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Yet Lock Honored for Paving the Way for Asian Americans

By HOWARD HO
AAJA-LA.org

LOS ANGELES, May 2004 – Yet Lock, executive vice president of City News Service, is a modest man who has managed to shun the spotlight while in service to the Southern California community since the late 1960s. So when Mayor James K. Hahn and the City Council honored Lock for his contributions as an Asian American in journalism, he didn’t mention it to Douglas Faigin, a friend and colleague of more than 30 years. “Information is always available from Yet about things in the community, but if it’s about him personally, especially when it’s a very impressive thing like this, he’s very reluctant to talk about it too much,” said Faigin, president of Los Angeles-based CNS.

Lock received a plaque from Hahn during ceremonies April 30 at City Hall to kick off the May celebration of Asian Pacific-Islander American Heritage Month. There on the south lawn, Lock returned to the place where he was first employed in Los Angeles as a press secretary for then-Mayor Sam Yorty in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But don’t expect Lock to think of it as some kind of homecoming.

“You know what? I never thought of it until you brought it up,” Lock said.

While working at City Hall, Lock paved the way for Asian Americans by serving in Yorty’s administration, which was the first to be truly racially integrated in Los Angeles. Yorty’s tenure ended in 1973, and Lock followed then-Deputy Mayor Joseph Quinn to his privately owned CNS, a wire service that provides breaking news to the major television, radio and print media in Southern California.

Running the business side of CNS, Lock managed to expand the range of service throughout the community, including signing up more than 130 subscribers as close as the L.A. Times and as far away as Hong Kong and Kyoto. But what can’t be quantified are the ripple effects of Lock’s efforts.

“It’s not enough to say that Yet’s knowledge and involvement in the Asian community has directly translated into coverage with CNS,” Faigin said. “But because CNS is the conduit to the rest of the media about what’s going on in the city and county of L.A., it’s had a direct and very significant impact on what all of media cover.”

Perhaps the greatest journalistic influence Lock has had recently has come from his work on the media committee for Los Angeles’ courts. As a representative of CNS and its clients, he helped organize news coverage for both the civil and criminal trials of O.J. Simpson and will serve on the committee for the upcoming Robert Blake murder trial.

During the first Simpson trial in 1995, he helped arrange seating assignments for the print media and made arrangements for real-time court reporter transcripts to be transmitted on the Internet. Under Lock’s supervision and negotiation, CNS put together the software to decode the transcripts and upload them through two dozen dial-up modems to media across the country. When Judge Lance Ito (who coincidentally was another Asian American honored by the city on April 30) ordered the courtroom cameras to cease momentarily near the end of the criminal trial, Lock’s transcript service became the only conduit for court proceedings to the media. But mention the unprecedented scale of this operation and Lock’s modesty kicks in once again.

“I don’t know,” he said, when asked if that was the first time such a service had been set up. “It was the first time in L.A. You don’t think about those things. You just have to get it done.”

Lock’s modesty can be traced to his childhood in tiny Hughes, Ark., about 36 miles west of Memphis. His parents had immigrated to St. Louis from China and later bought a grocery store in Hughes; Lock’s brother still lives in the town, which has a population of less than 2,000.

When Lock was in Hughes, there was only one other Asian family in town. With his Southern drawl, Lock recalls listening to the news on the radio with his father as an early influence. After his older sister went to Chicago and recommended that he attend Northwestern, Lock decided to leave the small town to pursue his undergraduate degree in journalism at the university’s Medill School. When Lock graduated, his compass pointed decidedly west.

“I didn’t like Chicago. I didn’t see any future in going back to Arkansas,” Lock said. “I didn’t have any desire to go east. But there were a lot of Asians out in Southern California. I think that had something to do with it.”

In Los Angeles, Lock found himself in at the epicenter of an emerging Asian American community. He was volunteering his time to the incipient Chinatown Service Center (which he later served as president), the newly formed East West Players (“There was no theater. There was no staff. It was just a guy named Mako. He was the driving force.”) and the Asian American Journalists Association (which he served as an early member and later as a national and local board member).

Lock parlayed his business skills and media connections into a fundraising and problem-solving force for those organizations as well as the Los Angeles Chinese Chamber of Commerce, eventually serving as its president as well. Lock did all this while maintaining his 30-plus-year career at CNS.

“I think there’s another twin of his,” his colleague Faigin joked.

Lock sees himself as a facilitator who tries to make himself useful in the community. He still chairs the Asian Pacific American Friends of the Center Theatre Group, which he helped to put on successful productions like the recent revisionist “Flower Drum Song.” He remains on AAJA-L.A.’s advisory board. But for all his efforts to strengthen organizations that have become established institutions during his tenure, Lock suggests that they were happy accidents – that had he been elsewhere, one can safely assume he would be just as involved.

“If there’s a problem, you try to work on the problem and try to see how you can be helpful,” Lock said. “Whenever they occurred, I happened to be there.”

At the City Hall ceremony, Lock found himself reacquainted with something he hadn’t seen for a while: his name in Chinese. As Chinese-language reporters asked him to write it, a woman who had remembered his name from an earlier article came forward and provided it.

Although Lock’s Chinese is admittedly rusty, there is no doubt this humble man has great pride in his cultural roots. And while still going strong at CNS, with plaque in hand, Lock finally got a taste of the community’s appreciation for the legacy his work will leave behind.

“It’s a good feeling,” he said, “to have something like that.”

Howard Ho is a freelance writer and composer and 2003 graduate of UCLA. He was an assistant editor at the Daily Bruin and has written for Entertainment Weekly. He last wrote for AAJA-LA.org about his experiences at the Chinese American Museum.