Mel McColloch named Cambria's Citizen of the Year

Mel McColloch, Cambria’s 2014 Citizen of the Year, says he has spent nearly three decades volunteering here to help make his hometown a “thriving community” where seniors can retire, businesses and their owners can succeed and “younger people can have work or businesses and stick around after they grow up here.” 

McColloch is to be feted at the annual Cambria Chamber of Commerce installation dinner Tuesday, Jan. 13, at the Cavalier Resort in San Simeon. The chamber board’s re-elected incumbents, Fidel Figueroa, George Marschall, Sue Robinson and Michael Thompson, will be sworn in, rejoining McColloch, Christopher Brazelton, Steve Kniffen and Joe Prian. 

McColloch’s list of nonprofit and service-club involvements is daunting, and it includes being a chamber member for 29 years, as well as serving on the board for 14 years and as board president since 2002. He’s active with American Legion Post No. 432, the Central Coast Honor Flight group, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Food Bank of San Luis Obispo County and Friends of the Library (especially during the latter’s fundraising efforts toward the new library, which has been open to the public since on Dec. 26, 2013).

He’s been an active supporter of the community’s flag-stand monument project at the Veterans Memorial Building, and has coordinated efforts to put a Highway 1 community monument on the north end of town (the south end already has the “Welcome to Cambria” sign).

He’s also helped scouts, bicycle clubs, the county Helping Hands program, People’s Self Help Housing and many other groups. 

McColloch is a life member of several veterans organizations. The Army vet, who volunteered for the draft a week after graduating from Dos Palos High School, worked in farming and land development for 28 years. His jobs ranged from “chopping cotton to being operations manager for George Nickel,” who developed and farmed 100,000 acres of land. 

Among the development projects and operations that McColloch managed for Nickel was the Rio Bravo Tennis Club and Golf destination resort and airport, site of the 1982 Olympic white-water races on the Kern River.

Since McColloch and his wife of 49 years, Irene McColloch, moved to Cambria, he has been far from retired. His jobs and projects have included: 

• Being ranch manager for a Vancouver firm that owned C.T. Ranch and Cambria Ranch.
• Building four motels on Moonstone Beach Drive and one in San Simeon for the Patel family.
• Helping Dan Legg build a couple of motels on Moonstone Beach Drive.
• Working for Tom Tierney to build the Pierpoint Motel in Cayucos.
• Building in Cayucos an E Street commercial complex of shops with motel rooms above. 

McColloch said he has reduced that portfolio to “two projects now, one in Pismo Beach and one in Templeton.” 

Mel and Irene McColloch have six children (scattered between Los Banos, Visalia, Corcoran and Bakersfield), 23 grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.

This story was originally published December 24, 2014 at 1:05 PM with the headline "Mel McColloch named Cambria's Citizen of the Year."