The cheap start to an obituary about longtime Southern California journalist Kim Christensen would take you backward, maybe toss up a fact-filled recitation of his career followed by some quotes from people who knew him in the mid-1980s, when he started working at The Orange County Register.
Before he was a key member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for stories about fertility fraud at UC Irvine and abuse of immigrants by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, before his stories about sexual exploitation within the Boy Scouts won him a book contract – even before he mentored young journalists as they uncovered wrong in the tiny city of Bell – Kim Christensen was just one of many bullpen-dwelling reporters in a Register building painted a color tantalizingly close to Pepto Bismol.
“I lost count of the Los Panchos lunches we had together,” said Ed Humes, a former Register co-worker who won his own Pulitzer and has written 17 books. “Or the times he made me laugh out loud with his martini-dry one-liners.”
“I can’t imagine a better friend,” said another former co-worker, Martin Smith, who edited Orange Coast magazine for nine years ending in 2016.
“The party just got less interesting.”
But that approach would be glib. And while Christensen was a lot of things – a smart, dogged, old-school reporter; an elegant, what’s-gonna-happen-next kind of writer; a grandson of a journalism-loving family from Dayton, Ohio – he was never glib.
Funny? Always. Self-effacing? Almost comically so.
But Christensen was something else, too; a word he would never use himself but one that colleagues and friends used over and over since his death, Monday, April 15, of cancer, at age 71.
“Kim was important,” said Brent Walth, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Oregon who in 2001 shared the Pulitzer Prize with Christensen and two other reporters for their coverage of the INS, when they both worked at the Oregonian in Portland.
“His work was about justice, if that’s not too simple,” Walth said.
“He wouldn’t wave his arms or scream about his stories, and he didn’t ever come to a story with an agenda. But he had an innate sense of justice, and injustice, and that came through in every story he wrote.
“His stories mattered.”
He was born to it. Christensen’s grandfather edited the Dayton Daily News and his uncle was the paper’s correspondent in Washington, D.C. Though neither of his parents nor his four siblings worked in journalism, Christensen was interested from an early age.
“Always. I think, he always pretty much wanted to be in news,” said his widow, Chris Christensen, a food writer and editor who had been married to Chistensen for 37 years.
“Even when he wasn’t working, he was following everything in the news. It was really his life.”
Specifically, he was interested in investigations. Christensen had a few other beats early in his career at the Dayton paper, but by the time the Register hired him, in 1986, he was specializing in longer, deeper stories, often about government malfeasance or other types of systemic failures or frauds. Some of his first stories for the Register were written in the wake of the 1986 Cerritos air disaster, a collision involving a commercial jet and a private plane that killed 82 people, including eight in a neighborhood struck by falling debris.
The nightmare became fodder for dozens of follow-ups – many written by Christensen and Humes – about fatigued air traffic controllers and aging equipment and other problems that contributed to the crash.
Much of Christensen’s work, Humes wrote via email, “helped explain what an avoidable tragedy the Cerritos disaster had been.”
In 1995, Christensen was part of another team looking into allegations that fertility doctors at UC Irvine’s Center for Reproductive Health were harvesting eggs from women and transferring them into other patients without permission. At least 15 children were born after such transfers, leading to shocking discoveries for some families, a spate of lawsuits and, eventually, changes to state and federal law.
The stories balanced heart-wrenching emotion, bewildering genetic science and what was for a time a virtual Wild West of legal gaps surrounding fertility work. It won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1996.
“Kim could take something that was very complex and explain it in ways that were never dull and never talking down to readers,” said Tonnie Katz, the Register’s editor during the fertility investigation who chose Christensen to help after other reporters learned about the allegations against the doctors.
“He was the perfect writer to work on that story,” Katz said.
Walth said the same about Christensen’s work at the Oregonian. Another team effort, this time involving the illegal detainment of immigrants and some citizens, and widespread cruelty within the former INS, was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2001.
Walth said Christensen – who’d been recruited from the Register by the Oregonian in 1999 – wrote key stories and passages that crystalized years of work into “clear, coherent, human words.”
“He had a rare gift.”
That gift stayed with him until the end of his life.
After moving back to Southern California and taking a job with the Los Angeles Times in 2005, Christensen covered dozens of stories about everything from abuses in hospices to lead poisoning from a battery plant. But his work in the late 2010s about how the Boy Scouts of America covered up years of sexual abuse became a capstone for his journalism career.
In 2020 he got an offer to write a book about the Boy Scouts scandal and, in 2022, he left the Times, in part so he could complete that project. By late last year, he’d done just that, turning in a manuscript that will be published next year as “On My Honor: The Secret History of the Boy Scouts of America.”
But in late January – as he was starting to handle last-minute questions from editors that are a standard part of non-fiction publishing – Christensen was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, and the prognosis wasn’t optimistic. For weeks, as he balanced chemotherapy infusions, Christensen worked whenever possible to complete his first book.
At times, that meant only brief windows when he had the energy to sit at a computer.
“But he was so focused, and so used to deadlines, that he could get a lot of beauty into a short time,” Chris Christensen said.
Last week, she added, Christensen saw the book’s cover art.
“He was pleased.”
On Tuesday, as she heard from friends and family, Chris Christensen said she had a tough call to make: One of the victims in the Boy Scouts scandal – a man who was initially a source for Christensen – has become one of Christensen’s closer friends, Chris said it’s likely she would be the first to relay the news of his death.
“He’ll take it hard,” she said.
“We all have.”
In addition to his wife, who lives in Long Beach, Christensen is survived by children Gayle Keith Rea, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and Michael Davis of Long Beach, two grandchildren and two great-grandsons.
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