Before any local road was paved, before the Infield Fly Rule, before Valencia. Before the births of everyone on the Santa Clarita City Council, the governor of California and the president of the United States.
Before direct dial telephones, television, talking pictures and the computer. Before MTV, the NBA, HBO, TiVO or ESPN.
Before antibiotics, bar codes, the Big Bang Theory, the car radio, nylon, the laser, vaccines for measles and polio, microwave ovens, the ballpoint pen, commercial color film, and before most people who lived in this valley had either indoor plumbing or electricity, there was The Signal.
The Signal has undergone many changes over the years. The first, and largest, was the biggest. On January 1, 1919, the paper went from nothing to something. That date is when the first editor, World War I veteran Edward H. Brown, founded the community’s then weekly newspaper.
A NAUTICAL THEME
"With this issue we unfurl the sails of the Newhall Signal upon the sea of journalism, and we hope that our efforts will be of service and benefit to the Newhall and Saugus valley," wrote Brown 89 years ago when the very first Signal was published on February 7, 1919 out of a room in the Hotel Swall. The wooden structure a few years later would burn to the ground with world corporate headquarters of The Signal in it.
Design-wise, the first Signal was a tiny creature, the size of a shoebox lid, just six pages long. (It would later grow to regular "broadsheet" size with the next issue, then shrink for several years back to sub-tabloid size.) There were no photos, although even back then, we were interested in movie stars. The front page lead story was about Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who was in town shooting a movie. Fairbanks had transformed the main drag of Newhall into a beautiful country village. But it was a tiny story about local cases of influenza that caught the interest of Signal readers. Around that time, 500,000 Americans had just died from it.
Ed Brown was a man interested in the world. Well. Most of it. From one of his editorials:
"Where the hell is China, anyway?" He combined politics and local news while offering a healthy plate of agricultural news. The Santa Clarita Valley, back then was a valley of just 500 souls and everything depended on crops and livestock.
Was Ed the victim of nerve gas? There are no records as to the cause of his death, but, after returning from battle in Europe in World War I and less than a year after creating The Newhall Signal (as it was called then), Brown died. His widow, Blanche, took on the task of running the paper and to the chagrin of some (mostly males) and delight of others (mostly females), Blanche turned the newspaper into a woman’s weekly journal, filling it with recipes, bake sales and arduously long descriptions of the Newhall Woman’s Club meetings.
There was an odd, on-again, off-again relationship between Blanche and the newspaper. One week she’d be the editor. The next, she wouldn’t. Perhaps it was with Thornton Doelle taking over as the other irregular editor in the early 1920s that The Signal first earned its reputation of being a quirky and eclectic community paper.
Thornton was also the local forest ranger and a poet. He added drama to the staid paper, covering bank robberies, moonshiners and crooks. One of Thornton’s benchmarks in his career was being deputized and sent on a posse to bring back some bank robbers hiding out in present-day Canyon Country. Thornton shot and wounded one of the suspects, came back, wrote a story about the daring raid and an editorial about how there is too much violence in America. A couple of weeks later, the bank robber’s attorney was horrified to look into the seven-man jury pool. There was Thornton. When the attorney asked that The Signal editor be dismissed due to obvious prejudice, the local judge responded: "Who better to judge? He was there."
13 YEARS OF POETRY & OPINION
In June of 1925, a new era began for The Newhall Signal. A.B. Thatcher bought the paper from Blanche Brown and started a 13-year reign. Thatcher became the first in a series of editor/publishers to start the 67-year custom of greatly opinionated columns and editorials on the front page of the paper. Thatcher, who went by the moniker of "Dad," called his column "The Jin Jer Jar" and noted: "It gives me the chance to get rid of some of my meanness, without hurting myself or anybody else — much."
Thatcher ran poetry on the front page. Sometimes it was bad. Sometimes it was haunting and lyrical. After failing to get the locals to call this area "Sunshine Valley," Thatcher in the 1930s came up with the label "The Valley of the Little Santa Clara." Or, today, Santa Clarita. Thatcher led the valley through the Great Depression. He sold the paper in 1938, but continued on as a columnist, being the oldest working journalist west of the Mississippi.
THAT IS ALL THERE IS
Fred Trueblood built on Thatcher’s foundation of a community newspaper. The Signal was more than a newspaper. It was a family album. You got it on the porch with the morning milk. From 1938 to 1963 — a quarter of a century, Fred Trueblood and his son, Fred II, created a record of births, deaths, joys and tragedies in a style that was fatherly — sometimes kind and wise, sometimes pedantic. The pages of The Signal carried no catchy graphics and few photos. Still, the Truebloods led the valley through some of the most dramatic changes of the 20th century, from the end of the Great Depression, through World War II, the death of William. S. Hart and the omnipresent threat of nuclear war with Russia and China. After that, there was a new foe to fight: "The Invading Monster of Progress."
Fred I started his front page column in 1938, calling it the Signal Tower. His son continued the tradition in 1960 when his father died. Trueblood Sr. passed away peacefully in his sleep, having taken just one two-week vacation from the little rural newspaper he loved so well.
Both men ended the column the exact same way for 25 years with the tagline: “That’sallthereisthereisn’tanymore.
Ray Brooks bought the paper in 1963 and ran it for less than a year. He brought a new, Happy Face design to the newspaper. It looked like a Nick at Night cable promo, with garish color and cartoon cut-outs all over the pages. It was a complete turn around from the staid, conservative look and feel of the previous paper. But Brooks’ brief experiment was nothing compared to what followed.
THE SPLENDIFEROUS RASCAL
Without question, one of the most influential people in the history of this valley was Signal publisher/editor Scott Newhall. Volumes could be filled on his exploits, and he managed to squeeze a dozen lifetimes into one.
Newhall was the dashing and controversial editor of The San Francisco Chronicle when he fancied having his own paper — one that not-so-happenstancedly carried Scott’s own name in the masthead. The rogue journalist, already famed across the country for his swashbuckling, almost 19th century style, offered Ray Brooks twice what The Signal was worth.
It was Scott who came up with the present mascot of the American bald eagle in the masthead and the motto: "Vigilance Forever." In the very first Scott Newhall-run Signal of 1963, the great-grandson of valley founder, Henry Mayo Newhall, set the community on its ears. He ran a front page story on how Zambian astronauts were planning to fly to the moon — in empty oil drums fired by giant slingshots. The scope, purpose and look of the paper changed dramatically. While Scott continued to make sure The Signal stayed a community paper, he added a Barnum & Bailey/World Weekly News quality to it. He held contests to rename the valley, with such suggestions as Newsaurita and Heartland causing groans. (Before there was Canyon Country, The Signal suggested a name of SoleWhite, as if the area were to be named after a detergent.)
Scott was behind a conscious and mischievous plan to make The Signal the most talked-about entity in the valley. “You get their attention, and then you try to educate or uplift them in another part of the paper, Newhall once mentioned. Scott was adept at getting people’s attention.
The newspaper ran stories with artist’s renditions of Bigfoot and asked if the beast was stalking people here. There were stories about flying saucers, sex, hippies, sex, weekend love-ins, group sex, wife-swapping, Nixon, sex and more sex. It worked.
By 1965, The Newhall Signal had doubled in size. It doubled again in 1966 and became a tri-weekly, coming out on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, whether you wanted it to or not. In 1978, Scott Newhall sold the newspaper to Morris Multimedia of Savannah, GA. Newhall had planned to retire soon and stay on for only a few years. At the time, he didn’t realize how wildly successful the paper would become or how quickly the valley would grow. Also, in 1978, the Sunday Signal replaced the Monday. The jolly style of mayhem continued.
But what really separated The Signal from every other paper on the planet was Scott Newhall’s "Death to Traitors" editorials. They would appear on the front page, above the masthead, and any English-reading being would be powerless not to pop for a dime to read them. Newhall went after presidents, tax collectors, pornographers, law enforcement, and even the Treasury Department for minting the Susan B. Anthony dollar in 1980. Scott called it a "dollarette." It gets worse: “...the most odious, unattractive, dwarfed and repellent whorehouse token in place of the good old American buck. People laughed or howled in protest, but they read The Signal.
MOVE TO VALENCIA
In September 1986, The Signal moved from its home base of 67 years -- downtown Newhall -- to new and much larger facilities on Creekside Road in Valencia. In its magnificent grand-opening ceremonies, Charles H. Morris, Sr., president of Signal owner Morris Multimedia, presented Scott Newhall with a special plaque dedicating the new facility in his honor. The Signal finally had its own press and a large enough plant to meet the needs of the growing Santa Clarita Valley.
In August of 1988, soon after the newspaper began publishing daily, one of the most colorful eras in American journalism ended. Scott, his wife and editor, Ruth, and their publisher son Tony all left the newspaper. Scott Newhall had written his last front-page editorial for The Signal. It was the end of another era.
CITYHOOD
Throughout its history, The Signal had always been a leader and advocate of the idea that the residents of the Santa Clarita Valley should manage their own destiny. Especially in the early to mid-1980s, editorials continuously complained about the way the county of Los Angeles treated this unincorporated and fast-growing area. Over the years, several movements towards local control were tried, but all failed until the cityhood campaign of 1987. The Signal is proud to have been one of the drivers behind the incorporation of the new city of Santa Clarita. The day after the defining election in November 1987, The Signal made sure that everyone knew success had finally come and headlined the winning cityhood vote on the front page above its flag as "Santa Clarita Wins Big."
GROWTH AND MORE GROWTH
In the 1990s, The newspaper continued grow and try new things as it expanded to meet the information needs of this growing valley. Always recognizing its responsibility as the newspaper of record for the SCV, The Signal continually worked to lead this valley into the new century. As the new century began, The Signal expanded its menu of publications that now not only contained the daily newspaper, but also included the monthly Santa Clarita Valley Living magazine, the SCV Business Journal, All About Kids and the Santa Clarita Valley Tourism/Visitor’s Guide. The Signal has earned many national and statewide awards and honors for local coverage, features, columns, opinion. In addition, The Signal has won several general excellence awards and was named large business of the year in 2006 by the Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce.
THE EVER FRESH CANVAS
Since 1978, The Signal has been owned by Morris Multimedia, Inc., a privately held media company that owns more than 90 publications in nine states and the Caribbean. Today through The Signal, its web site, and its other SCV publications and special sections, The Signal and its owners remain committed to the same ideals as its founders more than 89 years ago – serving as the news and information source for the Santa Clarita Valley. The Signal strives each day to provide quality SCV coverage like no one else. As one Signal reader put it, this newspaper is"... an ever-fresh and changing canvas of the community, where art, commerce and life are painted daily."
ONLINE…
Today with the internet we have instantaneous communication. The internet has widened the scope of The Signal as it leads the Santa Clarita Valley fully into the 21st century hosting blogs, local video, opinion polls, business directories and near-instant news and information on its award-winning web site. Our web site averages more than 40 million hits each year and continues to grow. Now with a complete re-design, "the-signal.com" begins yet another journalistic journey for The Signal.
Vigilance Forever.
Signal Senior Columnist John Boston contributed to this history.
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