FishbowlLA

The KCBS newsroom-cat story — Dorothy Lucey, Michael Horowicz, and the Columbia Square rodent fix

By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, September 2012

In early September 2012, FishbowlLA caught a second wave of reaction to former Good Day LA anchor Dorothy Lucey’s blog launch. A previous-day Lucey-coverage piece had prompted longtime KCBS producer Michael Horowicz to share a story from the early 1990s, when Lucey had been a KCBS personality and the station’s Columbia Square offices had been overrun by rodents. The fix: a cat named “KC” — Lucey’s choice, the name said to be “better than BS.” The cat got the run of the newsroom and once, famously, sat on noon anchor Tritia Toyota’s lap mid-broadcast. The original FishbowlLA framing called it an episode that “keeps on giving.”

Then

Dorothy Lucey had been a longtime LA-local-TV-news personality across multiple stations and decades. The 2012 blog launch was part of her post-on-camera-career media transition. The Michael Horowicz reminiscence — sent in response to FBLA’s earlier coverage — was structurally a small documented insider-LA-TV-newsroom history submission from someone who had been there.

The KCBS Columbia Square location — the historic broadcasting complex on Sunset Boulevard at Gower Street, which had been the West Coast headquarters of CBS Radio and CBS Television for decades — had its own institutional-history texture. The rodent problem the early-1990s Lucey-and-Horowicz crew had been managing was a small documented operational quirk of working in a 1930s-era broadcasting facility.

Tritia Toyota — KCBS’s noon anchor at the time of the cat-on-lap incident — had been one of LA’s more visible 1980s-and-1990s Asian-American television-news figures. Her not-flinching response to the cat sitting on her lap mid-broadcast was the kind of professionalism-under-unusual-circumstances anecdote that ended up becoming a small piece of station folklore.

The original FishbowlLA framing was warmly anecdotal — the kind of in-the-community small-LA-media-history piece that FBLA periodically surfaced from reader correspondence.

Now

The KCBS Columbia Square location was vacated in 2007 when CBS Television and KCBS moved to the CBS Studio Center in Studio City. Columbia Square itself was subsequently redeveloped — the 2010s mixed-use redevelopment by Kilroy Realty produced the current Columbia Square office-and-residential complex, with the historic Hollywood-era CBS buildings preserved as part of the broader redevelopment. The 2017 Netflix Hollywood headquarters lease in the redeveloped Columbia Square complex was one of the more substantial subsequent tenants.

Dorothy Lucey continued in occasional broadcasting and writing work after the 2012 blog launch. Her tenure on Good Day LA (KTTV’s morning show) across the 2000s had been one of the more distinctive LA-local-TV-news personality runs.

Tritia Toyota left KCBS in the late 1990s and subsequently transitioned into academic and political work — including a UCLA appointment and broader Asian-Pacific-American community engagement. She has continued in academic-and-advocacy roles across the years since.

Michael Horowicz continued in TV news production work across the post-2012 years. The kind of multi-decade insider-newsroom-history submission the 2012 piece captured has become less common across the years since — LA-region local-TV-news staff turnover has accelerated, and the kind of multi-decade-at-one-station career arc that produced Horowicz’s KC-the-cat memory has substantially thinned.

The 2012 piece reads now as a small documented LA-local-TV-news-history anecdote — the kind of in-the-community newsroom-folklore that has gotten harder to surface as the local-TV-news institutional memory has continued to thin. The Columbia Square redevelopment removed the physical-place anchor for the original anecdote, though the historic CBS buildings themselves were preserved and continue to operate in their redeveloped form.

Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.

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