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Charles Lummis and the Early Days
of the Los Angeles Times, Part II

Lummis Forgave Otis His Faults

Lummis never expressed more than the mildest criticism of Otis, and then only when couched in effusive praise for such a powerful personality who was on the right side of so many issues.

His admiration was based in part on role the Times played in turning Los Angeles from a lawless frontier pueblo into a modern city. "Few people in Los Angeles realize today what they owe him," Lummis recalled  in the unpublished memoir he was writing at the time of his death in 1928. "I don’t exaggerate when I say as one who has known and studied this town for 44 years that it owes no other man so much as this rough old soldier."

In Lummis's years with the paper in the 1880s, the Times was virtually a lone voice standing up to the forces that were railing for a boycott of Chinese businesses. The paper was the leading proponent of "high license," a fiercely-opposed regulatory mechanism that imposed a licensing fee and other controls on businesses selling liquor. The Times also supported the first municipal bonds that financed construction of a sewer system and helped beat back the attempt by the Southern Pacific railroad to block construction of a city harbor in San Pedro, a port that competing railroads also served.

The Times also parted company with other papers in the region on black-white race relations. The issue surfaced early in 1885 when reports began to circulate that Lucky Baldwin was considering bringing black laborers to work on his 80,000 acre racehorse farm in Santa Anita.

The Santa Ana Standard was aghast at the thought. A devastating earthquake "wouldn’t be half as bad as a Nigger colony," the paper wrote, prompting a rebuke from the Times. "We see no reason why they may not prove to be a desirable class of laborers," the Times declared in an editorial. "It takes all sorts of people to make a world… Give the black citizen a chance, say we."

Lummis wasn’t blind to Otis’s faults. In 1922 at a reunion of former employees of the Times, Lummis offered some frank comments on his former boss. "Col. Otis was brusque, rough, suspicious, vindictive…. He made innumerable enemies quite needlessly, as well as a large number that were greatly to his credit. It was good that every scoundrel, every criminal, every low politician hated him. It was a pity that so many thoroughly good people disliked him. He could have done a great deal more good if he had not antagonized so many good citizens. However as he did more for the community than all other newspapermen put together, I presume we may forgive him this loss of further achievement."

In the 1880s,
the Los Angeles Times
was a lonely voice
preaching tolerance of
Chinese immigrants
and black laborers

At a bustling
paper in a
burgeoning city,
Lummis rarely got
more than a couple
of hours of sleep
each night.
It caught up with
him eventually.

Otis ran his paper like a military campaign, demanding total devotion from his staff.  His philosophy was reflected in an article about the life of a Times reporter that appeared in the paper in the summer of 1887. Newspaper employees live in a "a continual whirl of excitement," the article observed. The reporter is always "in the thickest of the fray." With the ever-present fear that another paper will get a scoop, "times of immense nervous strain constitute the reporter’s everyday life…. Let it be noted that he holds himself in readiness to work from twelve to twenty hours a day, as occasion requires…. Whoever knew a thorough reporter to ‘fall down’ on his assignment so long as he could keep soul and body together."

The article concluded, "Old Ben Franklin numbering the hours which should constitute a night’s sleep said: ‘Six for a man, seven for woman, and eight for a fool.’ Whether this rule is a good one or not – and there are excellent authorities who dispute it – newspaper writers rarely enjoy the luxury of ranking with Franklin’s class of fools."

That story lends credence to a claim that Lummis often made about his time at the paper. "In my three years on the Times," he recalled in his memoir, "I never got more than two hours of sleep in the 24 and for the final newspaper year not over one."

The stress on Lummis was compounded in the fall of 1887 when he got himself entangled in one of Otis's vendettas, this one against a former business partner, Col. Henry Boyce.  In the pages of the Times, Otis relentlessly attacked Boyce over everything from his lack of business ethics to his "malodorous" marital record.

Boyce returned fire with editorials that were mild in comparison. In the Nov. 30 edition of his rival paper, the Tribune, Boyce called Otis a "brute" and Lummis a "sneak" and a "little liar." That insult was more than Lummis was going to take. At 4 p.m. on the day after the editorial appeared, Lummis confronted Boyce in front of the Nadeau Hotel on Spring Street and "whacked him across the face with my leather cane," as he matter-of-factly recalled in his memoir.

Several eyewitnesses corroborated Lummis’s account, but Boyce denied that Lummis hit him. The "excited little man" never got closer to him than 10 feet, he told a reporter for the Express. The Times, which took great pride in the combative spirit of its reporter, insisted that Boyce "was struck, but made off in a hurry." Lummis’s action was fully defensible in light of Boyce’s libelous tirade "to which no sober person would think of replying in words," the Times added.

Lummis, however, did not emerge from the fracas unscathed.   "For several months I had admonitory symptoms," he recalled. "My left forefinger went to sleep and stayed so. And sometimes the same crinkly feeling ran all around my heart." Then he felt an odd tingling sensation in his left leg. "But I laughed to scorn those who warned me to look out."

On Dec. 5, four days after his attack on Boyce, that routine was abruptly interrupted. "I went home for supper and lay down for a few minutes on the lounge. I couldn’t get up. I fought like a tiger. I knew what fighting was, too. Finally I did get up – but only to discover that my left side was helpless. I was paralyzed."

Lummis would recover use of all his limbs eventually, but only after three hard years of roughing it in New Mexico.