Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp.
Chapter XXV Characters Make a Town
"[p. 319] . . .
"[p. 323] . . .
"Perhaps the most famour character our pueblo ever produced was General Harrison Gray Otis [ -1917], whose fight against union labor attracted world-wide attention. I approach with hestitation the task of writing about him. I have read so much written about him by profound young authors who seemed to know him so intimately, without every having seen him. I will say frankly at the start that all I know about General Otis is that I worked with him and under him for twenty years and for about five years of that time was his personal assistant. He had a fondness for the military; I was his aide-de-camp.
"The general was born in Ohio of New England ancestry. As a young man he was a printer (yes, and belonged to the union.) When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted in the same regiment in which McKinley was a soldier.
"At the time of the World War, when we were teaching young boys to hate Germans, inviting them to thrust bayonets into hay figures by telling them, "Now he has raped your sister," I asked the general if he hated the Confederates. He was furious."Certainly I did not hate them. What do you think I was, a hired murderer? I was a soldier. Had I hated them, I should have refused to fight." [p. 323]
"[p. 324] In the seventies he came out west as a government official in charge of the sealing industry in the Alaska Islands. From there he drifted to California and became editor of a small paper in San Francisco.
"In Los Angeles, two printers had started a little weekly paper called the Mirror, out of the wreck of a disastrous venture that two young men had tried in the way of a daily paper. General Otis came to Los Angeles and bought it. The Times was started in 1884, the office being in an old brick building at the corner of Temple and Main. They had a ramshackle printing press that ran by water power from the city zanja. From time to time the pipes got clogged with fish and the press had to stop.
"When I first knew him the Times was in the small building which was dynamited by the McNamara brothers. His wife, Eliza A. Otis, was a reporter, running the first column of comment ever printed in the pueblo. His daughters were clerks in the business office.
"At this period when they wre picking the fish out of the printing press, there came into the organization one who was destined to be one of the most remarkable men of the West. His name was Harry Chandler. He was born on a New Hampshire farm. A student at Amherst, he took a dare to jump into an ice pond in mid-winter, and contracted tuberculosis. All alone he came to California. He got a job herding horses and peddling fruit in the San Fernando Valley. He was so skillful a trader, swapping old cook stoves for apricots on the trees, that in his first summer, he made five thousand dollars, big money in those days.
"He became the general's son-in-law and the financial genius behind the Times. In later years he was to become a millionaire with great land interests, cattle, cotton, oil.
"It was his inspiration that turned the Imperial Valley from a desert into the truck garden of America. His idea to [p, 325] bring the Olympic Games to Los Angeles, to make the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena into a great scientific center. Between Chandler and General Otis there always existed an almost touching faith and friendship.
"I went to work for the general just after he came back from the Spanish American War. He had commanded a brigade in the Philippines. After I had been with the paper a few weeks, he sent for me one day. He was writing at his desk and did not look up, leaving me shivering with fear on the edge of the rug. At last he looked up with a scowl, "What do you want?"
""You sent for me, sir," I stammered.
"Do you work here?"
" . . .
"[p. 326] [Examples are given of General Otis' journalistic integrity.]
"[p. 326] A working man himself, the general's sympathies were always with labor, although not with unions. If an editor had a dispute with a printer, his cause was lost before he started . . .
" . . .
"I am not going into the long bitter labor fight that lasted forty years and ended with the dynamiting of the Times building in which disaster twenty-three innocent men who had nothing to do with it were burned to death. Labor leaders have told me since that the general had cause for complaint at first, and that his rebellion against the union had been in the first instance justified. I reported the plea of guilty of the two McNamaras who set the dynamite, and [p. 327] was on the inside of the whole story, but I have not desire to dig it up here.
"[p. 327] . . .