OTIS CHANDLER

Otis “was a character right out of an Ernest Hemingway story, with his hunting, and his surfing, and his car collecting,” says filmmaker Peter Jones. He was a man of extremes, and he set his goals on transforming the Times from a conservative rag into a first-class paper. In 1958 Time magazine ranked the LA Times as the third worst newspaper in the country; by 1964 it was in the top ten. Under Otis, the Times earned ten Pulitzer Prizes. Despite the paper’s success, there was a dark cloud looming over the golden boy’s head—the entrenched and disapproving family board made up of the rest of the Chandlers. He ridiculed them as “self-indulgent coupon clippers waiting for their next dividend check.” Otis Chandler died on this day in 2006 at the age of 78.