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.. Norman Chandler (1899-1973), Publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Some at the Los Angeles Times felt that Chandlers sharp public criticism of management and the widespread attention it received played a role in several subsequent management decisions. Updated: October 7, 2011 . I never had him second-guess me, ever, said William F. Thomas, The Times editor from 1971 to 1989. But in 1989, two months after Laventhol replaced Johnson as publisher, Day was removed. 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. The two men introduced themselves as J.T. and Oats (Chandlers longtime family nickname), struck up a conversation about motorcycles and soon began dirt-biking together. His mother scooped him up and rushed to the hospital, steering the car with one hand and holding his hand with the other, frantically searching for a pulse. 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 By the time he enrolled at Stanford University in 1946, he weighed about 200 pounds. Emma Marian Otis 1866-1952. 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. By 1962, Palmer was gone and the gubernatorial race between Brown and Richard Nixon was covered primarily by two new reporters: Richard Bergholz, who had come from the Mirror, and Carl Greenberg, from Hearsts Los Angeles Examiner. Knowing that he couldnt create a high-quality, widely respected news organization if he relied exclusively on wire service reports and his existing staff, he began hiring top reporters and editors from other major news organizations and opening Times bureaus around the world. 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. It wasnt as much fun.. He missed the day-to-day challenge and the interaction with the editors and with the news. [1], Times editorial page editor Anthony Day observed that Chandler "had been raised to be a prince". Going with newspapers only is a flawed strategy, a dangerous philosophy that puts The Times at risk. 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 had always had an active life outside the newspaper business, and in his final years as publisher, close friends and associates knew that the lure of those interests combined with fatigue, restlessness, health problems and major changes in his personal life were inexorably leading him away from The Times. 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. [1], In 1986, Chandler won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism to honor his years of service to the newspaper.[3]. He put in long hours, but he managed to have dinner with his family most nights, even if it meant doing more work at home after dinner. Despite Chandlers worries and despite what he said was a constant stream of calls and letters from Times executives past and present, asking him to do something about the direction of the newspaper, he made no real effort for most of Willes tenure to influence what was happening at Times Mirror Square. Chandler insisted that he wasnt giving up the journalistic chase or losing his competitive edge, simply assuming a larger corporate responsibility. Did The Times change out of foresight or luck? Its not their kind of newspaper, he said. 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. 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. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. Chandler later insisted that he hadnt meant to demean blacks and Latinos, but the remark haunted him and the paper for many years. You transformed the entire staff, he said, and the whole place had a totally different attitude.. 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. [citation needed]. Williams was 21 years older than Chandler and often pulled in his reins. The Times, he would later say, was very much in his blood even then. It may sound strange for a Chandler to say this, he said in one such conversation, but I dont think my family and the other people running the company are looking ahead enough to the Internet and other new media. But he was never specific, and the word publisher was never mentioned.. Almost 20 years after their divorce, the happily remarried Marilyn Brant DeYoung said she didnt think shed been competitive with Chandler, except on the tennis court, where I did get upset when he beat me. She said they had a wonderful marriage, and he was an involved father, especially when he was younger, before he was publisher.. Former Times publisher Tom Johnson, left, greets Otis Chandler at a USC Annenberg Distinguished Achievement Awards dinner in January 2000. It could be said that the anti-Otis crowd beat up on him so much that he just gave up, said former editorial page editor Day. Chandler himself invested more than $200,000 of his personal funds. When he lost, he delivered a diatribe that would long haunt him, bitterly denouncing the press coverage by which, it was widely realized, he meant The Times and promising, You wont have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference., Years later, Otis Chandler would insist that the paper wasnt as bad as some people said when I took over. He had the papers support when he ran unsuccessfully for president in 1960. 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. Please enable JavaScript in your browser's settings to use this part of Geni. 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. Together, he wrote to Johnson after the changing of the guard, we are going to push the New York Times off its perch.. His goal, he once quipped, was to make it a militant middle-of-the-road paper.. 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. 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. Was the daughter of General Harrison Gray Otis and Secretary of the Times-Mirror Company (formerly the publishing company of the Los Angeles Times ). [1], Chandler was an enthusiastic athlete and thrill seeker, an image he actively cultivated. For most of the first 80 years of its existence, the paper was such a journalistic laughingstock that humorist S.J. 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 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. In 1995, at age 68, he crashed his motorcycle into a tractor while in New Zealand. The stock price tripled during his first three years at the company, and circulation grew modestly. By the time of graduation, he weighed 200 pounds. 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.. But the series also served notice that The Times was in the process of becoming a different and much better newspaper. Landsberg did additional reporting and rewriting of the text. Within four years, Time magazine and others were routinely mentioning The Times as one of the three or four best newspapers in the country. In 1999 almost 20 years after he left the publishers office and with no official ties to the paper anymore its standing in the national journalistic firmament was still so important to him that he emerged from a largely self-imposed exile and issued a strong denunciation of top Times and Times Mirror executives. Chandler realized that to build up The Times reputation, he had to demand fair and nonpartisan news coverage. 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 was more upset with myself than with Jack Burke, he said years later. 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