[1], In 1998, at age 71, Chandler suffered minor head injuries when he spun out a Ferrari automobile on the road in Oxnard. Chandlers wife, Bettina, was with him. Arthur O. Sulzberger, who was then publisher of the New York Times, said that although he initially shared his colleagues surprise and disappointment when Chandler left, I later realized that I shouldnt have been so surprised. Word that Chandler was breaking his silence ricocheted through the newsroom. Direct, decisive and at times startlingly frank in both his personal and professional lives, Chandler told people what he expected of them, and he didnt have much patience with failure. He gradually worked his way through every department at the paper: production, circulation, the mailroom, mechanical, advertising, the newsroom. Expressions of condolence or remembrance can be sent to the Chandler family at chan@mfire.com. But after about 18 months, I accepted an invitation to his house for dinner, and when I drove up to this huge mansion in San Marino, I thought, Holy cow! When I got inside, I said, Well, just what do you do at The Times?.. Many at The Times hoped that in the aftermath of that re-emergence, Chandler would use his moral authority to help reverse what he and they saw as the declining fortunes of the paper. 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. 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. Otis Chandler was born on July 24, 1924. Surprising though it may have been, that behavior the initial reluctance to question his successors; the cheerful acquiescence to the sale was very much in keeping with a lifelong pattern. Geni requires JavaScript! But the Mirror continued to falter, and his parents decided they didnt want his first command to be that of a sinking ship. After leaving the Air Force in 1953, he had little direction for his career. Norman Chandler, then near his 60th birthday, saw the logic in the change. Because he had five children and heavy corporate responsibilities, his wife tried to dissuade him from this favored leisure time activity. He was bold in making changes and investments in the paper that transformed The Times into a world-class news organization., Otis was a giant in every way, said Donald Graham, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of the Washington Post Co. The paper you are reading is his monument. 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. Updated: October 7, 2011 . Among them: the mate of the musk ox that nearly killed him in 1990. It was a sign that you now have a boss who believes in good, tough journalism, who wants to produce the best paper in the country and wholl support you in your efforts and make it possible to achieve that, he said. He set his sights on a goal making The Times one of the two or three great American papers and he pulled it off.. The city editor, who had been hired during Chandlers heyday as publisher, said he felt an obligation to carry out his former boss wishes. 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. Philip Chandler resigned from the Times Mirror board seven months later. Chandler attended Stanford, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Sigma Rho chapter). The Hearst paper was subsequently hit by a devastating strike and ceased publication in 1989. But results were slow in coming, and many top-level executives left. And, like most men of his stature, he was on the boards of several civic organizations and served on a variety of local and national commissions and committees. A tribute will be held at The Times at a later date for Times staff, as well as retirees from the paper and the Times Mirror Corp. 'It was three outside members of the [Times Mirror] board who persuaded him to do it 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. They didnt like the L.A. Times, he said in the 2005 interview. Would I have wanted to stay, given what was happening at The Times and Times Mirror? Chandler asked a year after stepping down. Norman Chandler (1899-1973), Publisher of the Los Angeles 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. 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.. Chandler liked the shotput and weightlifting, he once said, because they were individual sports, and he could be judged on his own merits. [1], Chandler made improvement of the paper's quality a top priority, succeeding in raising the product's reputation, as well as its profit margins. Otis said he wanted a more assertive, more liberal editorial page, Day said. By the time he enrolled at Stanford University in 1946, he weighed about 200 pounds. The pay was $48 a week. Column: 15 minutes of fame flies by. 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. He quickly increased the budget of the paper, allowing it to expand its coverage. He hunted. [1], In 1986, Chandler won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism to honor his years of service to the newspaper.[3]. 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. Ex-husband of Marilyn "Missy" Chandler Stewart The youngest son, Michael, also worked in the papers production departments, ultimately taking early retirement in a companywide buyout. Buff Chandler was the daughter of a prominent Long Beach family, owners of the successful Buffums department store. The negotiations were so secret that Willes said he didnt know about them until less than two weeks before the deal was done, and Chandler said he didnt learn of them until he began hearing rumors two days before the agreement was made. 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. He remained an avid reader of the paper. Please enable JavaScript in your browser's settings to use this part of Geni. Landsberg did additional reporting and rewriting of the text. 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. Chandler was no typical rookie. While he was hunting in Mozambique in 1964, an elephant charged him, his wife and their guide. I was strictly a tall, skinny blond kid from California.. 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. This was a flagrant violation of the independence of the editorial department, and it placed the credibility of the paper in jeopardy. Chandler had long felt that Willes hadnt shown enough respect for him and what he had accomplished. 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? Nobody had ever heard of the Chandlers, he said later. In 1995, after moving to another ranch in Oregon, he announced that hed found paradise. When I asked what he did, he just said, I work at The Times,. Thomas recalled. 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. He saw them both as restraints on his freedom. 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. For several years, the pair had enjoyed a Saturday ritual. Brian Lamb, right, founder and CEO of C-Span, interviews Otis Chandler in 2001. 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. 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. Under Otis Chandler, The Times became a critically lauded newspaper. 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. Thats why we diversified the company and went into television and cable and forest products and books and medical and legal publishing.. 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. Theyll have to carry me out of here feet first, he said. 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. 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. Although Chandler worried that the papers standing among opinion-makers would decline and that the new management was no longer committed to making The Times the best newspaper in the country, he said others in the Chandler family didnt share his concerns or his priorities. Both refused. The booming Southern California economy helped immeasurably, of course. Constance Chandler 1896-1962. The agreement made sense financially for The Times, but it proved to be a boon in another way as well. FOR THE RECORD:In an earlier version of this article, the date of the Helsinki Olympic Games was incorrectly given as 1948. Chandler cared deeply about how The Times was regarded by East Coast opinion-makers, and more than 40 years after his father first took him to a national convention of newspaper publishers, he could still recall, with an edge in his voice, how clear it was that The Times was regarded as a bad newspaper from a hick town.. But in 1968, the paper endorsed Democrat Alan Cranston for U.S. Senate over Republican Max Rafferty, whom it called an outspoken, militant conservative.. I like living on the edge, he said in a 1999 interview, five months after his 71st birthday and two weeks after he suffered minor head injuries when he spun out in one of his Ferraris near the vintage-car and wildlife museum he owned in Oxnard. Three years after that, he began construction on a 5,500-square-foot home in Ojai, about 30 minutes from his museum. Otis shoveled fertilizer for the family fruit trees at an early age and was kept on such a modest allowance that even when he went to college, he later recalled, the most lavish transportation I could afford was half-interest in a secondhand motorcycle.. In 1995, at age 68, he crashed his motorcycle into a tractor while in New Zealand. ADVERTISEMENT BY ANCESTRY.COM. His sudden elevation and his record as an athlete, not a scholar, at Stanford, led some members of the family (and their friends) to openly wonder if he had the intellectual capacity to run The Times. There was widespread speculation after he gave up his corporate titles that he had been gently nudged aside by long-disgruntled family members. 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. 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. Hes restless. Otis Chandler was born on July 4, 1919. He said to me many times that he hadnt wanted to come to the paper in the first place, but he felt an obligation to his family to do it, said Robert F. Erburu, who succeeded Chandler as Times Mirror chairman. Willes made several major cutbacks and refocused the companys efforts on newspapers, saying Times Mirror should concentrate on the business it knew best. Research genealogy for Otis Chandler of Duxbury, Plymouth, Massachusetts, United States, as well as other members of the Chandler family, on Ancestry. MyHeritage Family Trees; FamilySearch Family Tree; WikiTree; Geni World Family Tree; California Deaths, 1940 - 1997; U.S. Social Security Death Index (SSDI) U.S . With the Mirror still losing money, it had been Chandler who wanted it closed, and his father had reluctantly concurred. They resented my position at the L.A. Times and felt there were a lot of things I could have done differently.. My dad had already started to make improvements.. 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. "I was raised to hate the unions," Chandler said. Otis himself offered contradictory explanations of his mothers role in his promotion, befitting a mother-son relationship that had its share of paradox. His efforts led him directly into confrontation with a powerful force for the status quo: his own family. And it became clear over the years that he did not have any such intention. Newspapers are a mature, non-growth industry, vulnerable to cyclical economic downturns and increases in the cost of newsprint, he said. Chandler later insisted that he hadnt meant to demean blacks and Latinos, but the remark haunted him and the paper for many years. Most historians credit Otis mother Buff to her friends and family with persuading her husband to make their son his successor. Chandler realized that to build up The Times reputation, he had to demand fair and nonpartisan news coverage. 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. [1], Chandler died at his home in Ojai at the age of 78 due to the effects of Lewy body disease, seven months after his diagnosis. 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. 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. During Willes brief tenure as publisher he relinquished the job to Kathryn Downing in 1999 so he could concentrate his energies on Times Mirror he did initiate a number of controversial strategies designed to increase Times circulation and advertising revenue. 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. Various Chandlers controlled about 65% of the Times Mirror voting stock before the sale to Tribune in 2000, and most of them love Willes, Otis said several months before those negotiations began. One cannot successfully run a great newspaper like the Los Angeles Times with executives in the top two positions, both of whom have no newspaper experience at any level, Chandler said. Staffing in Washington and Sacramento was expanded. Chandler was honored with a Lifetime of Achievement award. 1 child. Like his father, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Sigma Rho chapter). You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. He finished second in the nation, third in the heavyweight division at the national weightlifting championships that year. Marian Otis Chandler (1866-1952), Born Emma Marian Otis. 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 said he was a great man who made this paper what it was, Boyarsky would say later. 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. 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. 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. 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 was both more willing than most publishers to reinvest the papers rising profits in editorial improvements and more visionary in his approach to newspapering. When he strides out of a meeting to shake hands, it is like looking up at a California redwood., Anthony Day, The Times editorial page editor from 1971 until 1989, once said: After I had been working for Otis for a few years, it occurred to me that I was working for a prince, a man who had been raised to be a prince.. Chandler had had earlier problems with his health, suffering from prostate cancer in 1989 and a 1998 heart attack. 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.. [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. Heres a man who led a full life, said Otis Booth, his cousin and longtime hunting companion. 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