Long before he became publisher of the Los Angeles Times in 1960, Otis Chandler (“The Last Great Newspaperman,” July/August 2000) was making headlines on the Farm. Chandler’s world-class athletic exploits, robust campus social life and courtship of his first wife, Marilyn “Missy” Brant, ’51, occupy one chapter of Dennis McDougal’s book Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty (Perseus, 2001). McDougal, a former Times staff writer, adds muscle to the legend of Chandler, ’50, as a larger-than-life figure.
Characterized as a “bronze California Adonis,” Chandler marked his college years with a disciplined regimen of physical training and an almost equally developed passion for female students, according to McDougal. A member of DKE, like his father, Norman, ’23, Chandler admits that his formula for dating at Stanford was “one is fine, two is better, and three is the best,” and chastises himself for his deceits. Chandler had more laudable accomplishments in the athletic arena. A record-setting shot-putter, “at one point, Otis became such a fanatic about weight training that he wrote and published a pamphlet—‘Scientific Weight Lifting Exercises Designed for Track and Field Events’—that he maintained had been stolen by the Soviets and incorporated into their 1952 Olympic training program,” McDougal writes. The book positions Chandler as the protagonist in a history about one of the 20th century’s most influential families and the transformation of both Los Angeles and its major newspaper from backwater wannabes to world-class powers.
