Dick Singer
“Some of my earliest memories are of bigoted bullies,” said local journalist and author Dick Singer. “I spent the first seven years of my life in a public housing project in Chicago, the only Jewish family in an otherwise poor Italian and Irish neighborhood. There was one Black kid in my class and one Puerto Rican — we’d hang out together at recess and cover each others’ backs,” he remembered.
It’s perhaps not surprising then that so much in Singer’s varied careers involved turning a spotlight on racial, religious and civil rights issues. One of his first assignments as a reporter was coverage of a Latino neighborhood’s long battle to maintain its unique identity in the face of impending urban renewal. He later authored a series of forty Page One articles on the area’s Latino population in the Whitter Daily News that won several honors, became an in-service training publication for local schools and earned him Whittier’s Outstanding Young Man of the Year Award in 1973.
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As editor and associate publisher of the Monrovia News-Post in 1987, Singer’s editorials supported the early candidacies of Bob Bartlett and Laura Larimendi Blakely, Monrovia’s first African-American mayor and first Latina council member, respectively.
Leaving journalism, Singer later served as Executive Vice President and manager of the Monrovia Chamber of Commerce. His tenure there saw diversification of the Chamber’s board and the first Black and South Asian Chamber presidents. He organized and moderated a series of town meetings that addressed current racial divides; one such meeting resulted in the formation of the Boys & Girls Club of the Foothills. He was also a founder and administrator, along with Charlotte Schamadan, of the Monrovia Leadership Academy, that trained diverse residents for service in local government and community organizations. Several of its enrollees went on to City Council, Planning Commission, School Board, Library Board and similar posts. Singer also wrote the application that resulted in Monrovia’s 1995 All-America City Award recognizing the community’s successes in both economic and interracial progress.
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For twenty-five years, Singer served on the board of directors of Santa Anita Family Service—fifteen of them as board president. Other boards on which served include The Intercommunity Blind Center, the Intercommunity Counseling Service, the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church halfway house and the Casa de Mayo drug rehabilitation program.
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From 2000 to 2010 he served as the City of Monrovia’s Public Information Officer and was a Deputy City Manager at retirement. Since then, he has written five books on Monrovia history. His Renaissance Years and People Like You and Me, in particular, deal with Monrovia’s historical racial, ethnic and religious struggles, highlighting residents and business leaders who led the way to today’s relative harmony.
He was a founding board member of Monrovia Changemakers.
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