Ray Chandler Related to Harry Chandler who Put Up The Famous 'Hollywood' Sign, Basically Built Los Angeles & Much More
(Links to articles included in the Voat post below):
https://voat.co/v/QRV/3111653
Thanks to a previous post on Voat in v/pizzagate where someone who said they went to high school with Rachel provided some interesting information about her relatives.
This includes Harry Chandler who erected the famous Hollywood sign. Will copy and paste an excerpt from that bio from Forbes:
Some 200 heirs with at least 20 different surnames are benefiting from clerk Harry Chandler's fortuitous marriage more than a century ago. In 1894, he wed the daughter of Los Angeles Times owner Harrison Gray Otis and proceeded to build a media empire. He also developed real estate and erected the famous Hollywood sign (which originally read "Hollywoodland") for one of his projects.
In 1944, he handed the reins of the publishing empire to son Norman, who in turn passed it on to his son Otis in 1960. In 2000, Tribune Co. acquired L.A. Times parent Times Mirror Co., which by then also owned six other daily newspapers. The Chandlers, who controlled 24% of Times Mirror and majority voting rights, ended up with about 20% of Tribune Co.'s stock. Jeffrey Chandler and cousin Roger Goodan, along with family trust chairman Walter Williamson, were the last family members on the Tribune board.
They backed selling the company to real estate investor Sam Zell, who took it private via a leveraged buyout in 2007, ending more than 100 years of the Chandler clan's involvement with the business. Today, the family's fortune is held in multiple trusts worth an estimated $4.2 billion.
According to Wikipedia Harry Chandler became the owner of the largest real estate empire in the United States and basically built Los Angeles.
Much of his boundless energy and dreams were however directed to transforming Los Angeles. As a community builder and large-scale real estate speculator, he became arguably the leading citizen of Los Angeles in the first half of the 20th century. Chandler was directly involved with helping to found the following: the Los Angeles Coliseum (and bringing the 1932 Summer Olympics to L.A.), the Biltmore Hotel, the Douglas Aircraft Company, the Hollywood Bowl, The Ambassador Hotel, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Automobile Club of Southern California, KHJ radio station, Trans World Airlines, the San Pedro Harbor, the Los Angeles Athletic Club, the California Club, The Pacific Electric Cars, the Los Angeles Art Association, the Santa Anita Park racetrack, the Los Angeles Steamship Company, the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, and the restoration of downtown’s Olvera Street and Chinatown[citation needed]. >
From CNN in 2009:
Los Angeles' development from an arid wasteland to a world metropolis and cultural capital is closely linked to the newspaper's rise under the ownership of one family.
"It would still be a desert," documentary filmmaker Peter Jones said, if Gen. Harrison Gray Otis didn't arrive in the 1880s to take over the bankrupt Los Angeles Times and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, wasn't there to follow him.
Jones' documentary is a saga of four generations of the region's most powerful family shaping Los Angeles as they pursued their own civil agendas – and accumulated wealth. "Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times" premieres Monday on PBS.
Historian David Halberstam said in the documentary that the Chandlers dominated Southern California as no other family has dominated any major region of the United States.
Just scratching the surface here Anons! Need help with this!