X.X. “Skip” Newhall, the great-great-grandson of Henry Mayo Newhall, a ubiquitous namesake heavily involved in the early Western settlement of the area, died Sunday. He was 87.
Newhall seemed to eschew a high-profile life like that of his father, famed former San Francisco Chronicle editor and longtime Signal publisher Scott Newhall, in favor of scientific pursuits and interests — although his family’s prominent position offered him an up-close-and-personal perspective on some of the Santa Clarita Valley’s growth and significant history.
In a previous interview on SCVTV, he shared with pride how attention from The Signal helped chase out the Ku Klux Klan when the hate group tried to hold a rally in the Santa Clara River wash back in 1966. The KKK later sued the federal government over the incident and lost.
“Skip was a very interesting person,” said his longtime sister-in-law, Reena Newhall, who is married to Skip’s younger brother Tony. She said he helped with the family’s early efforts to support what was then known as the SCV Boys Club — later the Boys & Girls Club — in the community’s early days.
His niece, Beth Richardson, who runs a family business in the SCV, described him as the uncle she always enjoyed hanging out with. She recalled how in the 1980s, Skip, whose parents had named him “Nicholas,” legally changed his name to “X.X.” — a type of eccentricity that Richardson thought was “cool” at the time but drew a “What now?” type of reaction from her parents, she said in a phone interview Friday.
He was born April 15, 1938, in San Francisco and raised in Berkeley before earning a math and physics degree at a university with family ties — Stanford. (Atholl McBean, Henry Mayo’s grandson and a former Newhall Land president, was an early supporter of the business school named after Leland Stanford, a business partner of Henry Mayo Newhall.)
He then went on to earn an applied mathematics degree at CalTech, which helped prepare him for a nearly 40-year career at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he was a lunar laser ranger. His research from that time has been published online.
He described the work as using reflectors left on the moon during the Apollo missions of the 1960s and lasers at specific locations, which he used to map the distance of the moon at any point in time. The work also had applications for missions involving planetary exploration, as the measurements were accurate within a few feet.
During a recent interview with SCVTV, Newhall recalled the famous encounter with the KKK in the 1960s, an event locals refer to as the time the group was chased out of the SCV.
In 1966, about two dozen KKK supporters showed up, largely transplants trying to recruit members, Skip Newhall recalled, adding there ended up being dozens more reporters and law enforcement officers.
Newhall said at the time he couldn’t believe such a hateful group thought they could find a foothold in the SCV.
“It was isolated, and I guess word got to … KKK country, that there would be a fertile picking ground. It’s an almost all-white population. ‘Why don’t we go up and get them on our side?’ I think that was the mentality they had,” Skip Newhall recalled, sharing that they were greeted by hundreds more who wanted to make sure they knew they weren’t welcome.
“They realized when they got here that, ‘Oh, that’s not going to work.’ But they went through the show,” he said, referring to the rally.
He then downplayed his own role in turning away the group.
“If anybody ran them out of town,” Newhall recalled, “it would have been Scott (Newhall) and the newspaper.”
Skip Newhall, who married four times, is survived by his wife, Lorena Sumaoang, whom he married in Santa Clarita in 2014.
