Otis himself offered contradictory explanations of his mothers role in his promotion, befitting a mother-son relationship that had its share of paradox. He thought they had committed transgressions that jeopardized the reputation and credibility he had worked so diligently to establish. The Times, he would later say, was very much in his blood even then. For all his seeming calm and control throughout his life, he had suffered from sporadic bouts of insomnia and intestinal pain diagnosed as a spastic colon ever since he became publisher. After graduating from Stanford, he tried to enroll in an Air Force training program. [1], Chandler was raised on a 10-acre (40,000m2) citrus ranch in Sierra Madre owned by his parents. The Chandlers had no rival as the most powerful family in Southern California. Nobody had ever heard of the Chandlers, he said later. But in a letter to his mother 12 years later, Otis referred to her as that person who made it possible for me to provide leadership to The Times, adding: It was a tremendous gamble for you to take on any young man of 32. There was no mention of his father. Unencumbered by union contracts, Chandler made major technological improvements at The Times, shifting from traditional hot type letterpress production to more flexible photo-composition and offset printing, and making The Times the first major newspaper in the United States to computerize typesetting. [1], On a 1964 safari in Mozambique, an elephant charged his party. By the time of graduation, he weighed 200 pounds. 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. 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. 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. I apologized to my wife and my children and my mother and father and everyone on the board and all my department heads.. 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. Norman Chandler, then near his 60th birthday, saw the logic in the change. 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. 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. Chandler was raised to share his family's distaste for labor unions, a tradition that favored the family's financial interests. 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. 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. 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. Seldom has a newspaper had such an opportunity to meld the best of three staffs. 1. Nixon, by all accounts, was stunned by the turnabout. Chandler started prep school at Cate, in Carpinteria, but his parents thought hed find a greater challenge and broader perspective back East, so after a year they transferred him to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. Some critics felt that his zeal for national recognition led The Times to underemphasize local news, particularly about minority communities. They owned vast landholdings and used their influence with elected officials and the business elite to shape the regions development. Because much of his Times Mirror stock was tied up in trust funds, a lot of his money came from buying and selling cars. Lucy Otis (born Chandler) in MyHeritage family trees (OBRIEN Web Site (FamilySearch)) view all 19 Immediate Family Stephen Otis husband Arunah Otis son Caroline Graves daughter Calvin Otis son Alice Otis daughter Chandler Otis son Lucy Randall daughter Stephen Otis son James Otis son Seth Otis son Nathaniel Otis son James Otis son view all 15 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. 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. The truth probably falls in the middle. Both Thomas and Johnson said he hated being chairman. The corporate air was a little too rarified for him, said Swayze, his secretary. Over time, Chandler and others said, that began to wear on him. Emma Marian Otis 1866-1952. 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. In Los Angeles, while working in the fruit fields, he started a small delivery company that . [2] At Stanford he was a successful shot putter. Elisha Graves Otis Print Family Tree Born 3 August 1811 - Halifax, Windham Co., VT Deceased 8 April 1861 - Yonkers, Westchester Co., NY,aged 49 years old Founder of the Otis Elevator Co. 1 file available Parents Stephen Otis 1773-1859 Phoebe Glynn 1778-1867 Spouses, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren No one could say that the team carried me or that the coach put me in because my name was Chandler.. "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. We wouldnt be working here if it werent for him.. 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. Unlike his father, however, he had not insisted that his children follow him into leadership positions at The Times. Its too big, its too stuffy. He had family money, but he had looked on GeoTek as another chance to prove he could succeed on his own, and he wound up embarrassed and forced by the exposure to return his stock and finders fees. 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. 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. He continued to ride motorcycles. As it happened, the consultants also recommended that, to ensure stability, the new publisher be capable of holding the job at least 15 years. After leaving the Air Force in 1953, he had little direction for his career. In some ways, he was typical of the macho male of his era. This coincided with the shift of the paper's editorial stance from overtly conservative to independent. 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. 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. As much as any other change at the paper, the arrival of Paul Conrad brilliant, sharp-penned and liberal served notice that an entirely new breed of Chandler was in charge. 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. More than most high-level executives, Chandler also seemed willing to interrupt the workday occasionally when pleasure beckoned. I was 50, and I didnt want to be unhappy for the rest of my life.. I dont butt in.. 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. I was more upset with myself than with Jack Burke, he said years later. 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. When Chandler left the publishers office and again when he left the chairmans job, his former colleagues worried that without him, they would no longer be immune to corporate and outside pressures. Readers could be excused for thinking that only one political party existed in Southern California. He died in May 1972 at age 47. The disease is known for its fast progression. The agreement made sense financially for The Times, but it proved to be a boon in another way as well. [1], "Oats" was Chandler's nickname within the family. They resented my position at the L.A. Times and felt there were a lot of things I could have done differently.. 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 surfed. Respect and credibility for a newspaper is irreplaceable.. I dont know but I didnt have that choice.. 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. To put together his galaxy of star reporters, Otis Chandler employed what in much of the newspaper business amounts to a secret weapon money.. He set his sights on a goal making The Times one of the two or three great American papers and he pulled it off.. 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. Ex-husband of Marilyn "Missy" Chandler Stewart 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. . Research genealogy for Otis Chandler of Mingo, West Virginia, as well as other members of the Chandler family, on Ancestry. Three top editors asked Boyarsky not to read the statement aloud, fearing that it would further provoke an already enraged staff. And it became clear over the years that he did not have any such intention. He wrote a statement, dictated it to Bill Boyarsky, then city editor, and asked that it be read aloud to the newsroom staff. Philip Chandler resigned from the Times Mirror board seven months later. 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. But in the social pecking order of the Southern California elite, she was seen as a cut below the Chandlers, and they never let her forget it. Otis Chandler at the Los Angeles Times in 2003 with a photo of his mother, Dorothy Chandler, in the backgorund. Newspapers are a mature, non-growth industry, vulnerable to cyclical economic downturns and increases in the cost of newsprint, he said. Sure, like any business executive, there were times when I would like to have been away from it all, free of responsibilities. Because he had five children and heavy corporate responsibilities, his wife tried to dissuade him from this favored leisure time activity. His goal, he once quipped, was to make it a militant middle-of-the-road paper.. Geni requires JavaScript! Nearly a decade after his divorce, he installed the best of his animals in dioramas amid the classic cars and motorcycles in his Oxnard museum. By the time he enrolled at Stanford University in 1946, he weighed about 200 pounds. 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. 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. Chandler welcomed Tribune in part because he admired its management and strategy and in part because he thought its diverse holdings four newspapers, 22 television stations and an aggressive Internet presence would help stabilize The Times financial position in the new century. Under Otis Chandler, The Times became a critically lauded newspaper. Chandler was the great-grandson of Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, the blustery Civil War veteran who bought part-ownership of The Times in 1882, a year after it began publication, and was its publisher for 35 years. As he did in every posting at The Times, he filled notebook after notebook with his thoughts on possible improvements. While he was hunting in Mozambique in 1964, an elephant charged him, his wife and their guide. The Dowling Family Tree with over half a million relatives,contains thousands of pictures and over four thousand GeneaStars.We are all related! That was far from the only example of Chandlers reversal of long-held dogma at The Times. 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 Chandlers grandfather and father followed Gen. Otis in the publishers chair. Many people found him a bit distant cool, controlled, difficult to know well and these qualities became more pronounced as he matured and increasingly tried to escape the burden of being a Chandler. 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