Loved Ones Offer a Final Toast to Editor Newhall

It may sound cliched, but Scotty would have wanted it like this.

So as a jazz band softly played “As Time Goes By,” some 650 people gathered Sunday at Scott Newhall’s Victorian mansion in Piru to remember the colorful newspaperman who died last Monday at age 78.

They came to remember a man whose hands helped shape the Santa Clarita Valley from backwater to boom town, as owner and editor of the Newhall Signal and board member of the Newhall Land & Farming Co., which developed most of the Santa Clarita Valley.

They sat together in small groups remembering an irreverent writer and editor whose scathing editorials both delighted and infuriated. And through tears and giggles they said goodby to a good friend, father and husband.

A sailor, a musician, a writer and drag racer--Newhall’s life was not like those of most men, and he wanted his memorial service to be different, too. A four-piece jazz band was hired to play his favorite Duke Ellington tunes and tables overflowed with food as bartenders served up glass upon glass of wine.

“He hated to be sad at other people’s funerals and he didn’t want people to be sad at his,” Newhall’s son Skip Newhall said. “He wanted the band, a good squeeze of the grape. We are trying to fulfill his wishes to the letter.”

That was easier said than done. As Skip Newhall spoke, he was interrupted several times by guests filing into the sprawling back yard. “I’m sorry,” they said, offering their hands with solemn condolences. “I’m very sorry.”

It seemed that everyone at the service had a different story to tell about Newhall, who bought the Newhall Signal in 1963 while remaining as editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. He retired from the Chronicle in 1971.

“He was one of life’s special surprises,” Skip Newhall said.

To Newhall’s family, he was a sensitive man whose love for people and animals was evident--if not always in his words--in his every action.

Son Jon Newhall recalled an episode in the mid-1960s in which a band of starving dogs had been locked in a cabin in Mint Canyon. Los Angeles County officials would let no one enter the cabin to give the dogs food until the owner had been located. When Jon Newhall called his father in San Francisco to tell him of the situation, the elder man roared: “ . . . somebody’s got to feed those starving bastards.”

Later that night, Newhall flew into Burbank Airport, drove up into the Santa Clarita Valley canyon and smashed one of the cabin’s windows to deliver troughs of food and water to the animals.

“Deep inside, we all knew he was a pussycat,” son Tony Newhall said later in the service.

To the generations of journalists Newhall tutored and nurtured, he was a demanding boss who turned out writers now working at some of the nation’s largest newspapers. Even to victims of his acerbic wit and scathing commentaries, Newhall was respected as a man of principle.

“We are all better for having known Scott,” said Clyde Smyth, former superintendent of the Hart High School District and frequent Newhall target. “Even if we didn’t know it at the time.”