Helen (Chandler) Garland

Helen Chandler was born on February 17, 1907 in Los Angeles, the child of Harry Chandler and Marian Otis Chandler. She and her twin brother, Philip, were the seventh and eighth children in the Chandler family. The oldest two girls, Francesca and May, were half-sisters whose mother had died of childbed fever after May's birth in 1892. Two years later on June 5, 1894, Harry married Marian Otis, the daughter of his employers, the publishers of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Gray Otis and Eliza Wetherby Otis. The family grew quickly: Constance was born in 1895, Ruth, in 1897, Norman, in 1899, and Harrison Gray Otis, in 1904. The family lived at 503 North Broadway on Fort Moore Hill in Los Angeles until 1912, when they moved into their widowed grandfather's house on Wilshire Boulevard and Park View Street, while their new house was being built in the Los Feliz area. They moved into 2330 Hillhurst Drive on January 1, 1917.

Helen attended public school, graduating from Hollywood High School in 1925. She attended UCLA, and Cal, becoming a Kappa Kappa Gamma, but did not graduate. During her college years she suffered from recurrent illnesses, which were never definitively diagnosed. I remember hearing her tell of bouts of dizziness which were both demoralizing and incapacitating. She regretted not graduating from college in her later years.

The fun and excitement of being in a large family was rather lost on my mother. She felt that she had been left in the care of her older sisters for much of her childhood. When I questioned my Aunts May and Ruth about that, they both replied that they had been very resentful about having to come home from school and entertain the babies.

My mother joined the Junior League and the Spinsters and evidently lead a more social life than that of her parents, who were rather austere. When she married my father she became part of an even busier social lifestyle. She enjoyed the more volatile atmosphere of the Garland house. I remember her telling me about how the Chandlers, when angry, would hold a grudge and not speak to each other for days, while the Garlands would shout at each other and get all their feelings out in the open, and then forget the whole affair in a matter of hours. She had a hard time with this new emotional climate at first.

Helen and Jack were engaged for many months before it was announced. My father told me once of taking my mother on a picnic to propose to her. I believe it was in April of 1933. Because of her precarious health they had a small wedding.