The Securities and Exchange Commission dropped all charges against Chandler in 1975, but the case cost him more than $1 million in legal fees, and it had a devastating emotional effect on him. Even Chandler said some of those long stories made the paper seem gray, somewhat dull at times. In 1995, at age 68, he crashed his motorcycle into a tractor while in New Zealand. When Williams showed him the piece, the publisher said it wasnt tough enough. Chandler was an exotic, at times mythic figure among the nations newspaper executives, most of whose exertions and excursions outside the boardroom were generally limited to golf courses and cruise ships. But it was clear that he had felt a growing personal animosity toward Willes, and he saw the takeover as a repudiation of Willes and a vindication of his own criticism. His goal, he once quipped, was to make it a militant middle-of-the-road paper.. 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. Many Chandler associates said his marriages breakup and the end of his publishership were inextricably intertwined. When Chandler took the job, the paper had only two outside offices. [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. 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. Otis, meanwhile, still had no idea what his mother and father had in mind for him. 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. After the guide missed his shot and fled, Chandler shot the elephant when it was only 10 yards away, preventing himself and his wife from being trampled. He finished second in the nation, third in the heavyweight division at the national weightlifting championships that year. 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. He started work right away as a pressroom apprentice on the graveyard shift. 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. Otis is someone whos very used to having his own way, and she impeded that.. 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. 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. In lieu of flowers, the family asked that donations be made to the Boys and Girls Clubs, the Central Coast chapter of the Alzheimers Association in Santa Barbara, or the Livingston Memorial Visiting Nurse Association/Hospice of Ventura. Research genealogy for Otis Chandler of Duxbury, Plymouth, Massachusetts, United States, as well as other members of the Chandler family, on Ancestry. Did The Times change out of foresight or luck? Having been rebuffed by Willes in a spring 1999 inquiry about buying Times Mirror, Tribune executives went around him several months later and dealt directly with Chandler family members and their representatives. 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]. Otis Chandler at the Los Angeles Times in 2003 with a photo of his mother, Dorothy Chandler, in the backgorund. 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.. Norman Chandler 1899-1973. I said something about wanting a weeks vacation first, but he wouldnt hear of it, Chandler said. Even when he was publisher, Chandler wasnt one of those workaholic bosses who could never let go. He said it was good for his back.. 2443 E Peach Tree Drive is currently listed for rent at $1,995 and was received on February 28, 2023. Not once did the article refer to Brown by name. But there is nothing as fascinating as the newspaper business, and I cant imagine any challenge more satisfying than the work we did to improve The Times.. When Burke asked Chandler if hed like to invest in his company and introduce Burke to other potential investors among the publishers wealthy friends Chandler was happy to comply. As a child, each year his parents held a memorial for the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing, linked to political agitators, that killed 20 Times workers. I apologized to my wife and my children and my mother and father and everyone on the board and all my department heads.. 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. 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. Collection Title: Chandler Family History Collection Digitized by California Audiovisual Preservation Project. They never forgave her for her apparent role in Otis ascension over Philip. 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.. He surfed. 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. He used the same tone of voice with the president of the United States and the guy who came to change the lightbulbs in his office, said Donna Swayze, his executive secretary from 1962 to 1988. The night he arrived home, his young familys possessions crammed into a used station wagon and rented trailer, his mother and father welcomed him enthusiastically. Norman Chandler, then near his 60th birthday, saw the logic in the change. He expected the very best of himself and of those around him.. Seldom has a newspaper had such an opportunity to meld the best of three staffs. When many top Times executives proved either reluctant to change or incapable of meeting his standards after he became publisher, he replaced 22 of 23 department heads within the first year. 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. 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. [1], Times editorial page editor Anthony Day observed that Chandler "had been raised to be a prince". Although the decision stunned her, friends said they had long seen the breakup coming. In 1948 the Chandler family had started a second newspaper, an afternoon tabloid called the Los Angeles Mirror, and as part of his training program, Otis worked there too. At 71, he resumed playing tennis. 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. Chandler had had earlier problems with his health, suffering from prostate cancer in 1989 and a 1998 heart attack. He had purchased his first a 1931 Duesenberg in 1968 for $35,000, and he built a world-class collection of Porsches, Ferraris, Duesenbergs, Cadillacs, Packards and other classics before selling all of them to meet the financial terms of his divorce settlement. How could I have been so stupid? 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'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. Not only did it champion GOP candidates, its editors helped select them. Otis Chandler was born on July 4, 1919. Within an hour, I had gathered things up in my briefcase, told my secretary, Well, we can shine those afternoon meetings off, and headed for Dana Point.., In a speech to a hunting conference in 1980, he described some of his other outdoor pursuits: I am primarily a gun hunter, both rifle and shotgun. Father of Private; Michael Otis "Mike" Chandler; Norman Brant Chandler; Private and Private But by 1962, The Times had become a different institution. They wanted the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations. The corporate air was a little too rarified for him, said Swayze, his secretary. 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. Within four years, Time magazine and others were routinely mentioning The Times as one of the three or four best newspapers in the country. Under Chandlers direction, The Times scrambled to hire the best of the reporters and editors from the two defunct papers and to get rid of its own deadwood. Heres a man who led a full life, said Otis Booth, his cousin and longtime hunting companion. 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. To put together his galaxy of star reporters, Otis Chandler employed what in much of the newspaper business amounts to a secret weapon money.. 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