S.J. Mathes

Samuel Jay Mathes (1849?–1927), known as S. J. Mathes, was a pioneer printer and newspaperman in Los Angeles, California, who in 1881 and 1882 directed the editorial policies of the newly established Los Angeles Daily Times, which later became the Los Angeles Times, until General Harrison Gray Otis took over in August 1882. Mathes later became, in effect, a tour operator for visitors to Southern California aboard Pullman sleeping cars from the East

Southern California

Mathes came to Los Angeles in 1875. "It was a little one-horse town in those days, but there were two or three newspapers," he recalled in a Times interview forty-six years later.

I took a job as foreman of the old Herald and stayed there three or four years. Then Tom Caystile and Jesse Yarnell and I went into the printing business. We published the Mirror as a little house organ to advertise our business. It was always in my mind to start a daily paper. I suggested it several times to my partners, but they wouldn't hear of it.

Personal life

Mathes was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of a Presbyterian clergyman who was a firm believer in abolition. The father sold his slaves and moved to Sigourney, Iowa, where the younger Mathes received his education.

An illness he contracted in 1900 remained with him until the day he died at age 78 in Los Angeles on January 28, 1927. He died at the home of Minnie Neighbors May, a former Sunday school pupil. Mathes was survived by two grandchildren, Ralph and Eleanor Bowdie, both of Long Beach, California.