Once-Powerful Family Matters in History Only

Alot of us have spent a lot of our years writing about a lot of you, in the pages of this newspaper.

So indulge me, won’t you, while I spend one column’s time and length on us, on life here at the Los Angeles Times.

When a couple of East Coast papers called me this week to ask me what it felt like, the merger of the L.A. Times with Tribune Co. of Chicago, I told them that it felt like I woke up and heard that the Pacific Ocean had been sold.

That’s how solidly the Chandler/L.A. Times pairing has been on the civic landscape--as a source of mine likes to say, like white on rice. As big a presence as that duo has been--and I’ll get back to that presently--it’s been even more so in the lives of those of us who work here.

And that’s why, even though the headlines have been proclaiming the Times-Tribune deal a merger, just now I feel more like a divorcee than a bride.

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Any more, as multinational companies take over and spread, company names get more bland (out with International Harvester, in with Navistar), company identities get more diffuse.

Less and less does a corporation have a face, but in The Times’ lobby are the faces, on paper and in bronze, of a century of publishers past.

Few employees remain from Otis Chandler’s 20 years as the last family publisher, but his name survives his tenure. When we took sources and contacts to lunch, we’d pick up the check and say, “Otis is buying.” When several of us met for dinner from different parts of town, we’d make the reservation in the one name we would all remember: Otis.

His mother, Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the Music Center founder and civic powerhouse who once tore up a rich man’s $20,000 donation check in front of him because she told him she needed more, was “Buffy” to us, even though we had never met her.

It was Buffy’s doing, we used to say, that for years the paper wouldn’t run photos of snakes or human navels. It was rumored that Buffy so hated the murals on a downtown building that she had a company garage built to block the offensive view.

A soap opera’s worth of good Chandlers and bad Chandlers and worthy and wastrel Chandlers populated our workday lives; we couldn’t imagine the paper or the city without them.

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Someone, maybe Balzac, wrote, “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.”

The greatly fortunate Chandlers have been accused of very great crimes in the past: of vehement union-busting, especially in the wake of the 1910 bombing of The Times’ building . . . of sticking a straw in the Owens Valley and sucking it dry to get rich building Los Angeles . . . of manipulating City Hall and the LAPD through a Merchants and Manufacturers Assn. that once made it a crime not to salute the flag.

In 1954, a local official published “Billion Dollar Blackjack,” a point-by-point attack on The Times, a “sordid story . . . full of human misery, the lot of those crushed by the insensate passion of the Chandlers to rule or ruin.” Chandler interests (whose future honors as standard-bearers of the 1st Amendment were more than a decade away) corralled all the copies they could find, and burned them.

One man’s crime is another man’s triumph. The Chandlers published an “air-minded” and movie-loving newspaper that made aerospace and entertainment key to the region’s economy. It beat the drum for a San Pedro harbor, for a pro baseball team, for the Music Center. The Chandlers promoted one real estate development named Hollywoodland, and others that became the San Fernando Valley. They helped to make a president of a hometown congressman named Richard Nixon.

For good or ill or both, Southern California would not be the place it is without the Chandlers and their newspaper. This week we learned that it is their newspaper no longer.

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Every day, I park in the garage that Buffy supposedly had built. Chiseled on its east wall is a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

The quotable Jefferson said something else that isn’t on the garage: “Merchants have no soil of their own. They go where the profits are.”

In a few months’ time, the profits will be going to Chicago.

Los Angeles will still be here. The Times will still be here. The people who write and edit and sell and distribute it will still be here.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled columns.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com