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99 5 The Los Angeles Times Years, 1961–1962 The sports columnist was the high priest of games then, often less a journalist and more sort of the athletic director of the local chamber of commerce. They were the cheerleaders, often caravanning together to the annual rota of approved events: spring training, the Masters, the Kentucky Derby, the Indianapolis 500, and so on through the athletic liturgical calendar. It was a drummer’s life, with deadlines and whiskey and wonderful camaraderie. —Frank Deford, “Sportswriter Is One Word” Writing a column is a useful but limited talent, like hitting a curve ball or lining up a downhill putt. I ascribe all my success to learning to go to my left on an adverb, changing a compound participle—not letting it play me, in other words— following through on all my prepositions (repeat, prepositions) and learning how to spell Tony Conigliaro. —Jim Murray, “Finally Won It,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1965 Megalopolis The Los Angeles of 1961 was an entirely different entity than the overgrown coastal village that Jim Murray had encountered when he stepped off the train seventeen years earlier. The wave of growth that he had been part of had continued unabated. The highway system, the origination of which he had chronicled during his days as a cub reporter, had sent out tentacles in every direction, 100 Last King of the Sports Page earning Los Angeles the moniker of the Freeway City. Transplants from every region continued to grow the population, and the residential base was topped with a floating population of tourists, conventioneers, and visitors.1 The population growth had fueled the rise of spectator sports. In the past three years, the city had gained three professional sports franchises: the Los Angeles Dodgers and the California Angels in baseball and the Los Angeles Lakers in basketball. The Los Angeles Sports Arena had opened in 1959 as a home for the Lakers and other sports and entertainment events. A stadium would be completed at Chavez Ravine as a home for the Dodgers the following year. Los Angeles, which had been drawing more than a million spectators to its minor-league teams for years, was finally in the process of becoming a major-league city.2 The playing field in the newspaper industry had changed since Murray had been gone as well. Television, which was just a speck on the media radar in the late 1940s, had by 1961 fundamentally changed the way news was communicated . Though the city’s daily newspapers were still recording strong circulation figures and maintained a somewhat loyal readership, a thinning of the herd was in progress, as it was in most major metropolitan areas in the country.3 And while the Los Angeles Examiner was the city’s leading newspaper while Murray was on its staff, Hearst’s favorite newspaper was on a downward spiral in the late 1950s and early 1960s that would lead to its demise in 1962. The Los Angeles Times, Murray’s new home, now dominated the market. The previous year, circulation at the Times was 532,078 on weekdays and 970,027 on Sundays, while the Examiner’s figures were 384,760 on weekdays and 678,280 on Sundays .4 The two afternoon papers, Hearst’s Herald-Express and the Chandlers’ Mirror, still held circulations of between 300,000 and 400,000, but the highway system and the increased reliance on automobiles had drastically reduced the demand for an afternoon news product. Within two years, the Chandlers would shutter the Mirror and Hearst would merge the Herald-Express and the Examiner, and Los Angeles would become a two-newspaper town. And it was the Times that would come to dominate the market. The Chandler family had run the Los Angeles Times since the 1880s, when Harry Chandler had married the daughter of General Harrison Gray Otis, who had purchased control of the company a few years earlier from a partner. From the very beginning of the Otis-Chandler partnership, the paper had been a staunchly conservative voice of the city’s business elite, always ready and willing to provide a voice for management and be an enemy to labor. For the first half of the century, the paper served as an instrument of the Republican Party in California , a reactionary rag that Time called “the most rabid Labor-baiting, Redhating newspaper in the United States.”5 By the 1940s and 1950s, the Times was a national laughingstock. A national...

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