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.^[2][3]

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.^[2] 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."^[4]

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.^[2][3]

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."^[3] 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.^[2]

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.^[2] 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.^[3]

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.^[2]

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.^[5]

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,^[1] 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.^[5]

Just before World War II in October 1941, a disastrous explosion and fire in Fall River, Massachusetts, destroyed a large plant of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company and with it a large part of government's supply of raw rubber, necessitating scrap drives to collect rubber. Boddy was on the air every night for more than four months, appealing to the public to collect and turn in their old automobile tires and other scrap. In a memo to President Roosevelt, Boddy outlined a plan to get rubber out of Japanese-held Malaya. Three weeks after he had written the memo, Boddy received a letter from the President thanking him for the idea and telling him that the operation was under way. Whether or not the operation actually took place, the story became the basis of the 1950 Hollywood film Malaya, in which the character "John Manchester," portrayed by Lionel Barrymore, was based on Boddy.

Boddy's editorial policies in these early years established the Daily News as the city's only liberal journalistic voice. After the end of World War II, Boddy's interest in the newspaper began to wane. His efforts to stimulate interest in various plans to boost the country's economy and his crusades for noble causes had ended with the war. Los Angeles had become a mecca for job-seekers and a refuge for new arrivals from the frozen East Coast. Postwar Los Angeles was emerging as an increasingly cosmopolitan city, and many of Boddy's editorial policies seemed quaint to the city's new residents.^[5]

Boddy spent less and less time at the newspaper as he focused his energies on his estate, Descanso Gardens, in La Cañada, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. He eventually turned the day-to-day operations over to his general manager, Robert L. Smith. Without Boddy, the newspaper lost its spunk and no longer tilted at windmills, reported newspaper researcher and writer Rob L. Wagner. By the fall of 1953, the Daily News was losing $75,000 a month, and it folded in December 1954. The assets were purchased by the Times Mirror Company. The Los Angeles Mirror, a Times-owned afternoon tabloid newspaper, took the Daily News name to become the Mirror-News.^[5]