Otis Chandler

"No single family dominates any single region of the country as the Chandlers have dominated California," David Halberstam wrote in "The Powers That Be," his 1979 book on the media, and indeed, for more than a century, it was the Chandler family--more than any other force or institution--who shaped the development of Los Angeles and its sprawling environs. Water for a desert city. A port for a landlocked city. A Music Center for a city with little in the way of formal culture.

As former editors of the Los Angeles Times Book Review (1975 through 2005), we are dismayed and troubled at the decision by Sam Zell and his managers to cease publishing the paper's Sunday Book Review. This step signals the end of an era begun 33 years ago when Otis Chandler, then the paper's publisher, announced the debut of the weekly section. Since then, the growth of the Los Angeles metropolitan region and the avidity of its numerous readers and writers has been palpable. For example, every year since its founding in 1996, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has attracted upward of 140,000 people to the UCLA campus from all walks of life throughout Southern California.

How much was Otis Chandler's storied collection of vintage automobiles and motorcycles worth? More than $36 million, as it turns out. At least, that's what bidders hailing from as far away as Europe and Asia collectively agreed to pay Saturday for the late Los Angeles Times publisher's collection at an Oxnard auction. "This is one of those great moments" for car collecting enthusiasts, said Larry Crane, the Thousand Oaks-based editor of Auto Aficionado magazine.

Amazon announced Thursday that it is acquiring social reading website Goodreads. The deal, which will be finalized in a few weeks, is the most prominent acquisition of a major book-focused startup in recent years. On Thursday afternoon, Goodreads founder Otis Chandler and Russ Grandinetti, Amazon vice president of Kindle content, sat around a speakerphone in San Francisco making press calls. It was an old-fashioned way to talk about a deal that's focused on doing things anew: integrating social media with e-books.

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.

Many patrons of the Los Angeles Music Center had hoped that the announcement of President Esther Wachtell's resignation in December would ease internal turmoil, improve fund raising and signal a time of healing. But her presence has remained controversial. Some of her supporters mounted a short-lived petition drive to keep her as president and chief fund-raiser of the Music Center. And others came to her defense. Maurice J.

A Man of Many Passions Transformed The Times Had Otis Chandler never worked a single day, his would have been a memorable life. An Olympic-caliber athlete, a champion weightlifter, an accomplished race car driver, big game hunter, surfer, cyclist, antique car and motorcycle collector, Chandler, who died Monday at 78, was a man whose avocations alone were the stuff of legend.

Catching a glimpse of Otis Chandler striding through The Times' newsroom was like sighting a griffin: a creature of mythology, half-lion and half-eagle. In his person, Otis stitched together two ideas as dissonant as Valvoline and Sparkletts: a believer in that most-democratic of instruments, a free and fair press -- the only business mentioned in the Constitution -- and an heir to that most regressive of institutions, an absolute monarchy.

The Walter Cronkite Journalism and Telecommunication Endowment at Arizona State University will present its third annual Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism and Telecommunication to Otis Chandler, chairman of the executive committee of the board of directors of Times Mirror, at a luncheon Thursday at the Arizona Biltmore. The award is given annually in recognition of distinguished service to the American news industry. Previous recipients are former CBS presidents William S.