The conservative movement that would lead to Barry Goldwaters presidential candidacy in 1964 and to Ronald Reagans subsequent rise was in its nascence. Thirty years later, he could still recall receiving a message from a fellow surfer one morning in the late 1960s telling him that waves were cresting at 12 to 15 feet off Dana Point the largest Southern California surf of my lifetime, he said. Chandler was no typical rookie. As a boy of 5 or 6, he had frequently accompanied his father to the office and slid down the chutes that were used to drop papers from the pressroom to the delivery trucks. Although Halberstam would later say, No single family dominates any other region of this country as the Chandlers have dominated California, Otis had a far-from-pampered upbringing and was never a man who could be described as effete. He set his sights on a goal making The Times one of the two or three great American papers and he pulled it off.. 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. Otis enthusiastically supported Michael's racing career until a near-fatal crash while qualifying at Indianapolis in 1984. Chandlers grandfather and father followed Gen. Otis in the publishers chair. When he started buying vintage cars again several years later, he purchased another 1931 Duesenberg, this time for $1.2 million, en route to building another world-class collection. Big, blond and broad-shouldered, Chandler looked more like a Muscle Beach habitue-turned-movie star than a corporate entrepreneur on a journalistic mission. Did The Times change out of foresight or luck? The New York Times even published an editorial under the headline The Truth According to Otis Chandler.. Norman Chandler, then near his 60th birthday, saw the logic in the change. But the Mirror continued to falter, and his parents decided they didnt want his first command to be that of a sinking ship. He collected vintage cars and drove most of them to work at one time or another, alternating Porsches and Rolls-Royces with motorcycles, pickups and other vehicles in his growing inventory. When Chandler was growing up, he lived with his parents on a 10-acre citrus ranch in Sierra Madre. 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. Heres a man who led a full life, said Otis Booth, his cousin and longtime hunting companion. Chandlers primary role was to provide the impetus, framework and financial support for change, rather than dictating specifics. 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. 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. He hunted. My trips gave me a balance, a perspective, he said. [1], "Oats" was Chandler's nickname within the family. On the fringes of that movement and especially active in Southern California was an ultra-right-wing organization known as the John Birch Society. 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. 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. At 71, he resumed playing tennis. They saw the sinister hand of communism behind such government initiatives as fluoridation of the water supply and integration of the schools. At the time of her death in 1997, she had eight grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. While in college, he sometimes worked summers at the paper, most often moving printing plates and other heavy equipment. After graduating from Stanford, he tried to enroll in an Air Force training program. That article deeply wounded some of the 160-odd descendants of Otis grandfather, family patriarch Harry Chandler. 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. 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. But as the children grew up and she had more time available, she embarked on a career of her own she got womens lib is how Chandler put it and that exacerbated tensions between them. It was clear to me that it meant a lot to him and that he didnt want to feel shut out.. Respect and credibility for a newspaper is irreplaceable.. The booming Southern California economy helped immeasurably, of course. Chandler said there was no simple answer: The region was changing, the demographic was changing, the type of paper was changing, he said. The city editor, who had been hired during Chandlers heyday as publisher, said he felt an obligation to carry out his former boss wishes. Brian Lamb, right, founder and CEO of C-Span, interviews Otis Chandler in 2001. But in 1972, he suffered his most damaging blow and it was, to a significant extent, self-inflicted. 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. Norman Chandler died in 1973. On arrival, she encountered a doctor she knew, and he revived the boy with a shot of adrenaline in the heart. Research genealogy for Otis Chandler of Duxbury, Plymouth, Massachusetts, United States, as well as other members of the Chandler family, on Ancestry. In a cover story on Chandler in 1967, Newsweek said, In the six years since his father made him publisher of The Times, Chandler has staged one of the most remarkable palace revolutions in U.S. journalism. But by then, he had so little real power and so little influence with the members of his family who controlled the paper that when they decided four months later to sell Times Mirror to Tribune Co. of Chicago, he said he hadnt even known about the negotiations until he heard rumors, nothing more, two days before the deal was consummated. Chandler died at his home in Ojai about 4 a.m., according to Tom Johnson, a former publisher of The Times who was acting as a spokesman for the family. 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. They would race their cars down the Pasadena Freeway at 140 mph in the predawn hours en route to weightlifting sessions at the Times gym and double cheeseburgers at Tommys, just west of downtown. Chandler tried to make amends, claiming he had been misquoted, but the damage had been done. Otis Family Trees, Crests, Genealogy, DNA, More add your favorite Website (s) to this page! The two married in 1922, and had two children, Camilla and Otis, both born in 1927. 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.). 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. But Thomas said it really didnt take much persuasion, because he really did want to go., Chandler himself said: I think some of the family members and some of the corporate people were hoping I would step aside although I dont recall that there was strong pressure.. By the time he left the publishers office, it had increased tenfold during his tenure. Among them: the mate of the musk ox that nearly killed him in 1990. Thats more than I ever heard from Mark Willes.. 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. President-elect Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy Reagan, are honored at the Los Angeles Music Center in 1980 during an event hosted by Otis Chandler and his mother, Dorothy. During Chandlers first year as publisher, the paper ran one of the most important series in its history, stories that helped define the new Los Angeles Times. For him a project is a process, a growth. 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. "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.[1]. But he didnt disclose to other investors that he received $109,000 in finders fees and $373,000 in promotional shares of GeoTek stock for his efforts. In the 1980 speech, he complained that he felt increasingly like an outcast. I was strictly a tall, skinny blond kid from California.. Numerous top Times reporters left the paper, many to join the New York Times or to pursue other interests. 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. I decided it was time to be a little selfish, to give myself full time to the things Id always enjoyed doing in bits and pieces., He may also have been frustrated by his inability to reach his stated goal of supplanting the New York Times as the most widely admired American newspaper. 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. Records may include photos, original documents, family history, relatives, specific dates, locations and full names. 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. Katharine Graham, who became publisher of the Washington Post three years after Chandler took over The Times, and who relied on him as a mentor in her first days on the job, said in a 1999 interview the day after her 82nd birthday, when she was still very much involved with the Post Im so committed to the company and so is Punch [former New York Times Publisher Sulzberger] that I cant imagine one of us actually leaving. He was initially miserable; the other students all seemed richer, better-educated and more sophisticated. 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. 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, David Halberstam wrote in The Powers That Be, his 1979 book about the news media. He had the papers support when he ran unsuccessfully for president in 1960. 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. He was featured on the cover of sporting magazines like Road & Track, Strength and Health, and Safari Club. 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. 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. I apologized to my wife and my children and my mother and father and everyone on the board and all my department heads.. Otis Chandler was born on July 4, 1919. By his strength and by his judgment of good journalists, he was of unique importance in the history of the Los Angeles Times.. Although The Times had, on rare occasion, endorsed conservative Democrats for state legislative and U.S. House seats, the backing of a Democrat for such a high office was a momentous decision, Chandler said in a 2005 interview. The GeoTek affair also damaged Chandler physically. Find records of Otis Chandler Birth records Marriage records Divorce records . His mother rushed him to a second hospital, where a doctor she knew revived him with an adrenaline shot to the heart. And he wrote an exhaustive, if somewhat ponderous, seven-part series about the treatment of mentally ill children. We wouldnt be working here if it werent for him.. 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. 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? Most of his early jobs in the training program were just that jobs, a grinding routine, he later said and because his father wanted him to have as many Times experiences (and meet as many Times employees) as possible, his schedule was constantly changing. Although Chandler had previously been insistent that his criticisms of the business strategies pursued by Times management remain private, this undermining of the papers editorial integrity stirred him to action. Regardless, Chandler welcomed the outcome, largely because of his dissatisfaction with the existing management of Times-Mirror. Hed put you in there, and he let you do it and if you werent performing, out you went.. [citation needed]. The GeoTek debacle helped greatly exacerbate the colon problem. He died in 2002. 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. Some at the Los Angeles Times felt that Chandlers sharp public criticism of management and the widespread attention it received played a role in several subsequent management decisions. But when Williams, the editor, suggested that the paper look into the organization anyway, both Otis and Norman Chandler gave him the go-ahead. 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