To be in the presence of a giant

I came to Los Angeles because of Otis Chandler.

It wasn't a difficult decision, although there was nothing about L.A. I truly liked. Not the weather nor the city's drab homogeneity.

This was a fairly lusterless place 35 years ago, but there was one shining beacon that brought many of us south or west, from places like Oakland and Kansas City and New Jersey.

That was Otis.

He was a giant among serfs in the newspaper publishing world, emerging on the horizon at a time when Western journalism didn't seem to be going anywhere.

We were trapped in a time warp that locked us into a style that was rapidly losing its appeal. Old-time journalism seemed quaintly slow and awkward in the dawning age of television.

I began hearing about the Chandlers and the L.A. Times when I entered newspapering in the 1950s. Former L.A. City Councilman and state Assemblyman William G. Bonelli had written a book called "Billion Dollar Blackjack" that accused The Times of everything from union busting to race baiting. He left the country a step ahead of a grand jury indictment on charges of corruption while a member of the State Board of Equalization and died in Mexico.

Because of the book, and before Bonelli was indicted, I wondered why anyone would want to work for the kind of newspaper he described. But then along came Otis, the surfing, shot-putting, car-racing guy they called Big Oats. He marched out of Stanford University as an athlete and an idealist, honed by professors who knew what his future might be and worked to help build it.

They envisioned a newspaper publisher of special qualities. And they got it.

We began hearing about a different kind of L.A. Times in the 1960s, one that Otis was transforming into a world-class operation. He became its publisher at the start of the decade, and those who were lured to the City of Angels began calling it a writer's heaven, where budget and space limitations weren't barriers to getting a story and telling it the way it ought to be told.

He informed the world that he wanted to create a New York Times of the West, in terms of size and quality. His goal was clear: to build from the disrespect of the past, and to make us all forget it ever existed.

My life as a left-of-center columnist at the Oakland Tribune was beginning to fall apart under the strident, right-wing leadership of William Fife Knowland, who had given up a seat in the U.S. Senate in a failed bid for the California governorship. The Knowlands owned the Trib, and WFK took over as publisher. I began looking around.