John L. Newcomb was born on March 27, 1927 in the small Nelson County town of New Hope. His parents were John C. and Alice Bowling Newcomb. His parents moved to a farm near New Hope when he was nine years old. He started daily milking of the family cow and, as a teenager, he worked on the farm with a team of mules during summer vacation. He acquired an avid interest in hunting by trailing along with his father on quail hunts, and received his first double-barreled shotgun at age thirteen. He coon hunted, trapped mink and muskrats, and sold furs.

John was educated in small public schools taught by the Sisters of Charity until his senior year when he enrolled as a boarder at St. Joe Prep. All his teachers up to this time had been nuns, and it was "quite a shock to hit the stone wall of some of the Xavier brothers."

At this time, the football and basketball teams did not have a name. A contest was announced to adopt a name. John submitted St. Joe Eagles. His entry was chosen in a split vote among the Brothers-John won $5.

Like many other seniors, John enlisted in the Navy in the middle of his senior year, February, 1945. By June, almost half of the graduating class had left for military service. The Xaverian Brothers decided to give all the seniors their diplomas. With the end of the war, John was discharged in the summer of 1946, after serving in the Western Pacific and Japan.

John married Edna Marie "Eddie" Boone in January, 1949, and had six children, five of whom are still living. Rose Alice died of leukemia at the age of ten in 1964. Eddie died in 1995. In 1997 John married Sally O'Daniel Johnson. Sally has three sons. John also has seventeen grandchildren, including twin boys.

John became a partner in his father's Gulf Oil Co. distributorship in 1946. He learned the business from the ground up by substituting for the company workers, many of whom had not had a vacation for years because of the war.

From 1947, the business began to grow to include more neighborhood service stations. This growth became more rapid when Newcomb Oil Co. decided to expand into the food mart business with the Five Star Food Mart chain. By the early '90's, there were close to twenty food marts. By 1997 with an expansion into Western Kentucky, the number of Five Star Food Marts had exceeded fifty. At the same time, the distribution of lubricants was increasing to include Chevron, Mobil, Shell, and Ashland oils and greases.

John's many other activities and achievements include: