Marking 120 Years, The Times Grew Up With the City

The Los Angeles Times celebrates its 120th anniversary Tuesday after decades in which the paper and the Chandler family that ran it for so long played key--and sometimes controversial--roles in shaping Southern California’s history.

Water for a desert city. A port for a landlocked city. A music center for a city short on culture. The aerospace and movie industries. Major league baseball. Future presidents of the United States. The Chandlers helped make those things happen, using their news columns and boardroom clout to promote causes they favored.

On Dec. 4, 1881, the first issue of the four-page Los Angeles Daily Times--which sold for a penny--rolled off the press with feminist Susan B. Anthony’s crusade to change the name of “Pullman” cars to “Pull-man-and-woman” or “Pull-irrespective-of-sex” cars leading the news.

The dynasty put down roots here eight months later, when Harrison Gray Otis started working for $15 a week as an editor at the Daily Times, headquartered near Temple and Main streets. Its ramshackle water-powered printing press was driven by river water from the city’s irrigation system. The printing press was sometimes stopped when employees had to fish around to find a trout that had slipped in and clogged up the works.

Within a year, Otis bought a share in the paper for $6,000. Three years later, he owned it all.

Not much more than a drifter himself, Otis tried his own form of immigration control. In 1886, he announced in The Times: “Los Angeles wants no dudes, loafers, failures, bummers, scrubs, impecunious clerk, bookkeepers, lawyers, doctors. . . . We need workers! Men of brains, brawn and guts! Men who have a little capital and a good deal of energy--first-class men!”

Otis, a Civil War veteran who later earned the rank of general for service in the Spanish-American War, always referred to the first Times building as the Fortress. His staff was the Phalanx, his home was the Bivouac and his vacation spot in Hollywood was the Outpost. He kept an ornamental cannon mounted on the hood of his car.

Otis saved his fiercest battles for organized labor. In the 1890s, he tried to stymie the labor movement by refusing to give in to workers’ strikes when he cut his printers’ salaries by 20%. His veins stretched to the breaking point and his face turned beet-red when he ordered all union typographers off Times property. He then replaced them with nonunion workers.

The present-day building at 1st and Spring streets is the third site for the newspaper and the one he did not live to see. It was built by Otis’ son-in-law and successor, Harry Chandler, businessman and the brains behind his father-in-law’s bluster. Where Otis was always ready to duke it out either with his fists or with his newspaper, throwing epithets at presidents and governors, lawyers and labor leaders, Chandler never sought the spotlight, but was always looking for the next big score.

By 1900, Otis, Chandler and other rich and influential Angelenos had organized to spearhead a secret plan to bring water 250 miles south from the Owens Valley so that Los Angeles could grow. They also bought San Fernando Valley land at bargain prices to enrich themselves when the water finally arrived in 1913.

When labor fought back in 1910, Otis rolled up his sleeves. Juries who acquitted jailed picketers didn’t make him less determined. Nor did the flooding of the city with 20,000 copies of Clarence Darrow’s pamphlet against the open shop, or the fact that membership in the Socialist Party had doubled overnight.

Then, early on Oct. 1, a huge explosion tore apart the Times building, killing 20 men. The Times rushed to press, blaming the fire on organized labor’s leaders in a makeshift edition that screamed “Unionist Bombs Wreck the Times.”

The bombing was a disaster for The Times, but far more so for the city’s labor movement. The confession of two brothers, Jim and John McNamara, both ironworkers and union leaders, discredited labor’s fight against the open shop. The Times building was rebuilt on the same site, with a plaque commemorating the men who died. When that building was torn down in 1938, the plaque went into storage.

In 1934, as the present Times building was being built--on a spot where the U.S. Army had briefly corralled camels in an ill-fated experiment before the Civil War--Chandler ordered that for every batch of sand and cement used in construction, an extra bag of cement be added to make the building stronger.

Otis had railed successfully in print against President Grover Cleveland’s reelection in 1888, and his successors used the newspaper’s influence to propel a young California congressman named Richard Nixon into the vice presidency. Nixon would later become the first president from California, and The Times became more critical in its coverage.

Over the years, the newspaper and its owners promoted aviation interests that eventually put Southern California in the forefront of aerospace, reluctantly welcomed the movie industry and boosted deals that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city.

Harry Chandler’s eldest son and successor, Norman, brought the newspaper to new prosperity. But almost a decade before he took over in 1944, his father was concerned that his son might have little interest in the day-to-day running of a newspaper. So in 1935, Harry Chandler accepted a $16-million offer to sell the paper to Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick, the editor of the Chicago Tribune, and his cousin, Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, according to the memoirs of Los Angeles Superior and Appellate Judge Isaac Pacht.

Pacht, who brokered the deal, said Chandler’s wife, Marian, the daughter of Gen. Otis, overheard the negotiations and put her foot down, saying her father would roll over in his grave if The Times were sold to a union newspaper.

It was Norman’s son, Otis, following his father into the publisher’s suite in 1960, who changed the newspaper from a conservative regional publication to a nonpartisan, respected journal of record with a national and international reputation.

More than a century of Chandler ownership ended when the newspaper and its sister publications were finally sold to the Chicago-based Tribune Corp. last year.