by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Continuing with our “postview” from last Saturday’s tours of Tres Hermanos Ranch, nearly 2,500 acres owned by the City of Industry in the cities of Chino Hills and Diamond Bar and managed by an authority comprised of the trio of municipalities, we press on with our look at some of the early history of one of the “three brothers,” Los Angeles Times publisher, real estate mogul and business figure, Harry Chandler.
Part one of this post covered his origins in New Hampshire, his migration to Los Angeles to recover his shattered health and his rise, from humble circumstances, in the ranks of the newspaper owned by Harrison Gray Otis from the mid-1880s into the following decade. While he was improving his lot in life, he married May Schlador and had two daughters with her, but, in 1892, just after the birth of the second child, May died of puerperal fever.
The widower, who was supervisor of the Times‘ circulation department, wrote on that aspect of the enterprise as part of a review of the functions of the paper in its 2 July 1893 edition. He discussed how carriers received their papers each morning, followed by young newsboys, or “newsies,” who sold from between eight and twenty paper daily with a profit of two-and-a-half cents each, although he “loses if he gets ‘stuck,’ as the office does not take back unsold copies.”
Chandler added that carriers, delivering as far as a hundred miles from downtown, used 64 horses, which plied some 1,150 miles each day and he asserted that the Times did not concern itself purely with profit on its routes. He concluded that those rural customers “are the most permanent patrons” and “will raid the office if they fail for any reason to receive their paper regularly.” By the end of the year, he certified that daily circulation reached over 13,000.
On 5 June 1894, Chandler married the boss’ daughter, Marian (1866-1952), at the Otis residence on Grand Avenue, just south of Washington Boulevard, this now part of the campus of Los Angeles Trade Technical College. The nuptials were attended by only family and a few close friends and conducted by a minister from the Congregational Church, with the Times observing,
The couple are both “Times people.” Miss Otis has for several years, and up to the date of her marriage, been a trusted member of the business staff of this office, a stockholder and director of the Times-Mirror Company, and secretary of the corporation. Harry Chandler has been with the Times for ten years past, and occupies the responsible position of Superintendent of Circulation.
After a San Francisco honeymoon, the couple returned for a reception at the Otis house “after which they will begin life in their new residence on Fort Hill.” This was Fort Moore Hill, a short distance from Chandler’s previous residence in what is now Chinatown, and the house stood at 503 N. Broadway, where the LA Plaza Village, named for the historic center of the Angel City just a short distance to the east, is now.
Chandler’s 1944 obituary stated that, “in 1894, Gen. Otis, founder of the paper, appointed him business manager. Soon afterward he married Gen. Otis’ daughter, Miss Marian Otis,” but, in fact, Chandler remained superintendent of circulation for some time to come, though he did join the officiate as assistant treasurer by fall 1896, at which time he also became a stockholder when the Times-Mirror Company doubled its issuance of shares from 240 to 480 and he held a 10% stake, comprising a handsome $48,000 holding. By summer 1897, he was also the assistant business manager of the Times, with Leroy E. Mosher serving as business manager.
It was during this period that Chandler began a prominent role in the Better City Government League, which, in 1896, advocated for independent candidates in the December municipal elections. He subsequently became the Second Ward director for the organization. Three years later, he was a main figure in the movement for a new Los Angeles city charter and, in 1900, was one of fifteen men (he received the lowest number of votes in a citywide election) chosen for the Board of Freeholders and chaired its committee on municipal boundaries for wards or council districts.
In late Spring 1898, Otis, who left newspaper composition in his native Ohio to enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War and rose to a lieutenant colonel and breveted twice for “gallant and meritorious conduct” and twice wounded in battle, became a brigadier general in the Spanish-American War. That conflict, which erupted in Cuba under spurious claims by “yellow journalists” that the Spanish attacked an American vessel, the Maine, soon spread to the Philippines, another long-time Spanish colony, and was part of the colonization efforts of the United States during that era—including the annexation of Hawai’i.
When Otis shipped out to the Philippines, Mosher was named managing editor overseeing the content of the Times, while Chandler was designated as vice-president and general manager, the Los Angeles Record of 4 June 1898 observed that “the paper would not change its policy or general character.” Three days later, the Los Angeles Express lionized Mosher, who began working for the Times a decade earlier as “a man of broad judgment and honorable views” and who would “conduct the paper with credit to himself and satisfaction to the general public.” It then remarked,
Mr. Chandler as business manager will have an easy job, which consists chiefly in declaring dividends [to the private company’s stockholders] and working up the circulation [which neared 30,000 each day]. He is a shrewd business man, whom people like to deal with, as they always get fair and civil treatment. The new management of the Times is in good hands. It will continue to wax fatter and fatter.
Otis resigned his commission on the last day of 1898 and this to take effect, the Record of 3 May 1899, “when the serious part of the Philippine campaign should be ended.” It added that, when Malolos, northwest of Manila, fell to the Americans, Otis was ordered to embark for home, but only given a half hour to do so.
Earlier, in that paper’s 4 April edition, it was reported that there was some question about Otis’ status, whether he was furloughed or if he’d permanently resigned and the Record alluded to rumors that he was “dissatisfied with his military assignments.” Whatever the situation, there were also whisperings that Otis contemplated running for the United States Senate, though this was denied, while it was also broadcast that Chandler tried to buy the Express, though this attempt was not successful.
On the first day of November 1898, Chandler entered another field, the oil field, when he joined Mosher, father-and-son Wallace and Guy Hardison of the Union Oil Company, and William B. Scott, who was related by marriage to the Hardisons, in founding the Columbia Oil Company. Scott was the president and Chandler the treasurer, while a later merger with Puente Oil Company, headed by William R. Rowland and which had a cache of producing wells on his portion of Rancho La Puente along what is now Fullerton Road/Harbor Boulevard at the summit of the Puente Hills, brought the tres hermanos together as brothers in business before they bought the ranch that bore their name.
Columbia was founded the year after the first producing oil well in Orange County was brought in by Edward L. Doheny, co-discoverer of the Los Angeles oil field just a short distance west of Chandler’s house, in partnership with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (which sought petroleum as part of a transition in fuel for its locomotives) at the Olinda Ranch in what is now the city of Brea.
This period was a true boom period for oil in greater Los Angeles and the rise of Columbia, which had many successful producing wells in the Puente Hills and at Olinda, was a financial bonanza for its principals. By the end of June 1900, the Whittier News reported that, for the previous fiscal year, Wallace Hardison (chiefly through Union) raked in $150,000, Scott reaped about $100,000 (the same amount as Doheny with his operations, though he went on to amass many millions), and Mosher and Chandler took in a cool $40,000.
In 1900, Columbia was reorganized, as the original issue of $200,000 in stock at $100 each was to be greatly increased due to assertions that the true value was at least four times that amount thanks to the firm’s rapid success. Notably, Wallace Hardison listed a small amount of shares on the local oil exchange and with curiosity afoot about the company’s plans, it was decided to set up a new one with stock at $1,000,000 at a dollar, but its partial IPO at half that amount.
The Express of 31 May added that
The Columbia is one of the best producing companies in the Fullerton district and has recently come into public notice because of the ownership of a large block of its present holdings by L.E. Mosher, managing editor, and Harry Chandler, business manager of the Times. Major General H.G. Otis is also stated to have large holdings in the corporation.
Production for the firm’s wells was about 100 barrels daily at $1.60 each and the article then ended by observing that Mosher took a half-year sabbatical from the Times and headed to Paris “as the result of his investment in the Columbia holdings.” In fact, he did not return to the paper and settled in Los Angeles where he started a manufacturing business, but it failed. He came back to the Angel City, but poor health and straitened financial circumstances led him to commit suicide on the beach at Santa Monica in February 1904.
Chandler went into another variation of mining in 1900, when he was the founding second vice-president of the Nome-Los Angeles Mining Company, which had claims in Alaska during the period when the great Yukon Gold Rush was underway there and in adjoining portions of Canada. He also expanded his real estate portfolio by purchasing, in June 1899 and perhaps with some his oil profits, 320 acres near Perris in Riverside County, where he grazed cattle and raised alfalfa.
Other areas of community involvement included Chandler’s 1900 election to membership in the Southern California Academy of Sciences, his serving as his father-in-law’s representative in seeking to influence the election of a vacant seat on the Los Angeles Board of Education and, in late April 1899, just prior to Otis’ return to the Philippines, taking part in a ceremony in which a tablet at the Times headquarters was installed commemorating the paper’s role in the so-called Free Harbor Fight, a critical effort in the region.
This was a years-long effort by competing interests to secure a commitment for a significant federal government investment in developing a major port in the Los Angeles area. The Southern Pacific Railroad, long a dominant power in California transportation and political influence, promoted its wharf at Santa Monica—with its line from the Angel City built by the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad (the founding president and subsequent treasurer of which was F.P.F. Temple) in 1875. Other powerful forces, including the Times, advocated for the harbor at San Pedro/Wilmington and this latter won that fight.
Chandler spoke at the unveiling and remarked that the memorial, purportedly paid for by citizens expressing appreciation to the paper, was “a compliment . . . having no precedent in the history of American journalism” and which he insisted was emblematic of “a public journal having a patriotic desire to benefit the city, the state and the nation.” After emphasizing the rendering of public service during the harbor battle, the paper’s manager continued,
When the newspaper gave publicity to the facts of the harbor fight, showing the magnitude of the contest, and the relative merits of the contesting ports, then our citizens of intelligence gave unsparingly of their time and money in opposing selfishness and corporate greed, and to exposing corporate infamy, to the end that this choice and chosen spot that we proudly call home might have a free harbor . . .
A century hence when, if our present rate of growth be kept up, this city will count its population by millions instead of by thousands, and all of our small towns will have become populous cities, this table will then still be a memorial to the Times for services rendered, unless perchance at that time some new engine of publicity may have superceded [sic] the newspaper of today, or evolutionized [sic] legislatures shall have legislated newspapers off the face of the earth. (Laughter).
United States Senator Stephen M. White, a longtime Los Angeles lawyer and former district attorney, was lionized for his leading role in the outcome of the battle, while Chandler expressed the regret that Otis was not able to attend the ceremony, which he was sure “would have been the happiest and proudest moment of his life.” He concluded that “this unique memorial intensely gratifies every one of the more than three hundred attaches of this paper.”
With regard to powerful entities, Chandler also became an early member of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, which had tremendous influence in business interests in Los Angeles. On Christmas Day 1898, he took a leading role in another of the newsies holiday feast thrown by the Times, this one held at the Royal Bakery and, while the young paper sellers gorged on turkey, ice cream and pudding, the Times of the following day noted that a pianist “played all manner of coon songs [racist pieces employing forms of Black dialect] and other popular airs, and the guests whistled and sang and yelled till the roof shook.”
In the winter of 1899, the Chandlers took a trip to New York City to attend the annual meeting of the American Newspaper Association and stopped in his hometown of Lisbon, New Hampshire, which he likely had not seen in about fifteen years when he came west in poor health and without much to his name. As the 19th century closed, he certainly went a long way to ascending to the upper echelons of the elite in Los Angeles, with enormous financial, political and social capital amassed.
We’ll return soon with a part three, so check back for that.
The Los Angeles Times’ daily circulation of 13,000 in 1893, promoted by Harry Chandler, was impressive for its time – reaching roughly 5% of the population of Los Angeles County and surrounding areas.
After 132 years, the contrast with today is striking. The paper’s paid circulation has dropped to under 70,000, nearly 50% down from 150,000 just three years ago, even as Los Angeles County’s population has grown to more than 10 million.
Since acquiring the Times in 2018 for $500 million, the current owner has faced big losses of $30–50 million every year, a burden he is no longer willing to shoulder indefinitely. He recently announced plans to take the paper public in 2026, aiming to attract outside investment and partially liquidate his stake. Yet given the paper’s ongoing struggles and a digital media landscape dominated by a few tech giants, an IPO seems unlikely to be the silver bullet for the Times’ future.