By KEVIN WING | Chairperson, Archive & Museum Committee

Fred Zehnder, a lifelong Bay Area and northern California television news and print journalist for more than six decades who went on to a colorful, storied career as the longtime news director of KTVU Channel 2 in Oakland, lost his life in the late hours of Sunday evening, June 27. He was 87.

Alameda police said Zehnder was struck and killed by an alleged drunk driver at about 10 p.m. as he was in a crosswalk at Lincoln Avenue and Walnut Street. Police said the driver of the truck was under the influence.

The driver was heading east on Lincoln Avenue in a raised Ford F150 truck, according to authorities. Police have not determined how fast the suspect was going, but he stayed at the scene. Police determined the driver, identified as 30-year-old Michael Williams Alexander of Hayward, was under the influence of either drugs or alcohol. He was booked into Santa Rita Jail with his bail set at $250,000.

Zehnder was KTVU’s news director for 21 years, from 1978 to 1999. Although he retired from KTVU in 1999, he continued as publisher and editor of the San Leandro Times newspaper, which he launched in the early 1990s. He took over the Castro Valley Forum newspaper in later years, and was publishing both weekly newspapers up until his untimely death Sunday night.

A 1991 inductee of the Silver Circle of the San Francisco/Northern California Chapter of The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Zehnder was a native of Lakeport, in Lake County. He began his journalism career as a copy boy at the Lake County Bee. During his military service with the U.S. Army in the 1950s, Zehnder was appointed broadcast director for the Army’s information office at Fort Bliss, Texas. He was the first news director at KVIQ-TV in Eureka. Following his time on the North Coast, he relocated to Los Angeles briefly to work as a news producer there. In the 1960s, he was an assignment editor, producer, writer and photographer at KPIX in San Francisco. In the early 1970s, he relocated to Sacramento to become executive producer at KOVR.

In 1974, he returned to the Bay Area to become assignment editor at KTVU. He left KTVU in 1976 to become assistant news director at KGO-TV in San Francisco, returning to KTVU as news director in 1978, where he would remain until his retirement in May 1999.

Zehnder, who was honored with numerous honors throughout his career including five regional Emmys, received the Governors’ Award in 2000, the highest honor that the Chapter can bestow upon any individual.