But the newsroom was riddled with hacks, and Norman Chandler was unwilling to make sweeping personnel changes or to approve the expenditures necessary to effect significant improvement. She was athletic, she surfed, she hunted and she was always vying for equal status or greater status than Otis, said Howard Gilmore, one of Chandlers longtime hunting companions. But as one of the arena's 10 "founding partners", the paper had agreed to share the issue's ad revenue with the Staples Center without telling its reporters or readers about the fiscal arrangement. Under Otis Chandler, The Times became a critically lauded newspaper. In the midst of a horseback riding lesson, he was thrown hard to the ground. Son of Norman Chandler and Dorothy Buffum Chandler Wall Street responded favorably. 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. "I was raised to hate the unions," Chandler said. It may sound strange for a Chandler to say this, he said in one such conversation, but I dont think my family and the other people running the company are looking ahead enough to the Internet and other new media. The youngest son, Michael, also worked in the papers production departments, ultimately taking early retirement in a companywide buyout. [1], Chandler enrolled at his parents' alma mater, Stanford University, in 1946. Norman Chandler was delighted by this practical evidence that Otis had absorbed his childhood lessons of prudence and thrift. Both refused. The most traumatic experience of Chandlers childhood one that assumed mythic proportions as he grew toward adulthood came when he was 8. He always has to have a project. Those included an increase in the amount of news the paper printed, the adoption of a new statement of principles and ethical guidelines, and the publication of an investigation into how and why the Staples deal had occurred. By his strength and by his judgment of good journalists, he was of unique importance in the history of the Los Angeles Times.. Chandler had always had an active life outside the newspaper business, and in his final years as publisher, close friends and associates knew that the lure of those interests combined with fatigue, restlessness, health problems and major changes in his personal life were inexorably leading him away from The Times. Other family members had gathered at the Chandler home. As recently as September, Chandler appeared fit, aside from a knee injury, and was lucid enough to sit for an interview and give a visitor a guided tour of his classic car and motorcycle museum in Oxnard. Chandler later insisted that he hadnt meant to demean blacks and Latinos, but the remark haunted him and the paper for many years. After the papers decision to endorse Nixon for reelection as president in 1972 caused a newsroom firestorm, The Times announced in 1973 that it would no longer routinely endorse candidates for president, governor or U.S. senator. He used the same tone of voice with the president of the United States and the guy who came to change the lightbulbs in his office, said Donna Swayze, his executive secretary from 1962 to 1988. Like his father, who had also been kept on tight purse strings by his father, Otis often split the bill with his fiancee or let her pick up the tab when they dated. Please enable JavaScript in your browser's settings to use this part of Geni. Alberta Chandler, the wife of Chandlers uncle (and rival) Philip, was a prominent member of the Birch Society, and she and Philip had played host to Birch Society President Robert Welch. In 1958, the paper had covered the governors race between Republican William F. Knowland and Democrat Edmund G. Pat Brown in its traditional way: Browns campaign was virtually ignored while Knowlands was championed. Two years later, he was considered a cinch to be one of three shotputters on the U.S. team for the Olympic Games in Helsinki, but he sprained his wrist before the tryouts and had to pull out the biggest disappointment of my life, he recalled almost 50 years later. Otis Chandler died at age 51 years old in March 1971. By the time Thomas became editor in 1971, many of the major changes had been made, resistance had greatly diminished and Chandler was stepping back to take a broader view. Historical Person Search Search Search Results Results Otis Chandler (1919 - 1980) Try FREE for 14 days Try FREE for 14 days How do we create a person's profile? Although Chandler had been opposed to Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race, he had deferred to his father and reluctantly agreed to run an editorial before the Republican convention pledging The Times traditional support to whomever the party chose as its nominee and that turned out to be Goldwater. As a student he competed in basketball, soccer, the high jump, running and weightlifting. The agreement made sense financially for The Times, but it proved to be a boon in another way as well. 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.. Sulzberger recalled decades later that he once walked into Chandlers office and found him hanging upside down in the doorway, like a bat. Mrs. Chandler later achieved fame on her own by raising almost $20 million to finance the creation of the Music Center, a step that went a long way toward erasing the hick town image that Otis had long resented, and she was always keenly interested in the papers coverage of culture and society. But he never interfered with an editorial decision, Thomas said, never tried to tell me how a story should be written or edited or played, or how a page should look.. In 1995, at age 68, he crashed his motorcycle into a tractor while in New Zealand. You cannot overstate the importance of Otis Chandlers impact on the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper industry and all of Southern California, said current Times Publisher Jeff Johnson (no relation to Tom Johnson). I think he fears that he would die if he werent building something.. Nothing but my kids is more important to me than the Los Angeles Times, he said in 1999. But when Williams, the editor, suggested that the paper look into the organization anyway, both Otis and Norman Chandler gave him the go-ahead. Chandler was elated; many who knew him well and saw him after that race said they had rarely seen him happier. 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.. But he did send memos to Williams, the editor, periodically in his early years as publisher criticizing the business and sports sections, for example, and complaining about the content and design of the Sunday magazine, then as now called West. He was rejected anyway; his shoulders and hips were still too big to fit into the cockpit of a jet. But it was Otis Chandler a world-class shotputter in college and a fierce competitor in every arena he entered who took charge of a paper that for decades had generated almost as much ridicule as revenue and transformed it into one of the best newspapers in the country. In 1986, Chandler surrendered the titles of chairman and editor in chief, although he remained on the board and took on the largely ceremonial role of chairman of the companys executive committee. 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. MyHeritage Family Trees; FamilySearch Family Tree; WikiTree; Geni World Family Tree; California Deaths, 1940 - 1997; U.S. Social Security Death Index (SSDI) U.S . Despite the enormous difference in their socioeconomic status, the two remained close friends for more than 30 years. Most historians credit Otis mother Buff to her friends and family with persuading her husband to make their son his successor. Some critics felt that his zeal for national recognition led The Times to underemphasize local news, particularly about minority communities. Thats when I decided this was the business for me.. I was a B student.). While he was hunting in Mozambique in 1964, an elephant charged him, his wife and their guide. As it turned out, however, several members of the Chandler family had begun to share Otis disenchantment with Willes, especially the companys lack of diversification, interest in new media and long-term strategic plan, as Chandlers sister, Camilla Chandler Frost, put it the morning the sale to Tribune was announced. But he said he wished people realized that if hed been left totally on his own, he might have done something different, so why did they question it when he finally decided he would do something different., Although Chandler often likened himself to the eagle that serves as the symbol of The Times I like to soar, to get above the minutiae and the crowds he insisted that as long as he was publisher, I was living the life I wanted to live. 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. Were going to spend as much money as it takes to be the best newspaper in the country and I mean, specifically, [better than] the New York Times, Chandler said in remarks to the papers Washington Bureau in the mid-1960s. [1], In 1990, Chandler was trampled by a musk ox in the Northwest Territories of Canada. They told me Id have to learn to do everything left-handed., With characteristic tenacity, Chandler exercised the arm rigorously, and six months later he could lift it over his head. 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. The collection also included dozens of vintage motorcycles, some of which were loaned to the Guggenheim Museum for its Art of the Motorcycle exhibit, which opened in 1998. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Surely, Chandler was the only publisher of his or any generation to have been profiled not only in Time, Newsweek and Editor & Publisher but in such magazines as Road & Track, Strength and Health, and Safari Club and to be depicted on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly in his bathing suit, riding a surfboard made of newspapers through the curl of a massive whitecap of dollar bills. I thought Otis was committed in the same way, she said. Well into his 70s, he maintained a long-distance bicycling regimen that few people half his age could attempt. Chandler and his editor, Williams, lured reporters away from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, the Washington Star, BusinessWeek and U.S. News & World Report. As it happened, the consultants also recommended that, to ensure stability, the new publisher be capable of holding the job at least 15 years. Murray had helped create Sports Illustrated and was one of its stars. Otis enthusiastically supported Michael's racing career until a near-fatal crash while qualifying at Indianapolis in 1984. 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. 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.. From the start, he wrote periodic first-person columns, prominently displayed in the front section of the paper, musing about the life of an athlete or the quirks of an outboard motor. But in 1968, the paper endorsed Democrat Alan Cranston for U.S. Senate over Republican Max Rafferty, whom it called an outspoken, militant conservative.. Chandler's family owned a stake in the newspaper since his great-grandfather Harrison Gray Otis joined the company in 1882, the year after the Los Angeles Daily Times began publication. Away from the paper, off the board, with most of his Times Mirror stock in trust, he no longer had the power or the inclination to do anything concrete, not even as a fourth third-generation newspapering Chandler. 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