Manchester Boddy

Elias Manchester Boddy (pronounced "Boady") (1891–1967) 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.

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.

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 magazine said much later that he was "High-voiced, quick-moving, affable, . . . an efficient horseman, pistol shot and fisherman."

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, ditch-digger, janitor, 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.

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