He missed the day-to-day challenge and the interaction with the editors and with the news. During his tenure it would expand to 34 foreign and domestic bureaus. [1], In 1986, Chandler won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism to honor his years of service to the newspaper.[3]. In an extreme example of the papers penchant for treating Democrats like nonentities, one lengthy article featured Knowlands attack on my opponent, the Democratic candidate for governor, who was described as a tool of union bosses and socialists. He was also the only reporter, rookie or veteran, whose name regularly appeared in both the Sports section, which chronicled his continuing exploits as a competitive weightlifter, and in the society pages, where his attendance at various black-tie events always rated a mention. The explosion was blamed on union militants, and, Otis once said, I was raised to hate the unions. (He later mellowed on that topic, although he always opposed unionization at The Times.). He wanted the paper to take what he called more balls out positions, and he wanted us to change our position and editorialize against the war in Vietnam.. He spent 1951 to 1953 on the ground in the Air Force, supervising sports and acting as co-captain of the Air Force track team at Camp Stoneman in the San Francisco Bay Area. Chandler said he wanted to hunt only the rarest and the biggest and the best, and he killed more than 100 such animals 10-foot brown bears and polar bears, lions and musk ox, wild antelope and mountain sheep many of which he had mounted on the walls of a trophy room in the home he shared with his first wife in San Marino. Among them: the mate of the musk ox that nearly killed him in 1990. So did the shutdown in January 1962 of the Mirror and the Examiner, the morning Hearst newspaper. By 1962, Palmer was gone and the gubernatorial race between Brown and Richard Nixon was covered primarily by two new reporters: Richard Bergholz, who had come from the Mirror, and Carl Greenberg, from Hearsts Los Angeles Examiner. When Burke was accused of fraud, Chandler too became a target of civil legal proceedings. Like his father, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Sigma Rho chapter). . Ultimately, he was able to do everything right-handed, he said, except serve hard in tennis.. His father, publisher of The Times from 1944 to 1960, had worked in the fields of the familys Tejon Ranch when he was a boy, so he saw no reason to spare his son from physical labor or spoil him with money. His father made sure that Chandler experienced work in all sections of the organization, assigning him to jobs in the industrial production of the paper, business management, clerical administration, and the news-gathering operation.[1]. He set his sights on a goal making The Times one of the two or three great American papers and he pulled it off.. The Birchers argued that presidents Eisenhower, Truman and Franklin Roosevelt were either Communists or Communist dupes. John Thomas remembers meeting Chandler and not knowing who he was when Chandler took one of his Porsches to the auto dealership where Thomas worked as the parts manager in the late 1960s. [4], He was not involved in negotiations by other members of the Chandler family to sell The Times to Tribune Company, a clear sign of how his influence had eroded. He had purchased his first a 1931 Duesenberg in 1968 for $35,000, and he built a world-class collection of Porsches, Ferraris, Duesenbergs, Cadillacs, Packards and other classics before selling all of them to meet the financial terms of his divorce settlement. The city editor, who had been hired during Chandlers heyday as publisher, said he felt an obligation to carry out his former boss wishes. Within a few years, The Times had a 2-1 lead over the Herald Examiner in advertising revenue, which provides about 80% of the income for most newspapers. Though Chandler said he was naturally saddened that Times Mirror will cease to exist and saddened by the end of local ownership, he had wondered aloud for at least five years whether Times Mirror could continue to thrive on its own in the turn-of-the-century mega-media merger environment. On it, neatly typed, was a seven-year executive training program, scheduled to begin that Sunday night. I was strictly a tall, skinny blond kid from California.. 'It was three outside members of the [Times Mirror] board who persuaded him to do it Over time, Chandler and others said, that began to wear on him. Bureaus opened in Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Rome, Bonn, London, Vienna and San Francisco, at the United Nations and on Wall Street. He was airlifted to a hospital. My dad had already started to make improvements.. In college, he had sometimes worked summers at the paper, most often using his physical strength to move printing plates and other heavy items and equipment. Many had led quietly productive lives outside the newspaper industry and had tried to keep their complaints about cousin Otis and The Times within the family circle. His two predecessors as chairman his father and Murphy had been invited to remain on the board, in a non-voting capacity, after their 70th birthdays, but Chandler was not extended a similar invitation, and he was clearly hurt by that. In 1948 the Chandler family had started a second newspaper, an afternoon tabloid called the Los Angeles Mirror, and as part of his training program, Otis worked there too. During Chandlers 20 years as publisher and five subsequent years as editor in chief and chairman of the board of The Times then-parent company, Times Mirror the paper won nine Pulitzer Prizes and expanded from two to 34 foreign and domestic bureaus. I wasnt satisfied Im that way whether Im out riding my bike or racing a car.. Otis enthusiastically supported Michael's racing career until a near-fatal crash while qualifying at Indianapolis in 1984. Since his first run for Congress in 1946, he had been championed by The Times as he successfully ran for U.S. Senate and then for the vice presidency on the Eisenhower ticket. Chandler changed The Times so dramatically and became so identified with the paper that when he left the publishers office at age 52, and again when he relinquished his corporate titles five years later, employees at The Times and Chandlers peers throughout the industry were both stunned and puzzled. When he lost, he delivered a diatribe that would long haunt him, bitterly denouncing the press coverage by which, it was widely realized, he meant The Times and promising, You wont have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference., Years later, Otis Chandler would insist that the paper wasnt as bad as some people said when I took over. LA Times After dropping out of Stanford, Chandler started working at the newspaper as a secretary to his father, Harry Chandler, who had been its publisher since 1917. He was the fourth and final member of the Chandler family to hold the paper's top position. Mark has the stock price and dividends up, and thats all they care about.. Norman Chandler 1899-1973. But there is nothing as fascinating as the newspaper business, and I cant imagine any challenge more satisfying than the work we did to improve The Times.. Direct, decisive and at times startlingly frank in both his personal and professional lives, Chandler told people what he expected of them, and he didnt have much patience with failure. He had married his college sweetheart, Marilyn Brant having proposed to her on his 23rd birthday on the seventh hole of the Pebble Beach golf course and they had a baby boy (Norman, after Otis father) but no plans and no substantial income. Given the principal players on both sides, the deal, or one very much like it, was probably inevitable, with or without Otis and without or without Staples. Ruth Chandler 1897-1987. Bulked up to 6 feet 3, 220 pounds as a senior in 1950, when he was captain of the track team, he put the shot 57 feet, 63/47 of an inch, to win the Pacific Coast Conference championship. And he took special pleasure in telling friends and colleagues about the telephone call he received from John Madigan, then-chairman and chief executive of Tribune, at 7 a.m. the day the takeover was announced. In October 1999, The Times published a special issue of its Sunday magazine devoted entirely to Staples Center, the sports arena and entertainment venue then about to open in downtown Los Angeles. He also began to develop a love of speed and once had to do a stint in traffic school after getting a speeding ticket on his bicycle, he said. Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism, Chandler Vintage Museum of Transportation and Wildlife, "Publisher Who Couldn't Get Enough Competition", "Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication", "Otis Chandler, 78; transformed L.A. Times into a leading paper", "Otis Chandler, Publisher Who Transformed Los Angeles Times, Dies at 78", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Otis_Chandler&oldid=1112344101, Stanford Cardinal men's track and field athletes, Pages using infobox person with multiple spouses, Pages using infobox person with multiple parents, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2017, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 25 September 2022, at 21:57. Otis Chandler (November 23, 1927 February 27, 2006) was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980, leading a large expansion of the newspaper and its ambitions. Nobody had ever heard of the Chandlers, he said later. He was also consumed by another passion: buying classic cars for his museum. In a controversial 1996 story in Vanity Fair, Chandler was quoted as criticizing his relatives as coupon clippers elitists bored with the problems of AIDS and the homeless and drive-by shootings. They wished The Times wouldnt cover those issues, and they werent interested in either the papers editorial quality or its social responsibility, he said. Prep Rally is devoted to the SoCal high school sports experience, bringing you scores, stories and a behind-the-scenes look at what makes prep sports so popular. And it became clear over the years that he did not have any such intention. After leaving the Air Force in 1953, he had little direction for his career. Some critics felt that his zeal for national recognition led The Times to underemphasize local news, particularly about minority communities. A public memorial will be held Monday at All Saints Church in Pasadena. Williams and Frank McCullough, one of the papers two managing editors, agreed at the outset of the gubernatorial campaign to monitor the coverage inch by inch to ensure that both candidates were covered fairly and equally. Word that Chandler was breaking his silence ricocheted through the newsroom. Family, friend, or fan, this family history biography is for you to remember Otis Chandler. He remained an avid reader of the paper. The Chandlers had no rival as the most powerful family in Southern California. The outdoors is my second home, my chapel, my retreat, my great love in life.. It wasnt as much fun.. He was turned down because he was 17 pounds heavier than the maximum allowed for jet pilots, so he starved himself and quickly lost the weight. Chandler cared deeply about how The Times was regarded by East Coast opinion-makers, and more than 40 years after his father first took him to a national convention of newspaper publishers, he could still recall, with an edge in his voice, how clear it was that The Times was regarded as a bad newspaper from a hick town.. login . One of the first examples came in 1961, when The Times hired Jim Murray as a sports columnist. Otis Chandler, whose vision and determination as publisher of the Los Angeles Times from 1960 to 1980 catapulted the paper from mediocrity into the front ranks of American journalism, died today of a degenerative illness called Lewy body disease. Jack Burke, Chandlers close friend since their days together at Stanford, had assembled an exploratory oil-drilling company called GeoTek in the late 1960s and early 70s. When I asked what he did, he just said, I work at The Times,. Thomas recalled. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Atonio Mafi draft diary: Mental health should be a priority, even in football culture, Roundtable: Our March Madness projections for UCLA, USC and others, Elliott: Kings trade Jonathan Quick, a legendary goaltender who couldnt make time stand still, Left-handed pitchers offer gold-like value for high school teams, Before and after photos from space show storms effect on California reservoirs, 19 cafes that make L.A. a world-class coffee destination, Dramatic before and after photos from space show epic snow blanketing SoCal mountains, Shocking, impossible gas bills push restaurants to the brink of closures. At 71, he resumed playing tennis. Chandler acknowledged that it was a difficult time for newspapers, but he disagreed vigorously with Willes approach. But he was never specific, and the word publisher was never mentioned.. Concerned by the growing competition from television, Chandler urged his editors to transform the paper into a regional daily newsmagazine that placed a high premium on analysis, interpretation and good writing not just covering the days events but putting them in context and doing so in a lively and compelling fashion. Chandler said the move would help allay the concerns of readers who, mindful of the papers partisan history, find it hard to believe that this newspapers editorial page endorsements really dont affect the news columns.. [1], Chandler was an enthusiastic athlete and thrill seeker, an image he actively cultivated. I loved being a reporter. After graduating from Stanford, he tried to enroll in an Air Force training program. He was also so disenchanted with the management of Times Mirror by then that, to the dismay of many, he not only didnt fight or even criticize the sale but instead embraced it as a very positive move a perfect fit a win-win situation.. Otis Chandler was born on July 4, 1919. Nixon, by all accounts, was stunned by the turnabout. How could I have been so stupid? He expected the very best of himself and of those around him.. Chandler himself invested more than $200,000 of his personal funds. My style was to do the job and push the boundaries, and once Otis realized I knew what I was doing, he let me do it, Thomas said. [1][2], After graduation, Chandler tried to enroll in an Air Force training program, but was turned down because he was too large to fit in the cockpit of a jet. Once he started as a reporter, though, he began to feel different about a career at The Times. One cannot successfully run a great newspaper like the Los Angeles Times with executives in the top two positions, both of whom have no newspaper experience at any level, Chandler said. The New York Times even published an editorial under the headline The Truth According to Otis Chandler.. By the time of graduation, he weighed 200 pounds. Not only did it champion GOP candidates, its editors helped select them. Later he would briefly attend the Cate School boarding school in Carpinteria before his parents elected to send him east to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He was skinny all right 6 feet 1, 155 pounds but he played varsity soccer and basketball, high-jumped and ran the mile, and his successes gave him an identity. For the first time in five years, I felt like I wasnt a leper. His goal, he once quipped, was to make it a militant middle-of-the-road paper.. [1], Chandler died at his home in Ojai at the age of 78 due to the effects of Lewy body disease, seven months after his diagnosis. The statement was a stinging and unprecedented rebuke of Willes and Downing. Nothing but my kids is more important to me than the Los Angeles Times, he said in 1999. He was, in general, something of a loner, a trait he traced partly to spending my young years on that ranch in Sierra Madre, a little remote, rather than on a neighborhood street with a lot of kids. Asked repeatedly in one interview to name his best childhood friends, he came up blank. People who knew the Chandlers well say Otis first wife was enormously competitive. In 1995, at age 68, he crashed his motorcycle into a tractor while in New Zealand. [1], A sprained wrist kept him from competing as a shot putter for the United States in the 1952 Summer Olympics. I like living on the edge, he said in a 1999 interview, five months after his 71st birthday and two weeks after he suffered minor head injuries when he spun out in one of his Ferraris near the vintage-car and wildlife museum he owned in Oxnard. [1], "Oats" was Chandler's nickname within the family. He accused Willes and Downing of misusing and abusing the newsroom staff, of unbelievably stupid and unprofessional handling of the Staples special section and of perpetrating a scandal and a fiasco that posed the most serious single threat to the future survival and growth of this great newspaper during my more than 50 years of being associated with The Times., This was, he said, probably the single most devastating period in the history of this great newspaper. When photographed for the cover of the literary magazine Atlantic Monthly he was depicted on a surfboard crafted from newspapers across a wave of dollar bills. Chandler tried to make amends, claiming he had been misquoted, but the damage had been done. Within an hour, I had gathered things up in my briefcase, told my secretary, Well, we can shine those afternoon meetings off, and headed for Dana Point.., In a speech to a hunting conference in 1980, he described some of his other outdoor pursuits: I am primarily a gun hunter, both rifle and shotgun. Chandler attributed his pursuit of solo athletics like shotputting and weightlifting to the same sources, saying, "No one could say that the team carried me or that the coach put me in because my name was Chandler". Philip Chandler resigned from the Times Mirror board seven months later. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. He died in May 1972 at age 47. Also, because Thomas was more aggressive than Williams, more likely to take the initiative and less likely to urge caution, Chandler adopted a largely hands-off approach. Critics also thought his position at the top of the citys power structure prevented The Times from aggressively investigating that establishment. Although all three of his sons worked at the paper for varying periods, none ascended into the top executive ranks. Hed put you in there, and he let you do it and if you werent performing, out you went.. Chandler had his own ways of blowing off such stress like getting behind the wheel of a turbocharged Porsche. That perception embarrassed Chandler, and when he took over as publisher a few years later, it became the driving force behind his commitment to remake The Times. The paper's Sunday magazine on October 10, 1999, was a special issue dedicated to the new Staples Center sports arena in downtown L.A., home to the Lakers, Clippers and Kings. On March 5, 1980, Chandler announced that Johnson would become the fifth publisher of The Times and the first since the papers infancy who was not a member of the Otis or Chandler families. His grandfather, Charles Abel Buffum, was a businessman who founded Buffum's, a department store chain, with his brother, Edwin E. Buffum, and a politician, who served as Mayor of Long Beach, California. Chandler pursued excellence in every aspect of his life, said Tom Johnson. Chandler continued to meet regularly with Puerner and John Carroll, who became editor of The Times shortly after the Tribune purchased the paper and remained in that position until last summer. There were so many changes going on, and I think if we hadnt kept up with the flow, The Times wouldnt have continued to do well financially Im glad we did what we did.. I started work right away, on the graveyard shift, midnight to 8 in the morning. He was a pressroom apprentice, at $48 a week, the equivalent of $356 in todays dollars. Expressions of condolence or remembrance can be sent to the Chandler family at chan@mfire.com. Even when he was publisher, Chandler wasnt one of those workaholic bosses who could never let go. For the first time in his life, he found his personal integrity seriously questioned. The disease is known for its fast progression. He said to me many times that he hadnt wanted to come to the paper in the first place, but he felt an obligation to his family to do it, said Robert F. Erburu, who succeeded Chandler as Times Mirror chairman. His mother rushed him to a second hospital, where a doctor she knew revived him with an adrenaline shot to the heart. On that wisp of a lure, the room filled up with the cream of the Southern California establishment: corporate heads, college presidents, prominent lawyers and judges, Los Angeles Mayor Norris Poulson, members of the county Board of Supervisors, former California Gov. But the series also served notice that The Times was in the process of becoming a different and much better newspaper. In 1960, he became publisher of the Los Angeles Times. 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