http://www.latimes.com/news/state/20000314/t000024419.html
The Chandler Dynasty Steps Aside
Media: Through The Times, which it owned for
more than a
century, the family shaped Southern California.
By DAVID SHAW, Times Staff Writer
"No single family dominates any single
region of the country as
the Chandlers have dominated California," David
Halberstam wrote
in "The Powers That Be," his 1979 book on the
media, and indeed,
for more than a century, it was the Chandler
family--more than any
other force or institution--who shaped the
development of Los
Angeles and its sprawling environs.
Water for a desert city. A port for a
landlocked city. A Music
Center for a city with little in the way of
formal culture. The
aerospace industry. The movie industry. An
important center for
scientific study and research. Major league
baseball. A future
president of the United States. The Chandler
family, operating
largely through the Los Angeles Times, played a
major
role--generally the major role--in turning all
those dreams into
realities.
.......................................
It's especially good for the Chandler family, whose
cumulative
shares in the deal are now worth $1.43 billion,
based on Tribune
Co.'s closing stock price Monday. (Terms of the
deal provide that
Times Mirror shareholders can choose between
taking $95 per
share from Tribune Co. or exchanging each of
their Times Mirror
shares for 2.5 shares of Tribune Co. stock.
Family shareholders are
expected to take the exchange.)
.....................................................
Influence Over Port, Water Decisions
Shortly before the turn of the century,
The Times pushed
hard--and successfully--for a port in San
Pedro, rather than Santa
Monica, the favored harbor site of Southern
Pacific Railroad, then
a preeminently powerful California institution.
Several years later, Otis, Chandler and
several other wealthy,
prominent Angelenos spearheaded the
controversial move to bring
Owens Valley water 250 miles south to serve Los
Angeles--and,
having bought up undeveloped San Fernando
Valley land at bargain
prices--to make themselves even richer in the
process.
Later, Harry Chandler, who served as
publisher of The Times
from 1917 to 1944, provided the financial
contribution--and
introductions to other successful
businessmen--that helped lure
Donald Douglas and his aircraft company to Los
Angeles. He was
similarly influential in the beginnings of the
Hollywood motion
picture industry and in bringing Robert
Millikan, a world-famous
physicist, to Southern California, a move that
led to Throop
Polytechnic, a local engineering and manual
arts school, becoming
the California Institute of Technology.
Harry Chandler's son, Norman, publisher
from 1944 to 1960,
played a similar role in helping to bring the
Brooklyn Dodgers to
Los Angeles in 1958, and Norman's indefatigable
wife, Dorothy
Buffum--known as "Buff"--was the force behind
the $20-million
fund-raising drive that led to the construction
of the Music Center in
1964.
Through all this, The Times was a rabidly
Republican, stridently
anti-union newspaper, using its news columns
and its
behind-the-scenes clout to promote the
candidates and causes the
family favored--most notably the career of a
young congressman
from Whittier named Richard M. Nixon, whose
early political rise
was largely credited to Times backing.
(
But all that changed when Otis Chandler became publisher in
1960 at the age of 32--championed for the
position by his mother,
over the objection of those in the family who
preferred his uncle
Philip.
The Times was already very successful
financially when Otis
Chandler took over. He made it even more
profitable, which
helped mollify his family critics. But he also
transformed it
journalistically, insisting that partisanship
give way to fairness and
that his editors hire the best journalists they
could find. Within four
years after he became publisher, The
Times--which had long been
derided as one of the worst newspapers in the
country--was being
spoken of as one of the three best.