduct by former California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush. Ultimately facing impeachment, Quackenbush resigned his elected office in March 2001.
In recognition of those stories, Virginia won the 2000 George Polk Award for political reporting, one of journalism's most prestigious honors.
She also received the Selden Ring Award for investigative journalism awarded by the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. It came with the $25,000 prize recognizing the year's outstanding investigative work in the United States.
Virginia was the first reporter for the LA Times to receive the Selden Ring Award.
In typical fashion, Virginia didn't let the professional honor obscure the practicalities. "Well, this will pay for a new roof," she said at the time.
Recalling many of Virginia's hard-hitting political investigations, Darryl Young, former director of the California Department of Conservation, emphasized emphatically,"It wasn't only Quackenbush!"
Linda Rogers, the Times state news editor, recalled Virginia's stories of the incredible sinking 105 Freeway that was built too close to the water table which undermined the roadbed.
"Officials covered up the construction error and tried to pump out the water when it rose, but the road was buckling as people drove on it," Rogers said. "The story was picked up by NBC."
"Wherever she went Virginia caught crooks with their hands in the public cookie jar." said Max Vanzi, a longtime colleague in the Times Capitol bureau. "In California, she was the bane to the existence of Governors Deukmejian, Brown, Wilson, Davis, Schwarzenegger and Brown again."
Virginia was born in the town of Stuart, in Palm Beach County, Fla. She graduated from the University of Florida. After working for the Palm Beach Post-Times and the Tampa Times, she was hired by The St. Petersburg Times in 1967 where she covered city hall and the county commission before being transferred to the State Capitol bureau in Tallahassee in 1973.
She then served as Capitol bureau chief of the Dallas Times Bureau from 1980 to1988 when she joined the LA Times. At the time there were nine male reporters in the Capitol bureau. She was the only woman.
Still, those other veteran reporters were awed by her watchdog journalism skills, some that were unorthodox.
"Her ability to get to the bottom of a story with that 'Honey, aren't you sweet'
Southern folksiness' caught the targets of her stories off guard," said former Times colleague Mark Gladstone, now assistant city editor with the Houston Chronicle.
And it wasn't only in California where Virginia uncovered political corruption and indifference to necessary reform.
Ralph Frammolino, a colleague at the Dallas Times Herald, remembers Virginia exposing Texas lawmakers being on dove hunting junkets.
At the Times Herald, she exposed the horrible conditions in Texas nursing homes -- the elderly left to lie in their own filth for days, and without medical care for weeks. It ultimately led to reform by the Texas state legislature.
She and colleague Dale Rice then launched a series that led to major federal court cases and reform and improved conditions of the mentally retarded and mentally ill in the state prison system. One story, published Sept. 11, 1988, headlined "Mentally Retarded and Sentenced to Death."
Rice described Virginia as "an incredible mentor to other reporters, those early in their career, those who were well along in theirs," said Rice, now director of the Texas A&M School of Communications and Journalism. "I never knew a better journalist."
It was a view shared by Harry Whittington, a prominent Austin, Texas, lawyer who was on the Texas Prison Board under Republican Gov. Bill Clements and was a vital source on the story for Virginia and Dale.
"She was the sharpest reporter I ever ran into," said Whittington, now 93.
Thirty years before the coverage of the misdeeds by Quackenbush, there was Tom O'Malley, another elected insurance commissioner and state treasurer from a different state -- Florida -- who came under scrutiny.
Virginia was the lead reporter for the St. Petersburg Times in investigating O'Malley during the 1970s.
"Her stories had a lot to do with the state's decision to launch a criminal investigation," said Martin Dyckman, former Times bureau chief in Tallahassee.
O'Malley was implicated in corruption charges, indicted, impeached, removed from office, convicted and sentenced to prison.
"She honed her skills on Tom O'Malley," then Quackenbush would become the target decades later, Dyckman quipped.
Virginia had her own guiding lights to pursue wrongdoing. "When you're covering people, you get a sense about them," she said in an interview in 2001. She started examining Chuck Quackenbush after noticing that "he never really took action that was adverse to the (insurance) industry."
Virginia's journalism career, then retirement, left time for other pursuits including gardening, travel and digging into her family history and that of her husband, Paul.
Her gardening guiding principle seemed to have been "Leave no bare spots where I could squeeze in another flowering plant." She was forever planting rose bushes in the front and back yard, amassing scores of potted plants of every imaginable variety on the front porch, the back patio, around the deck and on the side yard.
Often people walking by would stop to take in the splash of colors. Once, an older couple stopped to take in the scene, then started walking away, only to quickly return to snap a photo of a crepe myrtle tree covered with large clusters of gorgeous pink flowers.
Virginia enjoyed traveling with her husband, taking in the redwoods along the northern coast, the national parks in the Southwest, New York City, Montreal, Vancouver.
The world opened up: There was a week-long Viking Cruise on the Elbe River from Germany to Prague, trips to London, Paris, Rome and Venice, two weeks in the Netherlands checking out all its tall citizens riding to work and to the grocery store on their bicycles, the World War I battlefield of Verdun, two weeks "living" in Barcelona, and, of course, strolling down its famous street, La Rambla.
In Berlin they visited the remnants of the barbed wire and concrete wall that divided the city for nearly 30 years and the stark memorial to the Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.
They were swallowed up by the vastness of Mexico City. Separately, there was the trip to central Mexico and the college town of Guanajuato.
We spent time in Buenos Aires, then flew to the city of Ushuaia, whose claim to fame is being the southernmost city in America. Next land to its south was Antarctica.
The Schnitts last foreign travel was to Hong Kong about two years ago, not suspecting that the Communist government in Beijing would soon begin cracking down on the area's political independence.
In their mid 40s, Virginia and Paul put on snow skis for the first time in their lives (briefly), and took up camping with their son Barry in the state parks. Sunset Beach overlooking Monterey Bay and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park were two of their favorites.
Retirement in 2009 gave Virginia an opportunity to apply those journalism skills to family ancestry.
One Scotish clan went back to the 10th century that included a discovery that stunned Virginia.
"My family were marauders!" she exclaimed.
To her dismay, she found that her family in Virginia held slaves for two generations.
There were family members who fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and on both sides of the Civil War.
Her great grandfather, Paul Hoenshel, was an educator from Pennsylvania who came to Virginia in the latter part of the 18th century and fulfilled his dream of opening a school for teachers. He was a hundred years ahead of his time inviting women to attend the school and hiring women as teachers.
Her husband Paul's ancestors were part of the wave of Jewish immigration from Russia and Poland who arrived between the 1880s and 1920.
Virginia poured over ship manifests, passenger arrival lists at Ellis Island from 1892 to 1924, U.S. and New York State census information and the Newburgh city directory for 1940 to 1954.
Virginia is survived by her husband Paul of 46 years, son Barry of Woodside, and grandchildren Cole and Avery.
In 2021, we expect to have a celebration of Virginia's life. If you would like to do something in the meantime, in lieu of flowers, please support the "fearless journalism" of ProPublica.