Heirs to other great newspaper dynasties have felt an obligation to remain deeply involved with their papers, virtually until their dying day, and Chandlers decision not to do so remained a topic of curiosity among his peers long after he left. The Mirror was losing $30,000 a week, and Otis sent his father a confidential memo urging that a strong business manager be hired. Sure, like any business executive, there were times when I would like to have been away from it all, free of responsibilities. The paper warmly endorsed Nixon but also praised Browns accomplishments in the same editorial. He attended Dartmouth College, and on a dare, he jumped into a vat of starch that had frozen over during winter, which led to severe pneumonia. In some ways, he was typical of the macho male of his era. The 1962 gubernatorial campaign was another. 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. In 1995, when he was 68, his motorcycle collided with a tractor in New Zealand, leaving him with part of the big toe on his left foot missing, another toe severely damaged and the rest of the foot largely numb. He was airlifted to a hospital. Chandler always denied any conflict of interest, and he invariably emerged from these controversies with his reputation for personal integrity intact. Thats when I decided this was the business for me.. He lifted weights three times a week in his home gym. But Tribune had long had Times Mirror in its corporate sights. 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. Soon there was talk of Otis becoming publisher of the Mirror when he finished his training program most likely as one of the final steps before he became publisher of The Times. Chandler was elated; many who knew him well and saw him after that race said they had rarely seen him happier. But even though the paper and the company has been sold, it feels to me like Im home again.. At a time when newspapers were becoming increasingly vulnerable to competition from the Internet, television, direct mail and other sources for information and advertising, Willes said it was imperative that they market themselves more aggressively and improve journalistically to make themselves more relevant to readers and more valuable to advertisers. Le Dowling arbre gnalogique avec les parents d'undemi-million, contient des milliers de photos et plus d'un millierGeneaStars. 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. Did The Times change out of foresight or luck? 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. So did the shutdown in January 1962 of the Mirror and the Examiner, the morning Hearst newspaper. 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. 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. 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. 2443 E Peach Tree Drive, Chandler, AZ 85249 (MLS# 6525796) is a Single Family property with 3 bedrooms and 2 full bathrooms. The corporate air was a little too rarified for him, said Swayze, his secretary. He and Thomas finished sixth in a field of 72 cars third in their class of 22 a remarkable performance for a 50-year-old rookie driver. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Even Chandler said some of those long stories made the paper seem gray, somewhat dull at times. [1] Instead, he spent 1951 to 1953 in the Air Force's ground service, as a co-captain of the track team and supervisor of athletics and drama at Camp Stoneman in Pittsburg, California. When Chandler was growing up, he lived with his parents on a 10-acre citrus ranch in Sierra Madre. FOR THE RECORD:In an earlier version of this article, the date of the Helsinki Olympic Games was incorrectly given as 1948. He remained an avid reader of the paper. 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. The conservative movement that would lead to Barry Goldwaters presidential candidacy in 1964 and to Ronald Reagans subsequent rise was in its nascence. 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. 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]. His efforts led him directly into confrontation with a powerful force for the status quo: his own family. People who knew the Chandlers well say Otis first wife was enormously competitive. Numerous top Times reporters left the paper, many to join the New York Times or to pursue other interests. And in January 1964, they hired a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist away from the Denver Post. 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. Brian Lamb, right, founder and CEO of C-Span, interviews Otis Chandler in 2001. Other family members had gathered at the Chandler home. Others argued that the negative attention that was focused on the paper, Willes and the rest of the Chandler family in the aftermath of Otis statement helped accelerate and crystallize the familys desire to sell The Times. 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.. As a boy, he would stand alongside his father and grandfather at Hollywood Cemetery (now Hollywood Forever) in annual memorials to the victims of a bomb blast that wrecked the Times building in 1910, killing 20 workers. 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. 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. I thought Otis was committed in the same way, she said. Ultimately, there was little that Chandler could or would do to influence the fate of The Times beyond this brief but dramatic entry into the fray. 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. Like his father before him, he thought he should concentrate on companywide responsibilities, by succeeding Franklin D. Murphy as chairman of the Times Mirror board. 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. 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. Many people wondered if, in retrospect, Chandlers entire tenure at The Times had compromised his passion for freedom if he would have been happier had he been outside all the time, surfing, hunting, riding and racing, instead of being stuffed into a suit, sitting behind a desk, making speeches and attending meetings. 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. 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.. According to official documents, he wrote and telephoned a number of such people, including Evelle Younger, the former state attorney general and Los Angeles County district attorney. One of the first examples came in 1961, when The Times hired Jim Murray as a sports columnist. By all accounts, the family enjoyed their outdoor experiences together, for Chandler focused on his children as intensely as he did on everything else that mattered in his life. Buff Chandler was the daughter of a prominent Long Beach family, owners of the successful Buffums department store. Murphy was scheduled to retire soon, and Otis was determined to give up the publishers job in 1980, when he would have been publisher for 20 years four years longer than my father, he often pointed out to those disappointed by his departure. He said I had to be well-rounded and implied that it was so I could ultimately take some executive position. He broke the freshman school record with a toss of 48 feet (15m), 761/47inches. Willes had taken charge of the company after a deep and prolonged recession that hit The Times particularly hard; circulation at the paper was declining, and both the stock price and the profits of Times Mirror were falling even faster. Unbeknown to the reporters and editors who worked on that project and to the entire editorial staff of The Times the paper had agreed to share the profits from the issue with Staples Center as part of a complicated arrangement by which The Times became a founding partner of the arena. 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. 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. He was 70 then, mandatory retirement age for members of the board of directors. More than most high-level executives, Chandler also seemed willing to interrupt the workday occasionally when pleasure beckoned. 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. [1], Chandler visited The Times frequently as a child, sliding down chutes that were used to drop papers to delivery trucks. But former Editor Thomas, who joined the paper two years after Otis became publisher, said that although Chandler was basically a C-plus student his focus and tenacity made him an A-plus as a publisher or almost anything else he really put his mind to., (Jesus, Bill, Chandler told Thomas when he learned what the editor had said. But results were slow in coming, and many top-level executives left. Chandler, who had retired 19 years prior, sent his message directly to reporters, to the dismay of the newspaper's management. They wanted to impeach Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States. As a student he competed in basketball, soccer, the high jump, running and weightlifting. Recovery was slow but complete, and it was during that period of recuperation, Chandler said many years later, that he did a lot of thinking and somehow developed my competitiveness.. 'It was three outside members of the [Times Mirror] board who persuaded him to do it At the same time, he shifted the papers editorial page philosophy from the extreme right to slightly left of center. Its true that in 1958 Norman Chandler had promoted Williams, a 27-year Times veteran, to the top editors job and had given him instructions to initiate a more aggressive and evenhanded approach to the news. On one memorable occasion, a hotel maid walked in on him while he was doing full squats with his wife on his shoulders in place of a barbell. 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. 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. After graduating from Stanford, he tried to enroll in an Air Force training program. 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. In October 1957, continuing his climb into the executive ranks, Chandler was named special assistant to his father. After his divorce, Chandler had begun to move his primary residence so often two places in Malibu, then Hancock Park, back to Malibu, Ojai, Rancho Matilija, Oregon, Ojai again that his children began teasing him about it. 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. Within four years, Time magazine and others were routinely mentioning The Times as one of the three or four best newspapers in the country. 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. He foresaw the sprawling megalopolis that Los Angeles and its neighboring counties would become, and he wanted The Times to be the dominant paper from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border.. For him a project is a process, a growth. 1. 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. The pay was $48 a week. There was an air of anticipation as the elder Chandler stepped to the microphone and said, after a bit of reminiscing, I hereby appoint, effective as of this moment, Otis Chandler as publisher of The Times., He recalled almost four decades later having had no inkling what my dad was going to say until an hour before the luncheon. Nixon, by all accounts, was stunned by the turnabout. Three years after that, he began construction on a 5,500-square-foot home in Ojai, about 30 minutes from his museum. He was the fourth and final member of the Chandler family to hold the paper's top position. [1], In 1998, at age 71, Chandler suffered minor head injuries when he spun out a Ferrari automobile on the road in Oxnard. But the series also served notice that The Times was in the process of becoming a different and much better newspaper. Chandler re-entered the public eye in 1999 when he publicly criticized the LA Times for creating a special issue of its Sunday magazine dedicated to the new Staples Center in downtown LA when the paper shared a financial interest in the property. Thomas was largely responsible for the great length and literary style of many Times stories qualities for which the paper became both celebrated and criticized. 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. Staffing in Washington and Sacramento was expanded. 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. 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. Six weeks later, on the day that John Puerner of Tribune Co. took over as publisher of The Times, Chandler had dinner with Puerner and Jack Fuller, then-president of Tribune Publishing at their invitation. He sought largely solitary recreational activities throughout his adult life surfing, lifting weights, racing, cycling, hunting. He finished second in the nation, third in the heavyweight division at the national weightlifting championships that year. I apologized to my wife and my children and my mother and father and everyone on the board and all my department heads.. I was a B student.). 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