We wouldnt be working here if it werent for him.. Chandler was raised to share his family's distaste for labor unions, a tradition that favored the family's financial interests. After leaving the Air Force in 1953, he had little direction for his career. The booming Southern California economy helped immeasurably, of course. By his strength and by his judgment of good journalists, he was of unique importance in the history of the Los Angeles Times.. Not only did it champion GOP candidates, its editors helped select them. [1] He was the son of Norman Chandler, his predecessor as publisher, and Dorothy Buffum Chandler, a patron of the arts and a Regent of the University of California. When I asked what he did, he just said, I work at The Times,. Thomas recalled. 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. [1] I dont know but I didnt have that choice.. Doctors said his right arm, yanked from its socket by the impact, would be virtually useless for the rest of his life. He was rejected anyway; his shoulders and hips were still too big to fit into the cockpit of a jet. The Times, he would later say, was very much in his blood even then. Victims suffer from severe dementia, as well as the stiffness, tremors and impaired movements characteristic of Parkinsons. As a weightlifter, Chandler finished third in the nation competing in the heavyweight division. 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. They also gave me quiet time so I could really think. I liked to make it on my own in whatever I accomplished, he told an interviewer. Sulzberger recalled decades later that he once walked into Chandlers office and found him hanging upside down in the doorway, like a bat. 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. I think building houses is a replacement for the satisfaction he got from The Times, his wife, Bettina, said just before construction began on the Ojai house. Chandler acknowledged that it was a difficult time for newspapers, but he disagreed vigorously with Willes approach. Chandler retired as publisher in 1980 at the age of 52 to become chairman of Times Mirror, reducing his involvement in the day-to-day operations of the company. Chandler knew and trusted Burke. Three top editors asked Boyarsky not to read the statement aloud, fearing that it would further provoke an already enraged staff. You transformed the entire staff, he said, and the whole place had a totally different attitude.. 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. I wasnt satisfied Im that way whether Im out riding my bike or racing a car.. They saw the sinister hand of communism behind such government initiatives as fluoridation of the water supply and integration of the schools. In 1977, Chandler brought Tom Johnson, publisher of the Dallas Times-Herald and a former aide to President Johnson (no relation), to Los Angeles as president of The Times and heir apparent for publisher. George Cotliar, who joined the paper three years before Chandler became publisher and served as an editor for almost 40 years, said The Times had been widely regarded as a crappy newspaper and a politically biased newspaper, and the Birch series and the editorial were a statement to the staff too. Son of Norman Chandler and Dorothy Buffum Chandler At 6-foot 3-inches (190cm) tall, after bulking-up to and 220 pounds he won the Pacific Coast Conference title and finished second in the nation during his senior year with a toss of 57 feet (17m), 63/47 of an inch while serving as his team's captain. Growing up, Chandler had often said hed like to be a doctor, although he later conceded, I was never an outstanding scholar. When he left the Air Force in 1953, he had no clear sense of what he wanted to do with his life. Was the daughter of General Harrison Gray Otis and Secretary of the Times-Mirror Company (formerly the publishing company of the Los Angeles Times ). When Williams showed him the piece, the publisher said it wasnt tough enough. For several years, the pair had enjoyed a Saturday ritual. Chandler was both more willing than most publishers to reinvest the papers rising profits in editorial improvements and more visionary in his approach to newspapering. They never thought she was good enough to marry Norman, and she was out to prove them wrong, her son said several years after her death. Reporter Gene Blake produced a five-part expose, written in calm, matter-of-fact language. When he was a little older, he set up his own backyard basketball backboard and high-jump pit, and practiced both sports, by himself, hour after hour. [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. I always had the feeling that I wasnt welcome in the building when Mark was in charge that maybe theyd have a guard try to throw me out if I tried to come in. He was the fourth and final member of the Chandler family to hold the paper's top position. Marian Otis Chandler (1866-1952), Born Emma Marian Otis. Well before Chandler was named publisher, a poll of Washington correspondents conducted by writer Leo Rosten named The Times one of the three least fair and reliable newspapers in the country. In some ways, he was typical of the macho male of his era. He also complained that the papers editor and publisher never try to come up with new ways to cut the deficit. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. I must confess, he said, I am getting darn tired of defending myself as a hunting person.. 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. [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. 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. 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. The change that ignited the biggest debate was Willes announced intention to blow up, with a bazooka, if necessary, the wall that had traditionally separated and insulated the newsroom of the paper from the business department to avoid conflicts of interest. Chandler was just then becoming interested in big game hunting, and his approach to hiring was much the same: only go after the biggest and the best. Such special issues were financial windfalls for the Times, generating a record $2 million in ad revenue. I never understood how he could just opt out like that., But Chandler, asked often about his decision to leave, said: I gave 40 years of my life to The Times and Times Mirror. But he persisted and in 1978 at age 50, after years of what he called Walter Mitty fantasies about becoming a race car driver finally got a chance to race professionally. Watkins Glen was to be one of the most enjoyable experiences of Chandlers life. Their first child was a boy named Norman after Chandler's father. Until shortly before his death in 1973, Chandlers father had helped insulate him from those protests. "No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did," journalist David Halberstam wrote in his history of the company. He lifted weights three times a week in his home gym. The Games took place in 1952. So did the shutdown in January 1962 of the Mirror and the Examiner, the morning Hearst newspaper. Norman, the eldest, went through an executive training program and rose to be composing superintendent a position overseeing much of the physical production of the paper before leaving in 1989, when he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He worked out daily, lifting weights in a gym he had built at The Times and improvising when he was traveling. A few weeks or months after I became publisher, my mother told me, I used to tell your father that I thought you were ready, but he wouldnt listen to me,. he said. Otis, meanwhile, still had no idea what his mother and father had in mind for him. Ultimately, he was able to do everything right-handed, he said, except serve hard in tennis.. Chandler who learned to hunt when he was 10, shooting ducks with his father began big-game hunting a year after he became publisher, and for most of the rest of his life, he tried to go on at least one major hunting trip a year, in Botswana, Mongolia, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, among other places. 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. He remained an avid reader of the paper. 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.. Their son Harry concurred, although he also agreed with his mother that most of the familys leisure activities revolved around what Dad wanted to do camping, water skiing, cliff-jumping, surfing. At the age of 8, Chandler was thrown to the ground during a horseback riding lesson. 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. Everyone wondered why, at so young an age, he would step away from something that he had had such an enormous impact in building, Louis D. Boccardi, former president and chief executive officer of Associated Press, said more than a decade later. Her father had been mayor of Long Beach. I never had him second-guess me, ever, said William F. Thomas, The Times editor from 1971 to 1989. He was also consumed by another passion: buying classic cars for his museum. When he was with you, he was really with you, Harry said. 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. Thats not in my nature, he said. He withdrew from Dartmouth and moved to Los Angeles for his health. The series and editorial landed like a bombshell. Both refused. Chandler would assume the newly created position of editor in chief of Times Mirror and, on Jan. 1, 1981, he would succeed Murphy as chairman. As long as I knew him, Otis had an adventurous spirit and the courage to pursue it.. When I came, recalled Day, the former editorial page editor, I thought [Otis] was going to build a progressive newspaper dynasty like the Washington Post or the New York Times. Knowing that he couldnt create a high-quality, widely respected news organization if he relied exclusively on wire service reports and his existing staff, he began hiring top reporters and editors from other major news organizations and opening Times bureaus around the world. Other family members had gathered at the Chandler home. Find records of Otis Chandler Birth records Marriage records Divorce records . But in 1968, the paper endorsed Democrat Alan Cranston for U.S. Senate over Republican Max Rafferty, whom it called an outspoken, militant conservative.. 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. If a newspaper, even a great newspaper like the Los Angeles Times, loses credibility with its community, with its readers, with its advertisers, with its shareholders, that is probably the most serious circumstance that I can possibly envision. It was at Watkins Glen that Chandler got to know Bettina Whitaker, who was an executive at Shakeys International, a sponsor of his Watkins Glen car. The only other possible publisher in the family, however, was Normans younger brother Philip, then general manager of The Times and a member of the Times Mirror board. 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. Chandler himself invested more than $200,000 of his personal funds. By the time he enrolled at Stanford University in 1946, he weighed about 200 pounds. The Times, on his watch, consistently editorialized in favor of gun control, but Chandler himself was a strong advocate of the right to bear arms. The Hearst paper was subsequently hit by a devastating strike and ceased publication in 1989. When doctors said Otis was dead, Mrs. Chandler wailed, My son is not dead! She picked him up and raced to another hospital, screaming all the way there, Otis is alive, Otis is alive!. But William Thomas, who was Times editor when Chandler made his decision to step down as publisher, said he remembered sitting in a taxi with him in Madrid in 1975 before hed met Whitaker, when he was still married to Missy and hearing Otis say he wanted to give up the publishers job in three to five years. He entered a six-hour endurance race in Watkins Glen, N.Y., teamed with John Thomas, his motorcycle buddy and Porsche mechanic, who had long raced cars himself. 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. For most of the first 80 years of its existence, the paper was such a journalistic laughingstock that humorist S.J. For the first time in his life, he found his personal integrity seriously questioned. The Chandlers had no rival as the most powerful family in Southern California. He was convinced that he had taken The Times about as far as he could, and he wanted more challenges and more freedom. At the time he enrolled at Phillips, Chandler weighed 155 pounds. Brian Lamb, right, founder and CEO of C-Span, interviews Otis Chandler in 2001. Otis said he wanted a more assertive, more liberal editorial page, Day said. Id work the graveyard shift for a week, then spend a week on days, then a week on the swing shift, then back to the graveyard shift, he recalled. He finished second in the nation, third in the heavyweight division at the national weightlifting championships that year. Otis Chandler in MyHeritage family trees (Sturtevant Web Site) view all 15 Immediate Family Diana Chandler mother Asa Chandler, Jr. father Cynthia Bailey sister Emily (Chandler) Washburn sister Diana Chandler sister Noah Chandler, I brother Lucinda Chandler sister Laura Chandler sister Martin Chandler brother David Chandler brother George Chandler His first year, he increased it 45%. Otis Family Trees, Crests, Genealogy, DNA, More add your favorite Website (s) to this page! He moved gradually at first, then much more quickly, especially after hiring Day, who joined the paper as chief editorial writer in 1969 and later became editor of the editorial pages. He died in 2002. But it was fitting that his departure was so surprising to so many, for he had long been something of an enigma to his fellow publishers. It was a watershed experience, he said. After the series was published, Otis asked for an editorial criticizing the Birchers. 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. Thats more than I ever heard from Mark Willes.. Research genealogy for Otis Chandler of Duxbury, Plymouth, Massachusetts, United States, as well as other members of the Chandler family, on Ancestry. 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. By his own count, Chandler had at least half a dozen brushes with death over the years, and that didnt include his bout with prostate cancer in 1989 or his mild heart attack in 1998. Williams wrote a new one, warning that the Birchers extremism and smear tactics were subversive acts that could sow distrust and weaken the very strong case for conservatism. Chandler signed it and published it on Page 1. 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. Retired Times publisher Otis Chandlers car collection included a 1931 Duesenberg LeBaron Special Phaeton. (1924 - 1972) Jump to: Bio graphy Family Photos Comments Obit uary. [2] In 1945, her husband became publisher of the Times, a position he held until he was succeeded by their son, Otis, in 1960. Perelman once wrote that while traveling through the western United States by train, he asked a porter to bring him a newspaper and unfortunately, the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles Times.. Historical Person Search Search Search Results Results Otis Chandler (1928 - 1970) Try FREE for 14 days Try FREE for 14 days How do we create a person's profile? 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. Its not their kind of newspaper, he said. One of the first examples came in 1961, when The Times hired Jim Murray as a sports columnist. But the series also served notice that The Times was in the process of becoming a different and much better newspaper. When stories in local alternative weeklies, followed by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, disclosed details of the deal, the newsroom erupted in protest, circulating petitions and demanding an apology from Downing, the publisher, who had signed the original founding partner agreement. Respect and credibility for a newspaper is irreplaceable.. 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. Almost 20 years after their divorce, the happily remarried Marilyn Brant DeYoung said she didnt think shed been competitive with Chandler, except on the tennis court, where I did get upset when he beat me. She said they had a wonderful marriage, and he was an involved father, especially when he was younger, before he was publisher.. His remarks were reported in publications from coast to coast. Not long after, he left his wife, and three years later a year after he moved out of the Times publishers office he and Whitaker, 12 years his junior, were married. 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