Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [37]
The Seal Islands post was a humiliation that Otis, who was more ambitious than he was clever, couldn’t afford to pass up. But after three years he had had enough, and he returned, bilious and frustrated, to California, where he got a job as editor of a local newspaper in Santa Barbara. Otis hated Santa Barbara. It was a hangout of the privileged classes, smug, snobbish, and perfectly content to remain small. Otis despised inherited wealth and class, but he despised a town that was disdainful of growth even more. He believed in it, perfervidly, just as he believed in those who started with nothing and dynamite their way to success. “Hustlers ... men of brain, brawn, and guts” were the people he admired most, even if he had less in common with them than he thought. Otis would pursue a sinecure as a greyhound chases a rabbit, and it was his rotten luck at it, more than anything else, that finally caused his success. Trying to get himself appointed marshal of California, he was offered the job of consul in Tientsin, an insult that was more than he could bear. In 1881, Otis quit the paper in Santa Barbara and moved his family to Los Angeles.
The city was still small when Otis arrived, but it was already served by several newspapers, one of which, the Times and Mirror, was owned by a small-time eastern financier named H. H. Boyce. Boyce was looking for a new editor, and, though the pay was a miserable $15 a week, Otis took the job. Perhaps because he was fuming about the pay, or perhaps because he knew that time was running out, Captain Otis then made one of the bolder decisions of his life. He took all of his savings and, to help offset the low pay, convinced Boyce to let him purchase a share in the newspaper. Privately he was thinking that someday, perhaps, he could force H. H. Boyce out.
Harry Chandler came to Los Angeles for his health. He grew up in New Hampshire, a cherubic child with cheeks like Freestone peaches. His falsely benign appearance, which stayed with him all his life, made him a popular boy model among advertisers and photographers. But cherubic Harry was a rugged individualist and a ferocious competitor, and if there was money involved he would rarely pass up an opportunity or a dare. While at Dartmouth College, he accepted someone’s challenge and dove into a vat of starch—a display that nearly ruined his lungs. Advised by doctors to recuperate in a warm and dry climate, he bought a ticket to Los Angeles. Arriving there, he moved from flophouse to flophouse because none of his fellow tenants could endure his hacking cough. When he was thoroughly friendless and nearly destitute, Harry met a sympathetic doctor who suffered from tuberculosis and owned an irrigated orchard near Cahuenga Pass, at the head of the San Fernando Valley. Would Harry like a job picking fruit?
The work was hard but invigorating. Before long, Harry felt almost cured. The work was also surprisingly lucrative. The doctor was as uninterested in money as Harry was interested, and let him sell a large share of what he picked. In his first year, Harry made $3,000. It was a small fortune, and inspired in Harry an awed faith in the potential of irrigated agriculture and, most particularly, agriculture in the San Fernando Valley. With the proceeds, Harry began to acquire newspaper circulation routes, which, at the time, were owned independently of the newspapers and bought and sold like chattel. Before long, he was a child monopolist, owning virtually all the routes in the city.
By 1886, Harrison Gray Otis had finally managed to hound H. H. Boyce out of the Los Angeles Times and Mirror. It was a pyrrhic victory, however, because Boyce had immediately established a rival paper, the Tribune, and engaged Otis in an all-out circulation war. With the allegiance of whoever dominated the circulation routes, one or the other was certain to win. It was Otis’s luck that he got to Harry Chandler