Marian Hall, whose late husband Dixi Gail Hall founded the La Cañada Valley Sun, died Jan. 20 in Woodland Hills. She was 99.
Born Marian Brown in Medford, Ore. on Oct. 1, 1911, she and Hall were wed in 1933 in Michigan. In 1946 the couple moved to a home on Craig Avenue in La Cañada, just as the area was transitioning from rural farmland to a Los Angeles suburb. The parents of two, they recognized a need for school news to be delivered to local residents. That led Dixi Hall, a commercial artist, to launch the weekly newspaper on April 3 of that year with the full support of Marian.
"There was a lack of news coverage in the community and the citizens wanted to know what was going on," Dixi Hall was quoted as saying when the paper marked its 50th anniversary in 1996. He was a part-time publisher, as he kept his job as an artist for a downtown Los Angeles advertising agency.