He lifted weights three times a week in his home gym. At the time he enrolled at Phillips, Chandler weighed 155 pounds. 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. Collection Title: Chandler Family History Collection Digitized by California Audiovisual Preservation Project. 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. [1], In 1990, Chandler was trampled by a musk ox in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism, Chandler Vintage Museum of Transportation and Wildlife, "Publisher Who Couldn't Get Enough Competition", "Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication", "Otis Chandler, 78; transformed L.A. Times into a leading paper", "Otis Chandler, Publisher Who Transformed Los Angeles Times, Dies at 78", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Otis_Chandler&oldid=1112344101, Stanford Cardinal men's track and field athletes, Pages using infobox person with multiple spouses, Pages using infobox person with multiple parents, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2017, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 25 September 2022, at 21:57. 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 had the papers support when he ran unsuccessfully for president in 1960. Otis Chandler will go down as one of the most important figures in newspaper history, said Dean Baquet, editor of the Los Angeles Times. 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. Unlike his father, however, he had not insisted that his children follow him into leadership positions at The Times. George Cotliar, who joined the paper three years before Chandler became publisher and served as an editor for almost 40 years, said The Times had been widely regarded as a crappy newspaper and a politically biased newspaper, and the Birch series and the editorial were a statement to the staff too. Its not their kind of newspaper, he said. People who knew the Chandlers well say Otis first wife was enormously competitive. To grasp the breadth of the changes, it is necessary to understand what The Times had been. The next evening, a Friday, his father grinning like a Cheshire cat, Chandler would always remember handed him a sheet of paper. Shaw, The Times longtime media critic, filed a draft of this obituary before his death Aug. 1. As long as I knew him, Otis had an adventurous spirit and the courage to pursue it.. During Chandlers 20 years as publisher and five subsequent years as editor in chief and chairman of the board of The Times then-parent company, Times Mirror the paper won nine Pulitzer Prizes and expanded from two to 34 foreign and domestic bureaus. [1], In 1966 Chandler received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College. During his tenure it would expand to 34 foreign and domestic bureaus. Thats not in my nature, he said. 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. Otis Chandler died at age 51 years old in March 1971. At the same time, it doubled its circulation to more than 1 million daily and for many years during and after his tenure published more news and more advertising than any other newspaper in the United States. Historical Person Search Search Search Results Results Otis Chandler (1919 - 1980) Try FREE for 14 days Try FREE for 14 days How do we create a person's profile? Brother of Camilla Chandler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_Chandler. 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. Hed put you in there, and he let you do it and if you werent performing, out you went.. Chandler insisted that he wasnt giving up the journalistic chase or losing his competitive edge, simply assuming a larger corporate responsibility. Regardless, Chandler welcomed the outcome, largely because of his dissatisfaction with the existing management of Times-Mirror. Chandler contributed to that perception in 1978, when he responded to a television interviewers questions about the papers coverage of black and Latino communities by saying it was difficult to get those groups to read The Times. 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. He was 70 then, mandatory retirement age for members of the board of directors. That was far from the only example of Chandlers reversal of long-held dogma at The Times. And he took special pleasure in telling friends and colleagues about the telephone call he received from John Madigan, then-chairman and chief executive of Tribune, at 7 a.m. the day the takeover was announced. Going with newspapers only is a flawed strategy, a dangerous philosophy that puts The Times at risk. Retired Times publisher Otis Chandlers car collection included a 1931 Duesenberg LeBaron Special Phaeton. Chandler realized that to build up The Times reputation, he had to demand fair and nonpartisan news coverage. 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. This was the only big investment I ever made, and I didnt do any investigation of it beforehand. 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. 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.. But the series also served notice that The Times was in the process of becoming a different and much better newspaper. But Otis had certainly been aware of the family pressure. 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. Chandler was growing weary, worn down by the rigors of work and the burdens of responsibility, dispirited by GeoTek and his failing marriage, getting by mostly on nervous energy, with big circles under my eyes, he later said. Ever concerned with the papers image and visibility nationally, he teamed with Philip Graham, then publisher of the Washington Post, to create the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service to distribute the papers stories to client papers. . The most traumatic experience of Chandlers childhood one that assumed mythic proportions as he grew toward adulthood came when he was 8. He told me several times, and other people, that no Chandler would again be publisher of The Times, he added, and I thought that was a curious thing to say, especially since some of the Chandler children seemed perfectly suited to be publisher, at least as suited as Otis.. Since mandatory retirement age for the publisher was then 65, that conveniently eliminated the 52-year-old Philip. Toward that end, he initiated a more aggressive marketing program, expanded the papers geographic reach and started the Orange County edition to serve the burgeoning population there the first such satellite plant for any metropolitan daily in the country. My trips gave me a balance, a perspective, he said. Many Chandler associates said his marriages breakup and the end of his publishership were inextricably intertwined. His son was perfectly willing, indeed eager, to do and spend whatever was necessary to achieve journalistic respectability. That article deeply wounded some of the 160-odd descendants of Otis grandfather, family patriarch Harry Chandler. Mark has the stock price and dividends up, and thats all they care about.. As a Times columnist, he would become one of the most celebrated sportswriters ever. 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. When the guide missed his shot and ran off in a panic, Chandler shot the elephant in the leg at a distance of 10 yards, deflecting the animal just enough to send it thundering past them. 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. But he did send memos to Williams, the editor, periodically in his early years as publisher criticizing the business and sports sections, for example, and complaining about the content and design of the Sunday magazine, then as now called West. Well into his 70s, he maintained a long-distance bicycling regimen that few people half his age could attempt. He was 78. 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. [1] He was the son of Norman Chandler, his predecessor as publisher, and Dorothy Buffum Chandler, a patron of the arts and a Regent of the University of California. Two years later, he was made marketing manager of The Times. Did The Times change out of foresight or luck? But in 1972, he suffered his most damaging blow and it was, to a significant extent, self-inflicted. He was the fourth and final member of the Chandler family to hold the paper's top position. I think he saw leaving Missy as getting his freedom in one way, said David Laventhol, publisher of The Times from 1989 to 1994. Chandler made improvement of the paper's quality a top priority, succeeding in raising the product's reputation, as well as its profit margins. Some critics felt that his zeal for national recognition led The Times to underemphasize local news, particularly about minority communities. The paper warmly endorsed Nixon but also praised Browns accomplishments in the same editorial. 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. 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. Otis is someone whos very used to having his own way, and she impeded that.. But when Williams, the editor, suggested that the paper look into the organization anyway, both Otis and Norman Chandler gave him the go-ahead. I think building houses is a replacement for the satisfaction he got from The Times, his wife, Bettina, said just before construction began on the Ojai house. Despite the enormous difference in their socioeconomic status, the two remained close friends for more than 30 years. I think he fears that he would die if he werent building something.. 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. Such special issues were financial windfalls for the Times, generating a record $2 million in ad revenue. 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