BY DAVID KRONKE > TV WRITER

During her award-winning, history-making career, Linda Alvarez has covered many memorable stories. Here, she reflects on just a few:

• Her first story, as a reporter at KPNX in Phoenix, concerned "two boys who had found a baby in a paper bag," Alvarez recalls. "It was very poignant."

• While covering the 1985 earthquake in Mexico, Alvarez was doing a live report from outside a hospital that had collapsed.

"All of the sudden, everyone was saying, 'Silencio!' and the whole place, just teeming with people, went absolutely dead quiet," she remembers. "A man emerged from beneath the rubble holding a baby.

"That was just incredible, the joy that was felt."

• Alvarez revisited a landmark 1946 trial in Orange County that influenced Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that outlawed school segregation. Mendez v. Westminster concerned the children of Mexican-American tenant farmer Gonzalo Mendez, who weren't allowed to enroll in their local school.

"As a result of that particular battle, they desegregated schools in California, and that case was used as a precedent for Brown v. Board, and people don't know that. To be able to tell people that was one of my favorite, favorite stories."

• During the 1993 Malibu fires, Alvarez toiled tirelessly, until she was sent home at 1:30 a.m. to rest up. She arrived at her home in the Pacific Palisades, only to discover, "I was under mandatory evacuation.

"So I immediately put my cats in pillow cases, grabbed some pictures and went over to my sister's house, where we could see the flames," she remembers. "From there, I did live reports over the phone from my sister's house."

• When the 1994 Northridge quake struck at 4:33 a.m., Alvarez wasted no time: She surveyed her home, ensured that her mother was safe, and "was on the air shortly after 5 o'clock and stayed on for hours and hours and hours," recollects. "I knew we were imparting important information. Normally I take the freeway, but I didn't that day, and it was a good thing I didn't, because part of (the 10 freeway) collapsed."

• Alvarez says her most memorable interview was with a local 18-year-old building bombs on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf as the war with Iraq began in 2003.

"This scene with this young man who looked like he should still be in high school, from Hollywood, assembling these bombs that were going to be dropped on Iraq, and he did it with such composure and such purpose and such peace," she marvels. "It was very poignant – he talked about his parents, he talked about being down in the bowels of the ship, and it just struck me.

"I met another young man on the ship who was in charge of greasing the machinery that launched the aircraft," she continues. "He was also 18, and he said one of the things he always looked forward to was getting a can of menudo from home. That kind of thing really spoke to me. When we talk about the war, we talk about the battles. We don't often talk about the soldiers and their souls and their hearts."