To the photo staffs he nurtured and led during a decades-long career in journalism at the Daily Breeze and Press-Telegram, Chuck Bennett was more friend and family than boss.
When Bennett learned he had pancreatic cancer 2.5 years ago, he also, by example, passed on some important life lessons to many of his colleagues who had become and remained among his closest circle of friends.
“He was honest about it and he didn’t complain,” said Dean Musgrove, one of three photo editors for the Southern California News Group, which has 11 daily publications, including the Daily Breeze and Press-Telegram, along with the Los Angeles Daily News, Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribute and the Whittier Daily News. “I learned a life lesson about grace when facing such daunting odds.”
Bennett died on Aug. 20, about a month after his 60th birthday. He’d been under in-home hospice care for the last couple of months.
Bennett lived in San Pedro with his wife, Denise, and was born in Inglewood on July 24, 1965. He lived most of his early life in Poway in Northern San Diego.
He graduated from Poway High School and from Cal State Long Beach, studying journalism and serving on the campus newspaper, where he met his future wife in the mid-1980s — he was the chief photographer, while she was the chief copy editor. They married in 1991.
“I was on the word side and he was on the photo side,” she said.
Following college, Bennett worked as a photo editor at Newsday in New York. He and his wife, a Tribune News Service editor, both worked and lived on Long Island in those early years of their marriage.
After their first son, Chuck Jr., was born, the couple decided to return to their shared roots in Southern California.
“We’d had enough of the snow and had to get back to California,” she said.
Bennett arrived at the Daily Breeze in the late 1990s and stayed until 2018. He’d dealt pancreatic cancer off and on since 2023 but continued to work as a freelancer after his departure and throughout his later treatments, up until the final couple of months of his illness.
Frank Suraci, the former longtime city editor at the Daily Breeze who worked with Bennett for 20 years, said he admired and appreciated Bennett’s passion for local news.
“If he wasn’t in the office, he’d call me at all hours of the day or night to let me know something he’d heard that should be on our radar — whether it was a body at the bottom of a cliff or an explosion in the harbor or a massive police response somewhere.”
Many of the photographers who worked on the staff — some friends since college — remained close within Bennett’s inner circle through the years, gathering annually in the summer for family camping in Yosemite for more than 20 years, and keeping up a steady stream of texting and other frequent and impromptu gatherings throughout the year.
“He’d cook; he made fancy hors d’oeuvres and this bacon-wrapped shrimp,” said one of his closest friends, Brian van der Brug, an L.A. Times photographer who recently retired.
Bennett missed the Yosemite gathering for the first time this year, he said.
Former Breeze photographer Scott Varley, another close friend of Bennett’s who met him in college, said the Yosemite trips for the group were a summer highlight.
“We’d (also) go to Las Vegas,” Varley said. “There was a group of us from college, about eight of us or so.”
They got together for beers every few weeks and they all made sure to attend each other’s weddings and other big occasions wherever they were held.
“We’d all text each other during the Dodger games,” van der Brug said. “He had a wry sense of humor.”
As for coping with the unexpected diagnosis, “he was very practical,” van der Brug said, adding that Bennett followed his doctor’s advice for surgery and treatments, all while getting on with life. “Deal with it, right?”
“We’d confide in each other,” van der Brug said of his relationship with Bennett. “We were best friends.”
“Since last week,” Varley wrote in a social media post, “I’ve stopped myself from grabbing my phone to text him something inconsequential like I had done for years.”
Along with cooking, Bennett loved to travel, returning to Europe shorty after his diagnosis as part of an unofficial “bucket list,” Denise Bennett said, to visit some of the countries he’d missed seeing in the past.
An avid fan of Formula 1 racing, he walked the streets where the Monaco Grand Prix takes place during that final trip to Europe, in June 2024.
And in recent years, before his diagnosis, he’d found a new get-away, the tiny island of Tikehau, part of French Polynesia and close to Tahiti, where he would take photos and do some freelance work, deep sea fishing and “just enjoy the tropical life,” with family members often going along, Denise Bennett said.
He befriended the owners of the resort on the island and spent days there photographing the wildlife and birds, and nights shooting the stars — teaching others the basics of photography during his visits. Bennett also loved following the advances in space exploration, his wife said, and shot a number of the shuttle launches.
Bennett taught photography at El Camino College after leaving the Southern California News Group but continued to take freelance news assignments.
The photographers who worked on the staff remained close friends.
“I was just working with one of my best friends,” Varley said about working under Bennett at the Breeze. “He would say, ‘My job was to make your job easier.’”
Bennett was characteristically unflappable in the face of stress, very “chill,” as his wife described it.
“Sometimes working in a newsroom is hard, but Chuck was always looking for a way to make it a little better for everyone,” said Toni Sciacqua, digital managing editor at SCNG.
“Yes, he was a good photographer and leader,” she added. “He was part of Pulitzer-winning coverage over the course of his career. But he also was the host of Christmas parties and impromptu happy hours in the dark room and reminding us to take vacations and relax. He really seemed to enjoy hanging out with everyone and putting people at ease.”
The Daily Breeze won both a Pulitzer Prize and Scripps Howard award for local reporting in the same year — and Bennett was right in the middle of the celebrations.
“Chuck was the guy filling everyone’s champagne glasses during our celebrations,” Suraci said. “You couldn’t wipe that big smile off his face. He was so happy that our scrappy, close-knit group was getting some national attention.”
Through the years Bennett photographed all kinds of events — breaking news and routine events alike — that played out in L.A., including the Academy Awards a few times.
His last freelance assignment, just a few months ago, was one he specifically requested — joining with the SCNG photo team to help shoot the Grand Prix of Long Beach in April. It was an event he’d shot many times before.
“I think he wanted to push himself as long as he could,” his wife said. “Photography still brought him joy. He just wanted to live his life as normally as he could and for as long as he could.
“He was blessed with so many terrific people in his life,” she added, “and he liked to live his life to the fullest.”
Bennett is survived by his wife, Denise; two sons, Chuck Jr., 28, and James, 23; his parents, Chuck and Mary Bennett; and a sister, Mary Johnson.