Elias Manchester Boddy (; November 1, 1891– May 12, 1967) was an American newspaper publisher. He rose from poverty to become the publisher of a major California newspaper and a candidate for Congress. His estate, Descanso Gardens, was deeded to the County of Los Angeles in 1953 as a floral park.
Life and career
Life
Birth and education
Boddy was born November 1, 1891, in a log cabin on a Lake Tapps, Washington, homestead. He was said to have walked five miles daily to and from school and later attended Washington State College and the University of Montana.
Midlife
In World War I, Boddy was a second lieutenant in the infantry. He was gassed in the Argonne and sent home disabled. He spent months in a hospital. He was said to have resembled the actor Adolphe Menjou, and Time said much later that he was "High-voiced, quick-moving, affable, . . . an efficient horseman, pistol shot and fisherman."
Death
Boddy died in Pasadena, California, of congestive heart failure at the age of 75 on May 12, 1967. He was survived by his wife, the former Berenice M. Klotz, and two sons, Calvin and Robert.
Career
Sales
Boddy's career was called, by Art Berman of the Los Angeles Times, a "classic example of the self-made man, with his early years marked by poverty." Boddy's university years were interspersed with periods of working as a "door-to-door flatiron salesman, ditch digger, janitor and miner." He was also a milker, recruiter for the University of Montana, and New York City subway guard, then an Encyclopædia Britannica salesman in that city, where he persuaded poor families to band together to buy the volumes. In Massachusetts, he evaded a ban on book salesmen at Harvard University by hiring students as his agents. He was then promoted to sales manager for the encyclopedia.
After the war he resumed his old sales vocation by selling back issues of the magazine Current History as bound volumes titled The European War. He moved west for his health, founded a book publishing company in Los Angeles and sold copies of the Mexican Year Book and other titles for Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler. For fifty dollars he purchased an unsuccessful publication called Smiles and persuaded the Commercial Board of Los Angeles to take the magazine as its house organ thereby establishing himself as a publisher.
Newspaper
In 1926, Boddy was hired as editor of the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News, a failing newspaper originally founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. The following year, with the newspaper bankrupt, he persuaded a stockholder committee and then a federal judge to allow him to take over the newspaper. Within years, it became immensely profitable with Boddy as editor and publisher.
Boddy assumed ownership of the newspaper on August 5, 1926. Its plant, at Pico Boulevard and Los Angeles Street, was deeply in debt. He rejected Vanderbilt's editorial philosophy of emphasizing good news by turning the Daily News into a crusading newspaper that addressed police corruption, gambling and prostitution. He quickly earned the enmity of Los Angeles Police Chief James E. Davis, who attempted to silence the News by arresting Boddy. Davis used an obscure municipal law that made it illegal to publish horse-racing entries and results in a general circulation newspaper. The charges never got beyond the arraignment stage, and Boddy continued reporting vice and corruption in his paper.
Boddy was a Republican and supported Herbert Hoover in the 1932 Presidential election. He believed the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt was a "terrible mistake." Still, he recognized that Roosevelt's New Deal policies had merit and could lift the country out of the Depression. The Daily News was the only Los Angeles newspaper to openly endorse Roosevelt and give him balanced coverage. It also devoted considerable coverage to Technocracy, a type of scientific management of society and the economy. Boddy gave news space to Robert Noble's "Ham 'N Eggs" plan and Dr. Francis Townsend's "Townsend Plan," which proposed that state and federal governments would issue funds to people over age 60. The Daily News also extensively covered Upton Sinclair's run for California governor and his controversial End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign. Competing newspapers either ignored the campaign or wrote vehement editorials against Sinclair's programs.