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| Birth: | 10 Feb 1837 in Marietta, Ohio |
| Death: | 31 Jul 1917 in Los Angeles. CA |
| Sex: | M |
| Father: | Stephen Otis b. 10 Jun 1784 in Norfolk, Litchfield Co., CT |
| Mother: | Sarah Dyer b. About 1800 |
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Individual:
"Two years before the beginning of the Civil War, Eliza Wetherby of Lowell, Ohio, married a tall, blond, blue-eyed printer's apprentice who showed little promise of success outside of a florid use of the English language and a brassy ambition that passed in some circles as courage. He also exhibited a bravado that cowed many into believing him a natural born leader. Dreamy Miss Eliza Wetherby fell in love instantly.
His name was Harrison Gray Otis, the youngest of sixteen children born to a God-fearing hardscrabble farm family from the Ohio River Valley. Staunch Methodists and abolitionists, Stephen and Sara Otis could will nothing to their baby boy save a bona fide New England pedigree and a powerful Protestant work ethic. Named for a broadly praised Massachusetts cousin from the previous generation whose conservative Federalist politics had landed him in the Boston mayor's mansion and the U.S. Senate, young Harrison Gray Otis could also point to patriotic firebrand and Revolutionary War hero James Otis as his influential paternal grandfather. The Otis side of his family bequeathed young Harrison not only his lifelong taste for war and all things military but also his political zealotry which bordered on fanaticism and brought the lucrative patronage that usually went along with supporting the winning political party.
"I absorbed my first political sentiments from my father, who was active in the pre-Republican Liberty Party," Harrison later recalled. The winning politics practiced by the Ivy League-educated East Coast establishment eluded young Otis, however. Except for three years of basic country schooling, he hadn't the means, the opportunity, or the attention span for the kind of sustained education required of a nineteenth-century machine politician. Otis was restless and wanted to make his fortune. At fourteen, he left home for an apprentice position in the print shop that produced the Sarahsville Courier, and he didn't stopped moving until thirty years later, when he and his beloved Eliza finally settled down, 2,500 mile to the west, in that former den of iniquity known as Los Angeles.
In 1856, Otis enrolled at Wetherby's Academy in Lowell, Ohio, for some belated formal education; a year later, he attended Granger's Commercial College in Columbus, Ohio, in an attempt to smooth the rough edges of his scant schooling and add some business polish to his skills as a print compositor. It was in Lowell that he met and courted Eliza Ann Wetherby, the daughter of a wealthy woolen manufacturer and sometimes minister who had opened the academy and named it for himself. Eliza taught there in the 1856-57 school year, when Otis lasted as a student for all of five months. "Lizzie," as Harrison affectionately came to nickname her, was almost four years older and far more sophisticated than her future husband. She fancied herself a poet and even published a rhyme in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, long before she and Harrison heeded Greeley's famous advice to "go west, young man." The Otises were married in 1859 against Mr. Wetherby's wishes and they did not enjoy much in the way of a dowry. Instead, the couple was "happy and hopeful on $8 a week," as Otis described those days much later in his memoirs. They continued to bounce from town to town, landing briefly in Marietta (Ohio), Louisville, and Chicago, where the antislavery convictions he'd inherited from his parents lured Otis into the passionate presidential politics of 1860. He was an "apprentice" delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention from Kentucky, and he proudly pointed out for years afterward that he had helped nominate Abraham Lincoln. But for all his pragmatic optimism and years of experience in printing, when he returned to Ohio and the highly competitive printing business, Harrison Otis remained as dreamily romantic in his own way as his poetess wife was in hers. During a doomed attempt to scrounge newspaper work in Cincinnati, Otis spelled out his wanderlust, his eventual hope for a political windfall, and, above all, his attachment to his young wife in poignant, purple love letters.
With the breakout of the Civil War, Otis was among the first to enlist on the side of God, abolition, and President Lincoln, even though Lizzie was about to give birth to their first child. She bore Harrison a son, but the child died within days of its birth. Private Harrison Otis of the 12th Ohio Volunteers hurried back from the front only to see his son buried. Eliza would give him four more daughters: Mabel, Lilian, Marian, and Esther (who also died in infancy), but there would be no male heir to the future fortunes that the starry-eyed Harrison Gray Otis planned to earn for himself, his wife, and his progeny. Private Otis distinguished himself on the battlefield; he had at last found a metier in which he excelled without question, despite his meager education and humble beginnings. Twice wounded, he rose through the ranks and seven battlefield promotions to command his own company of Union soldiers at the end of the war. After forty-nine months of continuous service to the Grand Army of the Republic, Major Harrison Gray Otis mustered out in 1865; he was promoted once again following the South's surrender on the recommendation of his commander, Rutherford B. Hayes. For "gallantry and meritorious services," the future U.S. president raised Otis to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In the arduous years that followed, Harrison hung on tight to his Civil War military service as the proudest moment in an otherwise undistinguished career. As he and Lizzie continued scratching out a living in the printing trade, he vainly insisted on being addressed by friends, peers, and family alike as Colonel Otis, or, simply, the Colonel.
As partners, Harrison and Eliza Otis launched their first newspaper in the years following the war: a "poor little Jim Crow sheet" in Marietta, Ohio, called the Washington County News. Their newspaper earned no profits, so Otis subsidized the operation by selling his services as the official reporter for the Ohio State House of Representatives in nearby Columbus. Political patronage within the state capitol paid off further when he dumped the Washington County News to accept a job as printing compositor in the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Government Printing Office, where he joined the International Typographical Union. Later, he moved over to the U.S. Patent Office, where he rose to division chief. By 1870, he had climbed even higher, to foreman, and supervised four hundred employees while earning a salary of $1,800 a year. Harrison Otis might have lived out his life as a comfortable federal bureaucrat had it not been for his natural restlessness, his gambler's itch, and the inevitable "Get rich quick" appeal of Angora goats. Like bored middle-aged and middle-class middle managers of any era, Otis skimmed the back pages of magazines and newspaper classifieds for that mainchance business opportunity that would free him from the shackles of daily drudgery and make him independently wealthy. Little luck had come his way during his years in the printing and newspaper trade, and when he came across articles about the exotic appeal of rearing Angora goats, he was intrigued. In 1874, he took a leave of absence from his government job and crossed the country—his first trip west—to investigate the possibility of investing his life savings in a goat farm west of the Baja California coastline on remote and virtually uninhabited Guadalupe Island. Goats and Guadalupe did not impress him, but California did. Otis returned to Washington, but two years later, he and his family pulled up stakes and returned to California—this time, to Santa Barbara. President Rutherford B. Hayes now occupied the White House and, as was the custom of the day, remembered his friends and supporters in the form of plum political appointments. Although Otis didn't delude himself into believing he could land an ambassadorship, he figured that his loyal Republican Party support and his war record had to add up to some kind of cushy job. What he was offered, however, was a slap in the face: the post of the U.S. Treasury Department's official representative in Alaska's Seal Islands; these are located in the Bering Strait, which separates Siberia from Seward's Folly.
Despite its obvious drawbacks, the job did pay well: $10 a day, which could equal a small fortune at the end of a three-year appointment. Otis's duties added up to keeping poachers away from the fur seals and alcohol out of the hands of the Eskimos. On February 13, 1880, Otis wrote his farewell editorial: "On the first day of March, 1880, I will relinquish control of the Santa Barbara Press, and transfer it to other hands. Meantime I wish to close up my business here, preparatory to leaving for the far north." As there was nowhere for Otis to spend his salary in Alaska, he sent it all home to Lizzie; she had remained behind in Santa Barbara with their now-teenaged daughters and struggled to manage the family's newspaper long enough to sell it. In December 1881, Otis returned to Southern California on a brief leave from Alaska. During his stay, he and Lizzie paid a visit to Los Angeles, where Otis was interviewed by a reporter for the town's newest newspaper. Otis, who insisted on being addressed as Colonel, lectured the Daily Times correspondent about drunken Indians, punishments for seal poachers, and the primitive, inhospitable climate that would never merit much more than government by force of arms. Colonel Harrison Gray Otis, the soldier who had once fought bitterly to free African American slaves, now advocated the enslavement of Eskimos for their own good. But Otis conceded that Los Angeles was showing genuine promise as a place civilized enough to settle down in.
Otis returned to Alaska, but only for a few months. His faithful government service had earned him another government appointment—this time as diplomatic consul to the Southern Pacific paradise of Samoa. By the spring of 1882, Otis was back in Southern California for good; the lure of a brand-new start in the newspaper business in a brand-new L.A. was too seductive. He wired his regrets to Washington, D.C.
With $1,000 he and Lizzie realized from selling the Santa Barbara Press and a promise to pay $4,000 more in the years to come, the Otises bought a one-quarter interest in the struggling Los Angeles Daily Times. For a salary of $15 a week, Harrison renewed his membership in the ratified world of newspaper publishing and vowed to double or triple the Times' daily circulation of four hundred copies. But it was Eliza Otis who gave the family's new business the motto that would endure for a century: "Stand Fast, Stand Firm, Stand Sure, Stand True." On July 28, 1882, the front page of the Times blared: H.G. OTIS TO BECOME PRINTER OF TIMES. The Otises had three equal partners in their new enterprise: Jesse Yarnell, Thomas J. Caystile, and S. J. Mathes. A fourth "shadow" partner, A. W. Francisco, one of Colonel Otis's old friends from his Ohio days, agreed to help finance the Otises' end of the partnership. Three other inventive Easterners set their own course for Southern California in the early 1880s. Each in his and her own way would soon join Harrison and Eliza Otis in profoundly affecting the future of Los Angeles in the closing years of the nineteenth century. They were quite different from the Otises, just as they were quite different from each other: Harry Chandler, a tubercular Dartmouth dropout who would develop a Machiavellian instinct for accumulating money and influence once the Southern California sunshine helped him dry his lungs; Charles F. Lummis, a sickly Harvard-educated romantic fired by dreamy idealism. He had a Victorian novelist's devotion to serpentine phrasings of the English language and an artistic pretension inspired by humanitarian intent—even if it yielded minimal results; and
Helen Hunt Jackson, a poetic widow from Massachusetts whose love of lost causes sparked a Southern California social revolution with sentimental repercussions that still reverberate in L.A. more than a century later."
Part owner and 1st publisher of the Los Angeles Times. "Gen." Otis invested in the paper and quickly turned it into a financial success. In 1884, he and a partner purchased the entire Times and Mirror properties and incorporated them as the Times-Mirror Company. Two years later, Otis bought out his partner. In October 1886, the word "Daily" was removed from the title and the newspaper became the Los Angeles Times. From the beginning, Gen. Otis was an unabashed supporter of Los Angeles. He believed in the city's future and promoted it with all the energy - and all the newsprint - at his disposal. Los Angeles became a boomtown, overflowing with Easterners and Midwesterners seeking the riches Otis' newspaper promised.
Dynasty founder Harrison Otis and son-in-law Harry Chandler played crucial roles in transforming L.A. from a remote outpost of 12,500 to a metropolis of millions. The Times's free Mid-Winter Edition began promoting Southern California to Easterners four years before the first Rose Parade; Otis campaigned for L.A.'s harbor and against unions; he and Chandler spearheaded the plundering of Owens Valley's water. Chandler's real estate ventures stretched from the San Fernando Valley to Mexico; he launched business ventures ranging from the Hollywood Bowl, L.A. Coliseum, landmark hotels and the 1932 Olympics to the local oil, auto, aerospace, fashion and movie industries and Cal Tech, which trained people for technological industries. Chandler's son Norman ran the Times while his wife Dorothy's fund-raising built the L.A. Music Center. Both broke ranks with the family's extreme right-wing politics, and Norman's son Otis, who took the paper's reins in 1960, transformed it from a disrespected, business-boosting propaganda rag to one of the most respected papers in the nation. McDougal inadequately explains Otis's ouster and subsequent ambivalence as the Times floundered under leaders portrayed as insular, incompetent and mendacious, as well as his 60-something second adolescence of fast cars and big surf." From Priviledged Son, by Dennis McDougal, 2000.
6th cousin, 3R
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