Death of Chandler

At 1:07 a.m. on Oct. 1, 1910, the people of Los Angeles were awakened by six rapid, violent explosions. The Los Angeles Times building had been dynamited. In four minutes it was a roaring mass of flame. The Times's 46-year-old assistant general manager, Harry Chandler, who happened to be on the street outside, took brisk, efficient charge of the disaster. But when it was over, 20 mangled Times employes had died in the fire or leaped to their deaths on the pavement.

When the McNamara brothers, one an A.F. of L. union official, were arrested for the dynamiting, it was called a "frame-up." When, after months of agitation, the McNamaras confessed to the crime, the U.S. labor movement swallowed one of its bitterest pills.

Growth of a City. Harry Chandler, who died at 80 in Los Angeles last week, was a New Hampshire boy who went to California for his health after diving into an ice-covered vat near Dartmouth on a dare. In Los Angeles, Chandler's racking cough so annoyed his landlady that she asked him to move. He wandered into the hills, got a job with a squatter breaking colts and picking fruit. As part payment he got permission to sell some of the fruit to nearby Mexican laborers. In a year he had saved $3,000. He went to work for fiery, union-hating General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the four-page Times, as a circulation rustler.

When he became circulation manager in 1885, the Times had 1,400 circulation in a town of 12,000 people. When he died last week, the Times's daily circulation was 325,000 and Los Angeles city and county, sprawling over more than 4,000 square miles, was home to over 3,000,000 people. Harry Chandler, who married General Otis' daughter, and succeeded him as publisher in 1917, was more responsible than any other man for the growth of both the Times and its city.

Growth of an Empire. The feud with labor which Chandler inherited from his father-in-law and pursued relentlessly in the Times kept Los Angeles, until recent years, a strike-ridden city. It also kept the city open-shop, helped Chandler at tract the aircraft and other industries. He promoted vast Los Angeles real-estate developments, wide boulevards, Hollywood, the $60,000,000 artificial harbor at San Pedro, the Coliseum and Hollywood Bowl. Spreading his power and empire through out the Southwest, he became one of the nation's biggest landowners, one of the West's richest and most influential men. The Times (which has been actively managed since 1941 by his suave, able son Norman, 45) remained conservative--and one of the prime instruments of his power.

"Oh Lord, We Thank Thee . . ." Publisher Chandler never forgot the dynamiting of 1910 and the men who died in it. This Sunday, Oct. 1, as he had on nearly every anniversary for 34 years, he planned to repair to the Hollywood Cemetery with Times employes and relatives of the dead men for the annual memorial service. There, sitting tall and erect on his usual folding chair, gazing solemnly at the big memorial monument, he would have heard the Rev. W. Whitcomb Brougher begin his customary prayer: "Oh Lord, we thank Thee for the Times, which through all the years has championed the right to work. . . ."

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