In 1956, a young man from northern California, steeped in a journalistic background because of his father's long newspaper experience, came to the rural town of Chino to take over the operations on its paper, the Champion. Though he had a MBA from Harvard and was viewed by some as an outsider, Allen McCombs overcame some local skepticism and became not just a stellar journalist and newspaper owner, but a pillar of the community, serving in many leadership roles, including the planning commission, school board, and a committee working with CalTrans on the routing of the 60 Freeway through the city.
Even though he was head of a small town paper, McCombs was president of the state newspaper publishers association and was widely known for his dogged defense of a free press and the First Amendment. His ownership of the paper lasted a staggering 60 years until he sold the Champion in 2017, though he retained the title of publisher emeritus and continued his management of the editorial pages and the writing of his always-informative and entertaining "Rolltop Roundup."
As Chino Hills began to emerge as a growing unincorporated community, McCombs recognized the importance it would take in coming years and formed the Chino Hills News in the late Eighties. He later created an edition of the Champion for the city, after it was incorporated in 1991, and he did a stellar job in reporting on news and events in the new community as he did for Chino.
Launched by Chino's founder Richard Gird in 1887, the Champion is the second oldest continuously operating newspaper in the greater Los Angeles region, being a half-dozen years younger than the Los Angeles Times and it is hard to overstate how much of an accomplishment it was for McCombs and partners like Bruce Wood to keep the local weekly viable as print media shrunk dramatically in recent years. It is a testament to his vision, faith, keen understanding of community and sheer hard work that McCombs was able to not just keep the paper afloat, but of top-notch quality all of those years.
McCombs was also a keen student of history, generally and locally, and was a veritable storehouse of knowledge about Chino Valley's rich past, including that of Carbon Canyon. He always wrote incisively about aspects of our area's history and, in person, could retrieve long-stored facts from his prodigious memory that was astounding even as he got into his nineties. It was an honor to be asked by him to submit monthly columns, starting in 2018, in the "History of the Hills" series, sharing aspects of the history of Chino Hills as a complement to Kerry Cisneroz' excellent columns on Chino.
Though I did not know him for long or that well, I always enjoyed speaking with or corresponding with Al about the history of the Chino Valley, including at meetings of the Chino Hills Historical Society, where he gave a great presentation about local history. He lived a long and eminently useful life and his achievements in community building and the operation of a newspaper for six decades, especially during the lean years that have shuttered so many papers, are truly impressive and inspiring.
Thank you, Al, for all that you have done and given to the Chino Valley for 65 amazing years!
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