Family dynasties have always been beside the point in California -- the most famous Californians this state celebrates were born elsewhere. With the sale of the family-owned Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Tribune, the most famous family name in Los Angeles passes into history. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of the forthcoming "Brown," is an essayist for the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer and the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times.

LOS ANGELES -- The news that the family-owned Los Angeles Times has been sold to The Chicago Tribune is only a chapter in a very old story. Call it the California story.

We Americans everywhere are famous for honoring the future more than the past. But in no other state of the union is this more true: From the gold-rush to the dot-com present, California is a state made famous by people in search of the future; which is why, in common myth, the future happens here first.

Not coincidentally, most of the famous "Californians" were born elsewhere. The Los Angeles Times, for example, owes its early success and vision to a Midwesterner, Ohio-born Gen. Harrison Gray Otis.

The miracle, or perhaps the oddity, is that, for several generations after, the Los Angeles Times remained in the control of the Otis-Chandler family. Odd, because in no other state of America is the notion of a family dynasty so totally beside the point as in California. Many people left their families to come looking for the future in California.

This was the paradox of the Los Angeles Times: A family dynasty oversaw a metropolis of divorcees and loners and grandparents who happily lived several thousand miles away from their kids.

From the Spanish and Mexican eras, it's true, there survive families, Californios, with pretensions to being "old families," with faded land grants in their closets. And a new generation of Hispanic and Asian immigrants in California celebrate their strong family ties, just as 19th-century Italian and Irish immigrant families did in New York.

But the famous immigrants to California have been those "internal immigrants" who came to L.A. from Oklahoma or Brooklyn, looking for a gaudy future, and anxious to get away from dust storms or in-laws or debts or gray winters "back east."

It's no coincidence that the famous "Californians" we celebrate today -- from Louis B. Mayer to Jonas Salk -- were born elsewhere. And, in counter-distinction to the rest of the country, it's "the old man" (or woman) in California who ends more famous than his kids.

Walt Disney, for example. Walt Disney was born in Illinois and came to California to build his fantasy. But who can name the second generation of California-born Disneys?

Or consider, the state's most important bank, San Francisco's Bank of America. It was founded by A.P. Giannini, a great Californian, despite the fact he was native-born.

After her father died, heroically, Giannini's daughter tried to keep her father's bank from becoming merely a money-making machine, without connection to the state's memory of itself.

But by the time "B. of A." was recently sold by one faceless group of MBAs to another group of faceless MBAs from Charlotte, probably only a few Californians recognized the name of Giannini anymore.

For some years now, I rarely heard people in Los Angeles invoke the name of Chandler. (A new generation in that city would have trouble even recognizing the name.)

But through much of the 20th century, there was no family name more important to L.A. The Chandlers' Los Angeles Times described and defined the ever-expanding city, insisted to all the world that the city built on sand actually existed.

Since the retirement of Otis Chandler, the newspaper fell under the control of businessmen with little journalistic experience and even less sense apparent of the city they oversaw. And there were rumors about faceless "Chandler cousins" wanting to maximize profits and damn all.

Now they are gone. The Chandler cousins can play golf at Pebble Beach or move to Oregon or Fiji -- or whatever it is that third- and fourth-generation Californians end up going.

The great newspaper of Los Angeles has been purchased by Chicago!

It's the revenge the rest of the country plays on California: The business executives of the East Coast or the South or the Midwest end up buying up the old man's California dream from the descendants who want to sell.

California's greatest newspaper, the newspaper of that dark and difficult genius, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis -- a man who fled the Midwest and helped invent L.A. -- his Los Angeles Times is now owned by the most important newspaper in the Midwest.