otis chandler obituary

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. Search for your loved one by country, state and city. 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 won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”, Years later, Otis Chandler would insist that the paper “wasn’t as bad as some people said when I took over. Only then did Chandler tell Thomas about himself and his family. Sure, like any business executive, there were times when I would like to have been away from it all, free of responsibilities. “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 wouldn’t listen to me,’.” he said. Direct, decisive and at times startlingly frank in both his personal and professional lives, Chandler told people what he expected of them, and he didn’t have much patience with failure. Obituaries act as quiet reminders of the finite nature of our lives. Explore Life Stories, Offer Condolences & Send Flowers. All rights reserved. If a newspaper, even a great newspaper like the Los Angeles Times, loses credibility with its community, with its readers, with its advertisers, with its shareholders, that is probably the most serious circumstance that I can possibly envision. Found inside – Page 265Other sources were: R Andersen, Privileged son (robinandersen.info, 2002, available from: http://www. robinandersen.info/Otis.htm); Obituary: Otis Chandler ... An obituary for a science . Like many women of her generation, Marilyn Chandler had long put her own career interests on hold to raise their children. In this volume, Starr covers the crucial postwar period--1950 to 1963--when the California we know today first burst into prominence. One had only to visit the men’s room in his car and wildlife museum — its walls covered with posters of scantily clad women draped over shiny sports cars — to realize that his ultra-masculinity wasn’t limited to guns, barbells, fast cars and motorcycles. Others argued that the negative attention that was focused on the paper, Willes and the rest of the Chandler family in the aftermath of Otis’ statement helped accelerate and crystallize the family’s desire to sell The Times. “It wasn’t meeting Bettina that did it, even though Missy thinks so,” Chandler said many years later, referring to Marilyn Chandler by her nickname. 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 today of a degenerative illness called Lewy body disease. 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. Chandler had long felt that Willes hadn’t shown enough respect for him and what he had accomplished. Although Chandler had previously been insistent that his criticisms of the business strategies pursued by Times management remain private, this undermining of the paper’s editorial integrity stirred him to action. “I don’t know but I didn’t have that choice.”. Obituary Mar 2nd 2006 edition. Jenni was born in San Jose, California on December 19, 1968. 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. He married Betty Jo Richardson on December 19, 1968, in Chandler, OK. Otis Chandler Cunningham Jr. share to facebook. It was at Watkins Glen that Chandler got to know Bettina Whitaker, who was an executive at Shakey’s International, a sponsor of his Watkins Glen car. Two years later, he was made marketing manager of The Times. People who knew the Chandlers well say Otis’ first wife was enormously competitive. By the time he enrolled at Stanford University in 1946, he weighed about 200 pounds. Chandler was both more willing than most publishers to reinvest the paper’s rising profits in editorial improvements and more visionary in his approach to newspapering. 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.”. David Thompson officiating. He was preceded in death by his parents, Otis Kyle and Mae Etta Chandler; his brother and sister-in-law, Hurl and Peggy Chandler; sister, Obera Jester; and brother-in-law, Galen Stisher. Dr. Herman Gibson, officiating. She was the daughter of the late John W. and Arbelle Adams . He remained an avid reader of the paper. Chandler was never a meddler or an intruder. 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. Many invested with Burke, who raised more than $30 million among 2,200 individuals over eight years. All of the records contained in OTIS are for prisoners and parolees who are CURRENTLY under the jurisdiction of the MDOC, as well as those serving a prison sentence but who are out on writ. I was 50, and I didn’t want to be unhappy for the rest of my life.”. He sought largely solitary recreational activities throughout his adult life — surfing, lifting weights, racing, cycling, hunting. But he also worried about his legacy, and he increasingly spoke critically, if only in private at first, about his unhappiness with the direction of Times Mirror and the paper under Mark Willes, a former executive at General Mills who had been hired to succeed Erburu as chairman and chief executive in 1995 and also assumed the title of Times publisher when Richard T. Schlosberg III retired unexpectedly in 1997. Jack Burke, Chandler’s close friend since their days together at Stanford, had assembled an exploratory oil-drilling company called GeoTek in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Chandler, he said, loved being publisher. Otis E. Treanor was born on February 4, 1928, in Stroud, OK, and departed this life on Monday, February 23, 2009, in Norman, OK, at the age of 81.. Otis, the son of Benjamin M. and Lola E. (Tate) Treanor, was a long-time resident of Davenport, OK. Otis served in the United States Army during WWII. And sooner or later I’m afraid we’ll have to align ourselves with one of those companies to ensure the long-term survival of The Times.”, When Tribune turned out to be that company, Chandler said, “Of all the people, of all the media companies that Times Mirror could join, this is the most logical and probably the best company.”. Chandler is survived by his wife; sons Harry of Los Angeles and Michael of Bend, Ore; daughters Cathleen Eckhardt of Soquel, Calif., and Carolyn Chandler of Santa Barbara; sister Camilla Chandler Frost of Los Angeles; and 15 grandchildren. But when Williams, the editor, suggested that the paper look into the organization anyway, both Otis and Norman Chandler gave him the go-ahead. Obituaries can vary in the amount of information they contain, but many of them are genealogical goldmines, including information such as: names, dates, place of birth and death, marriage information, and family relationships. He eventually recovered from serious head injuries. To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Otis Odell Chandler please visit our. The only other possible publisher in the family, however, was Norman’s younger brother Philip, then general manager of The Times and a member of the Times Mirror board. Going with newspapers only is a flawed strategy, a dangerous philosophy that puts The Times at risk. Tulsa. “I started work right away, on the graveyard shift, midnight to 8 in the morning.” He was a pressroom apprentice, at $48 a week, the equivalent of $356 in today’s dollars. Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks & Mortuaries- Hollywood Hills FD 904. Otis Odell Chandler McKnight-Fraser announces Funeral Services for Mr. Otis Chandler of 952 Steadfast Road, Andrews. Chandler’s grandfather and father followed Gen. Otis in the publisher’s chair. One reason why Otis might have sold was that he was less well known for any addiction to the inky-fingered arts of journalism than for putting the shot, riding motorbikes and hanging ten on a longboard in Malibu when the surf was up. As it happened, the consultants also recommended that, to ensure stability, the new publisher be capable of holding the job at least 15 years. 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. Burial will be in Concord Cemetery under the direction of Chandler Memorial Funeral Home. Chandler’s reign as publisher was not an uninterrupted, 20-year victory lap. “That’s why we diversified the company and went into television and cable and forest products and books and medical and legal publishing.”. Funeral homes wishing to feature obituaries, please contact us . Despite the enormous difference in their socioeconomic status, the two remained close friends for more than 30 years. But he didn’t disclose to other investors that he received $109,000 in finder’s fees and $373,000 in promotional shares of GeoTek stock for his efforts. That is the way it begins, anyway. After graduating from Stanford, he tried to enroll in an Air Force training program. In 1986, Chandler surrendered the titles of chairman and editor in chief, although he remained on the board and took on the largely ceremonial role of chairman of the company’s executive committee. Obituary editor Jon Thurber disclosed the death in an internal email this morning, followed by a message from Editor Dean Baquet: "As Jon announced, Otis Chandler died early this morning. Obituary courtesy of The Alderson-Ford Funeral Home of Naugatuck. Typically, Chandler would offer “gentle advice,” Carroll said, but never try to dictate what the new management should do with the paper. Select a city or town in Texas from the alphabetized list below. Reporter Gene Blake produced a five-part expose, written in calm, matter-of-fact language. Found insideFor a particularly critical view of Chandler, see Bonelli's Billion Dollar ... 218 “Georgia cotton patch”: As quoted in Ruth Chandler's obituary, LAT, ... He was rejected anyway; his shoulders and hips were still too big to fit into the cockpit of a jet. Chandler would assume the newly created position of editor in chief of Times Mirror and, on Jan. 1, 1981, he would succeed Murphy as chairman. 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.”. MADELEINE BRAND, host: This is DAY TO DAY. Instead they always find new ways to spend money.”. But in 1968, the paper endorsed Democrat Alan Cranston for U.S. Senate over Republican Max Rafferty, whom it called “an outspoken, militant conservative.”. Through our advanced obituary search , you may search our database of obituaries by name, location, date of death and keywords. Chandler later insisted that he hadn’t meant to demean blacks and Latinos, but the remark haunted him — and the paper — for many years. 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. Robbie was born on June 15, 1943 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to Thomas and Jane Reeder. The patriarch of the Southern California Chandler clan inherited the publisher's job at the Los Angeles . She was a native of Piedmont, South Carolina, and a longtime resident of Newport News. He accused Willes and Downing of misusing and abusing the newsroom staff, of “unbelievably stupid and unprofessional handling of the Staples special section” and of perpetrating a “scandal” and a “fiasco” that posed “the most serious single threat to the future survival and growth of this great newspaper during my more than 50 years of being associated with The Times.”, This was, he said, “probably the single most devastating period in the history of this great newspaper. 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. By the time he left the publisher’s office, it had increased tenfold during his tenure. A public memorial will be held Monday at All Saints Church in Pasadena. That was far from the only example of Chandler’s reversal of long-held dogma at The Times. 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. Betty Simpson Chandler went home to be with her Lord and Savior on Monday, August 16, 2021. Newcomb . The explosion was blamed on union militants, and, Otis once said, “I was raised to hate the unions.” (He later mellowed on that topic, although he always opposed unionization at The Times.). This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "Otis Chandler", A daily email with the best of our journalism, The composer and political activist, died on September 2nd, aged 96, The first female dub poet died on August 4th, aged 65, The war surgeon and hospital-builder died on August 13th, aged 73, The art expert died on August 11th, aged 83, The Hollywood child star died on August 7th, aged 95, Published since September 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”. tylerpaper.com 100 E. Ferguson, Suite 501 Tyler, TX 75702 Phone: 903-597-8111 Email: feedback@tylerpaper.com He lifted weights three times a week in his home gym. In 1995, when he was 68, his motorcycle collided with a tractor in New Zealand, leaving him with part of the big toe on his left foot missing, another toe severely damaged and the rest of the foot largely numb. “Mark has the stock price and dividends up, and that’s all they care about.”. But he was never specific, and the word ‘publisher’ was never mentioned.”. How the pandemic helped scatter $1-million homes across L.A. Big gap between Pfizer, Moderna vaccines seen for preventing COVID hospitalizations, These are L.A.'s new million-dollar neighborhoods, California has the lowest coronavirus rate in the nation. “There is something about him that suggests if Otis Chandler hadn’t existed, Ernest Hemingway would have created him,” the Christian Science Monitor said in 1980. “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.”. “This was the only big investment I ever made, and I didn’t do any investigation of it beforehand. “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. “They’ll have to carry me out of here feet first,” he said. As long as I knew him, Otis had an adventurous spirit and the courage to pursue it.”. 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 day’s events but putting them in context and doing so in a lively and compelling fashion. Found inside – Page 221Obituary : Mrs. Bina Otis , M. E. Chandler , F. E. Wickham . New Members : J. L. Williams , F. W. Dixon , W. H. Wellhouse . The annual news department budget at The Times was $3.7.million when Chandler took over. Chandler liked the shotput and weightlifting, he once said, because they were individual sports, and he could be judged on his own merits. Otis Chandler and his wife, Marilyn, flank President Carter and Rosalyn Carter at a White House dinner in 1978. “After a year or so in editorial, when I told my dad that I’d just like to be a reporter, he said, no, I had to go on to other departments,” Chandler said. Welcome to the Michigan Department of Corrections’ searchable database, which we call the Offender Tracking and Information System (OTIS). Murray had helped create Sports Illustrated and was one of its stars. Once he started as a reporter, though, he began to feel different about a career at The Times. But the Mirror continued to falter, and his parents decided they didn’t want his first command to be that of a sinking ship. “We’re going to spend as much money as it takes to be the best newspaper in the country and I mean, specifically, [better than] the New York Times,” Chandler said in remarks to the paper’s Washington Bureau in the mid-1960s. Even when he was publisher, Chandler wasn’t one of those workaholic bosses who could never let go. Mr. Chandler went home to be with the Lord on Wednesday, October 19, 2016 at Georgetown Memorial Hospital. His goal, he once quipped, was to make it a “militant middle-of-the-road paper.”. Goodreads CEO & founder Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler Editor & Chief run a social reading site that offers book reviews and a place to discover new books to read, based in part by what your . Get service details, leave condolence messages or send flowers in memory of a loved one in Otis, Colorado. Carol is preceded in death by her parents, sister Olive Wheeler, and brother James Hall. The Mirror was losing $30,000 a week, and Otis sent his father a confidential memo urging that a strong business manager be hired. Obituary. Like his father, who had also been kept on tight purse strings by his father, Otis often split the bill with his fiancee or let her pick up the tab when they dated. Chandler immediately excelled, breaking the school freshman record with a toss of 48 feet, 761/47 inches. Within four years, Time magazine and others were routinely mentioning The Times as one of the three or four best newspapers in the country. Willes, he said in 1999, was “basically undoing what I and my father and Franklin Murphy all did, dating back to 1958. His life played out with the intensity of Greek tragedy, and by . He also complained that the paper’s editor and publisher “never try to come up with new ways to cut the deficit. Obituary for Otis Odell Chandler in Andrews , South Carolina . . Nazario’s impressive piece of reporting [turns] the current immigration controversy from a political story into a personal one.”—Entertainment Weekly “Gripping and harrowing . . . a story begging to be told.”—The Christian ... 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. The other was that Los Angeles might have seemed to offer few of the psychic rewards to a newspaper owner that Minneapolis, say, or Milwaukee, might provide. 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. Chandler said he wanted to hunt only “the rarest and the biggest and the best,” and he killed more than 100 such animals — 10-foot brown bears and polar bears, lions and musk ox, wild antelope and mountain sheep — many of which he had mounted on the walls of a trophy room in the home he shared with his first wife in San Marino. Chandler’s words hit like a bombshell, both in the Times newsroom and in the newspaper business nationwide. Williams was 21 years older than Chandler and often pulled in his reins. A year before, he had said that “Nothing but my kids is more important to me than the Los Angeles Times,” and perhaps he saw the sale, for $8.2 billion, to the Tribune company of Chicago, as a way of safeguarding his legacy, as well as a rebuke to the managers who now ran the paper. Service Details. “It’s too big, it’s too stuffy. According to official documents, he wrote and telephoned a number of such people, including Evelle Younger, the former state attorney general and Los Angeles County district attorney. Chandler was no typical rookie. 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. “I’d work the graveyard shift for a week, then spend a week on days, then a week on the swing shift, then back to the graveyard shift,” he recalled. Mr. Ferrell is survived by (4) children: Ashley Williams (Tyree) of . Southern California was considered a cultural backwater, and despite his family’s vast wealth and power, Chandler felt like a hick. And he wrote an exhaustive, if somewhat ponderous, seven-part series about the treatment of mentally ill children. He was the grandson of Harry Chandler, Marian Otis Chandler, Albert Warren Williamson and Inez Culp Williamson. A portrait of Otis Chandler hangs in the old Times Mirror boardroom. If you went out to dinner, you could be fairly sure you would find yourself in the company of other members of your own profession, whether that was oil or property or the law. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. On the fringes of that movement — and especially active in Southern California — was an ultra-right-wing organization known as the John Birch Society. Away from the paper, off the board, with most of his Times Mirror stock in trust, he no longer had the power — or the inclination — to do anything concrete, not even as a fourth third-generation newspapering Chandler. “The corporate air was a little too rarified for him,” said Swayze, his secretary. Did The Times change out of foresight or luck? Chandler started prep school at Cate, in Carpinteria, but his parents thought he’d find a greater challenge and broader perspective back East, so after a year they transferred him to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. 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. OWNING a newspaper is different from owning other sorts of business. Norman Chandler, then near his 60th birthday, saw the logic in the change. It is a bittersweet reminder of all we've lost, but it can also help us to remember all we enjoyed while they were alive. Otis is survived by his wife, Joan D'Amato Hall, son Clay and wife Lorri, daughter Belinda Williams and husband Donnie . Otis and Williams — “perhaps the ablest newspaper editor of his generation,” in Halberstam’s words — became a formidable team. Not only did it champion GOP candidates, its editors helped select them. He was also consumed by another passion: buying classic cars for his museum. They wanted to impeach Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States. Chandler insisted that he wasn’t giving up the journalistic chase or losing his competitive edge, simply assuming a larger corporate responsibility. If you will, it’s too complicated.”. Otis is someone who’s very used to having his own way, and she impeded that.”. “They resented my position at the L.A. Times and felt there were a lot of things I could have done differently.”. The GeoTek affair also damaged Chandler physically. Ronald Reagan's personal attorney Roy Miller was a California success story. “When I asked what he did, he just said, ‘I work at The Times,’.” Thomas recalled. Joseph Ernie Lee Cart Jr. Joseph Ernie Lee Cart, Jr., "Joey," 60 years old, passed away on September 1, 2021. But he was hardly unaware of his family’s powerful position. He once said that she had received — and sought — more recognition than she deserved for many changes at the paper, including his own rise, and that his father had long been underestimated. Visitation will be from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday, February 8, 2020, at Laughlin Service Funeral Home, preceding the memorial service at 3 p.m. with Stephen Hampton . With the Times's circulation and profitability now diminished, and little love for the new owners, the age of Otis seems greater than ever. Dave Mogni passed away unexpectedly on Thursday, September 9, 2021. 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. Chandler changed The Times so dramatically and became so identified with the paper that when he left the publisher’s office at age 52, and again when he relinquished his corporate titles five years later, employees at The Times and Chandler’s peers throughout the industry were both stunned and puzzled. “They didn’t like the L.A. Times,” he said in the 2005 interview. He lived out one of his father’s 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. Services will be held 11:00 a.m. Monday, October 24, 2016 at Cedar Grove Missionary Church in the Spring Gully Community in Andrews with Rev. Despite the liberalization of The Times’ editorial page under Chandler, he remained moderate, even conservative, on many issues, feminism among them. A year later, he moved again. “He told me, ‘You created a great newspaper, Otis, and we’ll make you proud,’.” Chandler said. Money was invested, offices opened at home and abroad, award-winning journalists hired and sections added until the former light-weight rag had grown so hefty that doorsteps trembled at its descent. Thomas owned and operated Wilder Sales and Services. The Los Angeles in which he had grown up was a dull place, mostly peopled by bland, heat-seeking migrants from the mid-west. 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. “I thought Otis was committed in the same way,” she said. In 1999 — almost 20 years after he left the publisher’s 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. The GeoTek debacle helped greatly exacerbate the colon problem. “We treated him as an insider and told him what was happening,” Carroll said. 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. One of the first examples came in 1961, when The Times hired Jim Murray as a sports columnist. 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.

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