TOPANGA CANYON : Editor Seeks to Preserve an Area’s Lifestyle

The man who thundered against the proposed Canyon Oaks Estates development atop Topanga Canyon seems a most unlikely titan.

Colin Penno sits in a bare room similar to the ink-stained newspaper office John Boy worked in atop Walton’s Mountain in the television series “The Waltons.” And like his fictitious TV counterpart, the editor of the community’s bi-weekly newspaper--the 2,000-circulation Messenger--does not take lightly any threat to his beloved home.

“The Messenger is really the glue that holds the canyon together,” said Darlia Holland, a local real estate agent. “And Colin has always been there.”

The 47-year-old Penno hails from Cornwall in the south of England.

Twenty years ago, he landed a job photographing an album cover for an expatriate British singer/composer living in Los Angeles. Penno flew over, and still recalls waking up his first morning in the record producer’s Topanga Canyon house.

“I walked out on to the deck amid the oak trees, listened to the stream and the quiet,” he said. “I knew I was home, and wept.”

Although the singer’s career faltered, Penno went back to Cornwall, sold most of his possessions, and returned to Topanga armed with only a duffel bag and $30.

His first job was digging ditches at $2 an hour. A couple of years later, he had saved enough money to buy a second-hand Plymouth Fury and endless rolls of film.

When the Messenger started up in 1976, Penno signed on as news photographer. Two years later, he became the editor, learning to type as he learned to write and report.

Despite his friends’ urgings, Penno has stayed on at his $10,000-a-year job. With the zest of a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, he takes on all perceived enemies of the canyon, including the mass media he claims “trivialize and distort” canyon life and real estate developers who would “flatten and destroy” it.

His favored methodology is simple and direct. He takes dazzling photos of Topanga and pairs them up with dramatic captions. When the Canyon Oaks Estates development was headed for a final vote, for example, Penno ran a photo with the caption, “The Last Virgin: Topanga’s Summit Valley Is Being Peddled in the Valley.” Just minutes before the County Board of Supervisors was to vote on the project, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy announced it would buy the proposed site.

“We advertise in the Messenger because it’s the only local publication out there,” said Judy Schokley, director of advertising for the Jon Douglas Co., a real estate firm in Los Angeles. Penno “doesn’t turn away advertisers, and we don’t turn away customers.”

Nor does Penno have any regrets at his gadfly role.

‘We’re all aware that we’re just one ridgeline away from L.A.,” he said. “And yet, Topanga’s a place where you can still smell the earth. It’s small-town America, with the local paper, the gas station, the post office and two general stores.”