John E. King and Homer D. King

Homer Duncan King, who was born in 1897, began his journalism career as a young man, first on the Hemet News, then the Redlands Daily Facts and the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram before becoming managing editor of the Nevada State Journal and finally of the Hollywood Citizen-News.[8][9] He held all those positions before he was age 30.[10][11]

Homer King and his sister, Helen, a schoolteacher, were both afflicted with muscular dystrophy.[12]

While King was working at the Citizen-News "a creeping paralysis first manifested itself," according to King's obituary in the Long Beach Independent. "A physician prescribed that he should be placed in a cast for two years." Instead, in 1926,[13] he returned to Hemet and took over operation of the family's newspaper.[8]

The disease was progressive. At first he could walk with a cane, and he rode a bicycle. Then, after a bad fall, he drove a specially equipped car, hobbling into his office on crutches. Later, he had to be carried into the office.[8]

The Los Angeles Times wrote that he was "an editor and writer of great physical and professional courage" who had for twenty years "been carried each day into his office, seated in a chair, a cigar placed in his mouth and a pencil in his hand. . . . He could roll the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other," and he could sign his name "if the paper were passed beneath his hand," but he was "capable of no other movement."[8]

Columnist Earl E. Buie recalled in the San Bernardino County Sun on February 22, 1961, that King had for twenty years been "unable to move any part of his body," but "his faithful companion, Johnny McCloy, a male nurse, [was] constantly at his side." McCloy "picked him up as you would a child, carried him to his car, then to his desk in his office, propped him against a stack of pillows in his chair, from which he dictated news stories, editorials and a sparkling column of philosophy, humor, comment on the events of the day and observations."[14]

Buie wrote that McCloy "kept Homer's cigars fired, his hair combed, put on his hat in a jaunty position, and, when Homer took a night out with the boys, he held his cards and shoved out the chips at the poker table."[14]

King died in his sleep on February 21, 1961.[8] Survivors included his widow, Agnes, and a stepdaughter from a previous marriage, Alice Benham of Los Angeles. Burial was in the family plot in San Jacinto Valley Cemetery.[8][10]