Steve Harvey

Steve Harvey died on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, from complications of Parkinson's disease and Lewy body dementia, the Los Angeles Times reported. He was 80. The place of death was not reported. The Times obituary, by Andrew J. Campa, was published that evening Pacific time. Sportswriter Jay Christensen noted on X that his syndicated Bottom 10 column had been a must-read for college football fans. Funeral or memorial plans have not been made public.

He is not the comedian and Family Feud host Steve Harvey; the shared name caused some confusion online when the news broke.

Steve Harvey was born in 1946 at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, to A.C. Harvey and Marie Moog Harvey. His exact birth date has not been made public. He grew up in West Los Angeles, attending Clover Avenue Elementary School, Palms Middle School and Hamilton High School. At Hamilton he was, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, a perpetual varsity baseball benchwarmer, and his lifelong love of sports later fed his best known comic feature. His sister is Marilyn Stein.

In 1962, while at Hamilton High, Harvey attended the Scholastic Sports Association workshop (now the California Scholastic Press Association), a summer journalism program at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo run by Los Angeles Herald Examiner journalist Ralph Alexander. The Times described it as a transformative experience, and Harvey stayed involved with the program as a teacher and board member.

He went on to the University of Southern California's journalism school and wrote for the Daily Trojan. He recalled that a highlight of his student career was being hung in effigy by the USC marching band after he wrote a story about shill band members.

Harvey started "The Bottom 10" in 1965 while at USC, a satirical ranking of the worst college football teams in the country. It was syndicated through United Press International and became a long running favorite, later imitated by ESPN.

He worked at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner before joining the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times in 1968. He later moved to features, writing about offbeat people and places from Angelyne to the Zamboni museum in Paramount. Around 1988 he began "Only in L.A.," which ran in the paper for 20 years, appearing for a long time on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays in the California section before moving to weekends in April 2008. He also contributed to the paper's L.A. Then and Now feature.

In August 2008 the column ended its run in print. Harvey continued filing items to the L.A. Now blog on latimes.com, then carried "Only in LA" to the news site LA Observed and wrote "Only in LB" for the Grunion Gazette in Long Beach. His career at The Times lasted 40 years.

"Only in L.A." collected brief, wry items about the region's oddities: misspelled signs, strange business pairings, dueling street signs, odd alibis from police newspapers and stunts staged for the cameras. Harvey called himself the curator of the Museum of Crazy Stuff in L.A. and said that about three quarters of the exhibits came from readers who mailed in photos and clippings. "I can't think of anyone who has more fun opening his or her mail each morning," he said in 2008.

Memorable items included the 1988 radio stunt in which four heavyweight Arizonans did jumping jacks on Venice Beach to try to break California off the continent, and his 2000 confirmation that the freeway chickens living along the Hollywood Freeway were real. The best of the column was collected in his 1996 book, "The Best of Only in L.A.: A Chronicle of the Amazing, Amusing and Absurd."

Harvey was married to Venetia Lai. They had a son, James, and a daughter, Sarah, and he had a granddaughter, Penelope. He later lived and wrote about life in the Long Beach area for the Grunion Gazette. Online he often joked about being confused with the television host of the same name, once writing that he wondered how many of his would-be friends thought he was "Steve Harvey, the TV show," and signing a post as "Only in LB Bureau Chief, Not the Actor, Steve Harvey."

Harvey gave generations of Southern Californians a shared, affectionate running joke about their region and a place to see their own odd sightings in print. When the Times dropped the column from print in 2008, readers wrote in protest, and LA Observed called him one of the paper's best known bylines for decades. His Bottom 10 became a template for celebrating futility in college football coverage, and his work with student journalists through the California Scholastic Press Association workshop extended his influence to younger writers.

Book: "The Best of Only in L.A.: A Chronicle of the Amazing, Amusing and Absurd" (1996).

Columns: "The Bottom 10" (from 1965, syndicated by UPI); "Only in L.A." (Los Angeles Times, about 1988 to 2008, later online and at LA Observed); "Only in LB" (Grunion Gazette, Long Beach).

No video interviews with Harvey were found on YouTube; searches are dominated by the television host of the same name.