Together, he wrote to Johnson after the changing of the guard, we are going to push the New York Times off its perch.. Chandler knew and trusted Burke. The Times, he would later say, was very much in his blood even then. Of all the political figures to benefit from The Times partisanship over the years, none had been more favored, or more successful, than Nixon. As it happened, the consultants also recommended that, to ensure stability, the new publisher be capable of holding the job at least 15 years. Willes had taken charge of the company after a deep and prolonged recession that hit The Times particularly hard; circulation at the paper was declining, and both the stock price and the profits of Times Mirror were falling even faster. I must confess, he said, I am getting darn tired of defending myself as a hunting person.. 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.. The most traumatic experience of Chandlers childhood one that assumed mythic proportions as he grew toward adulthood came when he was 8. Many Chandler associates said his marriages breakup and the end of his publishership were inextricably intertwined. Would I have wanted to stay, given what was happening at The Times and Times Mirror? Chandler asked a year after stepping down. 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. And it became clear over the years that he did not have any such intention. The two had hunted together, and Burke was the godfather of Chandlers eldest daughter, Cathleen. 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. Chandler won many distinguished awards in his years at The Times: honorary degrees and plaques and certificates from various universities and other prestigious institutions, including a lifetime achievement award from the Annenberg School for Communication at USC a few months before the sale of Times Mirror. Wall Street responded favorably. Both refused. They would race their cars down the Pasadena Freeway at 140 mph in the predawn hours en route to weightlifting sessions at the Times gym and double cheeseburgers at Tommys, just west of downtown. 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. Chandler, he said, loved being publisher. He said I had to be well-rounded and implied that it was so I could ultimately take some executive position. I said he was a great man who made this paper what it was, Boyarsky would say later. I was strictly a tall, skinny blond kid from California.. 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. A go-anywhere, ride-any-wave surfer for more than 60 years, Chandler also hunted big game on safaris, raced high-speed cars and motorcycles on official tracks and urban freeways and was always looking for new challenges, preferably those with some measure of risk. Otis said he wanted a more assertive, more liberal editorial page, Day said. That was far from the only example of Chandlers reversal of long-held dogma at The Times. Although Chandler had been opposed to Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race, he had deferred to his father and reluctantly agreed to run an editorial before the Republican convention pledging The Times traditional support to whomever the party chose as its nominee and that turned out to be Goldwater. During his tenure it would expand to 34 foreign and domestic bureaus. 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. He also began to develop a love of speed and once had to do a stint in traffic school after getting a speeding ticket on his bicycle, he said. When Burke was accused of fraud, Chandler too became a target of civil legal proceedings. A few weeks or months after I became publisher, my mother told me, I used to tell your father that I thought you were ready, but he wouldnt listen to me,. he said. Although all three of his sons worked at the paper for varying periods, none ascended into the top executive ranks. It wasnt as much fun.. Connect to 5,000+ Chandler profiles on Geni, Norman Chandler, Dorothy Chandler (born Buffum), Cause of death: Motor neuron disease, Dementia with Lewy bodies - Feb 27 2006 - Ojai, 1930 - Los Angeles (Districts 0001-0250), Los Angeles, California, USA, 1940 - 800 West Orange Grove, Arcadia, Manrovia Township, Los Angeles, California, USA, June 18 1951 - Los Angeles, California, United States, Feb 27 2006 - Meiners Oaks, Ventura, California, United States, Nov 23 1927 - Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States, Norman Chandler, Dorothy Chandler (geb. He hired the best people he could find and gave them the freedom, the resources and the challenge to take a newspaper that had been mocked as partisan, parochial and inferior and turn it into a publication that could no longer be sneered at. Although Halberstam would later say, No single family dominates any other region of this country as the Chandlers have dominated California, Otis had a far-from-pampered upbringing and was never a man who could be described as effete. He worked out daily, lifting weights in a gym he had built at The Times and improvising when he was traveling. Chandlers wife, Bettina, was with him. Typically, Chandler would offer gentle advice, Carroll said, but never try to dictate what the new management should do with the paper. Harry Chandler was born in Landaff, New Hampshire to Moses K. and Emma J. [1], In 1990, Chandler was trampled by a musk ox in the Northwest Territories of Canada. He attended Dartmouth College, and on a dare, he jumped into a vat of starch that had frozen over during winter, which led to severe pneumonia. He lived out one of his fathers fantasies when he became a professional race car driver, but nearly died in 1984 when his car slammed into a wall at the Indianapolis 500. His son was perfectly willing, indeed eager, to do and spend whatever was necessary to achieve journalistic respectability. Chandler had had earlier problems with his health, suffering from prostate cancer in 1989 and a 1998 heart attack. I occasionally hunt with a bow I am a saltwater fisherman and dry-fly freshwater fisherman, a gun collector, a sometime skeet and target shooter, an avid backpacker, outdoor photographer, trophy skinner, wild game gourmet but a lousy cook. His mother rushed him to a second hospital, where a doctor she knew revived him with an adrenaline shot to the heart. Among them: the mate of the musk ox that nearly killed him in 1990. As he did in every posting at The Times, he filled notebook after notebook with his thoughts on possible improvements. 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. His mother rushed him to a hospital, where doctors initially reported he was dead. 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. 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. 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. His two predecessors as chairman his father and Murphy had been invited to remain on the board, in a non-voting capacity, after their 70th birthdays, but Chandler was not extended a similar invitation, and he was clearly hurt by that. [1] While in college, he sometimes worked summers at the paper, most often moving printing plates and other heavy equipment. 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. Later he would briefly attend the Cate School boarding school in Carpinteria before his parents elected to send him east to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. 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. 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. The Hearst paper was subsequently hit by a devastating strike and ceased publication in 1989. Since mandatory retirement age for the publisher was then 65, that conveniently eliminated the 52-year-old Philip. 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. Despite the enormous difference in their socioeconomic status, the two remained close friends for more than 30 years. Brian Lamb, right, founder and CEO of C-Span, interviews Otis Chandler in 2001. Other key members of the Chandler family wanted Philip to succeed Norman, wrote Marshall Berges in his 1984 book, The Life and Times of Los Angeles. But Norman regarded Philip as something of a lightweight, not entirely competent to take an aggressive leadership role at The Times.. 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. 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. 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. 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