Visionaries and scoundrels made the Los Angeles Times, which returns to local ownership after 18 years
LOS ANGELES_The Los Angeles Times rose to prominence under the leadership of a bellicose, union-busting Civil War colonel who kept an arsenal of shotguns in the newsroom in case of labor strife and drove through the city with a custom horn that looked like a cannon mounted to his hood.
For more than a century, starting in 1882, Harrison Gray Otis and his heirs, the Chandlers, used the power of the newspaper to shape Los Angeles to their interests, and were pivotal in nearly every aspect of the city's growth.
The family fought to build a deep-water port in San Pedro and pushed to bring water from the Sierra Nevada. It turned vast wheat fields in the San Fernando Valley into lush suburbs and lured the budding film and aerospace industries. In its final big feat, Otis' great-grandson transformed a reactionary, parochial newspaper into a highly regarded national institution.
A boom-to-bust corporate era that followed brought publishers from outside the family. Ultimately the Chandlers sold the company to out-of-state owners - including one as blustery and self-righteous as the colonel himself who promptly led the company into bankruptcy.
Since its circulation peak in 1990, the paper struggled under relentless corporate pressure to cut costs. And in the last decade, the breadth of content and its effect in Southern California and the nation diminished.
On Monday, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong will return the company to private local ownership after 18 contentious years under the Chicago-based Tribune Co. and its publishing spinoff, now called Tronc.
"The new owner would probably be well served by studying the Chandlers," said William Deverell, professor of history at the University of Southern California. "That local ownership spoke to an attachment to a region. Its results and motivations were complex, but the paper was really something you could sink your teeth into, whether you agreed or disagreed."
When Otis first visited from Ohio in 1874, Los Angeles was a small farm and cattle outpost of sagging adobes and dust-choked streets filled with chickens and stray dogs. It was just starting to shake a reputation as the most murderous town in the West.
The colonel saw endless potential.
"It more than fulfills my expectations," he wrote in the Ohio Statesman, according to Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt in "Thinking Big," their 1977 history of The Times. "It is
