00:00:03Alexa Clausen: Ok, good morning, we are now recording. Uh, this is Alexa Clausen with Dan Rios on our third session interviewing regarding his career, the Times Advocate and North County Times. It’s May 9th, 2017, and, uh, just by way of introduction, today we are going to focus a little bit more on the technical aspects that Dan had encountered and worked with. Based on what he said that during his interview as a young man as a photographer, he was hired because he had a specialty and knowledge of color. And he had brought his portfolio, and the bosses said “Yeah, we’re moving in this direction and you’re the guy. So, maybe from that starting point in the status of the color for this newspaper and where they were going and your involvement, if we could start there?
00:01:11Dan Rios: Yeah, ok. Yeah, uh, I was hired, May of 1968 and that was one of the questions asked me was whether I knew how to do color and I had specialized in color my last year, semester, in college. And I shared my portfolio and the day after that I was hired. Uh, I started working the dark room as their first full-time photographer. They had had a part time photographer, and they had a reporter/photographer named Mary Jane Morgan who would take pictures, process the film, and print things on what was called a Photo-rite machine. It was basically a large Polaroid. The paper had the emulsion built in. You exposed the paper, feed it through this machine and it would come out in print. Umm, it was never fixed or finished. It was just air dried as an instant print, and it would be used for the reproduction. They had gone off-set, and they would, the uh, production department, would screen it- what was called 'screening' these pictures. And read them in the paper. Well, I started and uh, thought this was not the, the right way to go, so I installed regular processing chemicals and paper. But we did use the Photo-rite machine to proof everything, make contact prints instantly so the reporters and advertising could select the photos, and I would print them.
Uh, during this time, uh, Keith Seals was the production manager and asked me if I knew how to do color separations. And I had, uh, played with this in college and I told him I would do research, and I’d get back to him, and I did. And I came up with this process of using color film with color filters, with the enlarger, and using panchromatic paper-it, which is, uh, registered all colors of the spectrum. As opposed to orthochromatic paper which only registers, uh, blue light. Red light doesn't register, hence the red light in the dark room. You can work in the dark room without damaging the papers cause, it would not be sensitive to red light. Well, panchromatic paper is sensitive to all colors of the spectrum.
So, I would have to work in total darkness. And I would expose, and I played around with this, and I would expose these different papers. Four papers. The black, the cyan, the yellow and the magenta- in different sheets of paper and process them and come with different images using the enlarger and different filters. Colored filters. And then giving them four sets of prints. And, I had to use this home-made device to register. I would punch the papers and then I would align them with the punches on the, on the surface of the enlarger. Um, I would hand these papers over to black and white prints to the production department. They would screen them all, uh, because they were all different.
00:04:32Ac: Yeah
00:04:33DR: Using the filters and come up with the separations. Uh, prior to that, we would send color transparencies to Monrovia. The newspaper in Monrovia,
00:04:42AC: Ok
00:04:43DR: And they would separate there at 133 lines per inch. But they would take two-three weeks to come back. So, we had to plan there was no instant color in the paper. We had to plan for Christmas, Easter, 4th of July, stuff like that. Very sporadic. I remember Keith Seals telling me once that his dream was to be able produce, reproduce half column color mug shots every day in the paper.
00:05:12AC: Wow.
00:05:13DR: Eventually, we got to the point where we did that.
00:05:16DR: Well, we did this color separation system of mine, uh, for a year, year and a half. And maybe even longer. Uh, we got better equipment in the, uh, in the production department to scan my, uh, my separations. And I remember when the Wild Animal Park cause I was taking pictures there from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting.
00:05:43AC: Oh, sure!
00:05:44DR: And, in fact I had shot the color, the cover in 4” x 5” color transparency. And we did send that out to be scanned and separated.
But we had a collection of all these color negatives. And when grand opening of Wild Animal Park, I spent maybe 30 hours straight in the dark room separating each negative from Friday afternoon till Sunday about noon. Came home a couple times, had supper, took a shower and went back. At the end of my session there on Sunday afternoon I couldn't feel the floor. I was hallucinating. I had been in the dark so long, working so many hours. So, Monday when the crew came in, they started separating. And that was a special section that we put out for the Wild Animal Park.
00:06:46AC: Now, how, uh, was the color technology going forward elsewhere?
00:06:50DR: Yes, uh, yes.
00:06:51AC: And, and were you able to merge your color separation system with what was coming forward?
00:06:58DR: No, no.
Eventually the company did research and there was a man in Escondido who would do color separations for us, for color slides, color positives. And we quit my separation, thank God. Cause it was, it was a, ah.
00:07:18AC: It was too labor intensive.
00:07:19DR: Yeah, it really, really was.
00:07:20AC: Plus, you’re exposed to all that, the chemicals.
00:07:22DR: Yeah, the chemicals never bothered me, they were harmless, unless you drank them, I suppose. But eventually they bought a machine to do color separation in the Production Department.
00:07:33AC: When do you think this was? What year?
00:07:36DR: Hmm, mid-70's, late 70's. Yeah. Um, but when I started there, um, I brought my own equipment in and I had 4” x 5” cameras, and 2” and a quarter cameras, and 35 mm cameras, and strobe lights, and light stands, and lighting equipment.
Uh, when I got there, I think the paper had three Rolleiflex cameras that, uh, everybody used. Um, they were continuously being broken. Man handled and uh...
00:08:10AC: Yep, that’s the problem…
00:08:11DR: So, I went to Ron Kinney, and I said to him. Oh, to back up. Eloise Perkins was going on vacation, and she wanted her own camera. So, I did a little research and found out that there was a Japanese company Yashica that was making a twin lens reflex camera for about 70 dollars, 78 dollars I think, I got her one. Whereas the Rolleis were costing 500 to 700 dollars apiece. This is 1968, 70, 71. I don't know how much it would be in today's dollars. But it would be massively expensive.
00:08:46AC: Oh, it would be $10,000…
00:08:50DR: Yeah, so she started using her own camera and bringing the film in. And my god, I couldn't believe the negatives were as sharp or sharper than the Rolleiflexes, from a 70-dollar camera.
00:09:03AC: But you continued to use your own equipment?
00:09:06DR: Yes, right. And I was using their Rolleiflex. Till I got one for myself and, uh, I bought some new strobe lights because the one they had was not adequate. But finding out how sharp, just, just a fine piece of camera the Yashica was, I went to Ron Kinney and I asked him: We are spending all this money repairing these three Rolleiflexs that we have, why don't we just buy a Rollei… a Yashica for each of the reporters as their own camera?
00:09:42AC: Right, the cost of…
00:09:43DR: The repair bills went down to nothing because they would take care of their own cameras. And we supplied the film, the processing, the printing all they did was take... And some reporters refused to take pictures. If they, if they were forced to, I remember one columnist, overexposed the film so badly that you could see the sun through them. Because he did not want to take pictures, this was his way of rebelling. He says, “I'm not a photographer, I'm a writer, I'm a columnist.”
And, then the company would make the reporters take their own pictures when they went on assignment if I wasn't available. But this one reporter, absolutely refused. And he came from San Diego. I think he started in the (19)20's or (19)30's- the San Diego Sun or the Union, the Tribune.
00:10:32AC: So he was of the school that you send a photographer with the person.
00:10:36DR: Yeah, right, yeah. He was not going to mix the professions. The other reporters, they didn't care. Some reporters were pretty good. Bill Kane was pretty good, Eloise was good at taking pictures of monuments, and Kenny Russell was pretty good. There were some reporters that were pretty good photographers. Mary Jane Morgan was pretty good. But when I got them each their own camera the repair bills went down to nothing. And then we had the three Rollies, the two Rollies stayed in the shop for emergencies, back-ups.
00:11:09AC: Now, at any point with the color, now they would take black and white or would they take rolls of… how did that work?
00:11:16DR: No. No color, it was all black and white. All 2 and a quarter inch negatives. All black and white.
00:11:19AC: Ok, ok, ok. But were you and some of the other photographers the only ones who were allowed to, uh… was there ever color film introduced?
00:11:30DR: Oh yeah! We had color film when I first started.
00:11:34AC: Right, right. But when… who was allowed to go use color. If there was a special project.
00:11:38DR: Just me.
00:11:39AC: Because it was expensive. So, if they knew there was a special edition, then you’d take the color?
00:11:50DR: Yes, right. Uh, eventually after we hired the dark room technician, Lowell Thorp and then we hired Jim Baird, super photographer. Personality, eh. Then the regime had changed, it was changing at the time. So, we started shooting, eh, we shot, Jim Baird shot strictly 35 mm. And, the film had improved considerably at that point and our chemicals, cause we had experimented with different chemicals to get the finer grain and the negatives sharper images. I eventually went to 35mm also.
And, uh, but we also, we shot the color at the 2 and a quarter inch because it was better for reproduction. By then we had our own reproduction and color separation system in the production department.
00:12:47AC: What years were you migrating to the 35 mm?
00:12:50DR: I think it was the mid… mid (19)70s. Mid (19)70s yeah
00:12:54AC: And then what about the percentage of color being added to the paper?
00:12:58DR: Oh, it was, it was 5% at the most. It was just special sections, special assignments, uh, special events in town… that we would plan.
00:13:07AC: And then when did all that start changing?
00:13:12DR: Probably the mid to late (19)70s and the beginning of the (19)80s. Because as I had said, Keith Seals dream was to run half column color mug shots. That, to him, seemed like a total waste of effort and time, but that was one of his dreams. And eventually we did that in the (19)80s, mid-(19)80s, type thing. And then we got pretty prolific.
And then the, uh, the Ocean Blade, the Blade-Tribune started running color. And their color was better than ours. The reproduction bolder, brighter. And by then the San Diego Union started running color also.
00:13:54AC: So, they had better equipment, or they had better processing?
00:13:57DR: Uh, better processing. So, Keith Seals would attend these conventions and come back with new techniques and new machinery. He would bring back a representative from different organizations for better processors and better color separation machines and stuff. So eventually we improved considerably. But then we started adding more photographers and eventually, uh, we started shooting primarily color negative film because then we could run that in black and white and color. We had an option.
00:14:38AC: When do you think that was?
00:14:40DR: I think the mid-(19)80s, late (19)80s.
AC: [00:14:43}Ok, so you used the color film, but if you wanted it to be black and white…
00:14:48DR: Yeah, the scanning could convert it to black and white. Uh, then we started shooting…we had been shooting color negative and then eventually we turned to color positive slides. And we did that for quite a number of years. Up until the 90's, I think. And then I believe that’s, and I’m not sure, but one… that’s about the mid-(19)90s, the late (19)90s we went to digital, and it was all color.
It was a combination of a Nikon camera, an AP got some manufacturer [to] come up with these digital backs. And I think the memory cards were about 250 megabytes. And you couldn’t erase selectively, you had to erase the last image, then you had to reboot. Each photographer was given two cards. So, we had to be very careful what we took pictures of, we couldn't just machine gun because you were very limited.
00:15:53AC: Right! Your memory was limited, oh that must have been frustrating.
00:15:58DR: It really was! And we would have to come in, and this is what I was trying to learn. And I really didn't want to learn computers. I had no knowledge of computers. I didn’t want to learn computers. I just wanted to finish my career with film.
00:16:12AC: In those days, to my memory, it wasn't as easy as it is now.
00:16:15DR: Oh god no.
00:16:17AC: To do the downloading and all...This was not… Just…
00:16:21DR: For someone who knew computers, it was probably… I had to write out a list of steps, I think there were twenty steps
00:16:28AC: That’s the way it was.
00:16:29DR: From, from putting the card in the reader, to finding, and I had no idea the folders, and files and clouds and… Oh my God, it was so frustrating. I would go in my shift, from 9:00 AM to 2:30 PM – 3 o clock or 7 to 2:30- 3 o clock. Depending on when I took lunch breaks…
But I would go in at 5 o'clock in the morning just to play with the computer. And one of the young kids in the computer department gave me a piece of advice, he said, “whatever you do, you’ll never break the machine. Just shut it down, turn it off and restart it. You're back to square one.' It was such a relief in my mind because I was so nervous, touching buttons, pressing anything.
00:17:13AC: To my memory, when it was new to me that if you got stuck in loop, to back out was murder. So did they have a day, that all of a sudden, they’re like, “OK, all of your old cameras that took traditional film, you're done. Starting Monday, we're all going to digital?”
00:17:31DR: Yes, and at that point, um, when there were six or seven photographers in the pool, we were told that we would have to buy our own equipment.
And I went to the owners at that point, I think it was Tom Nolan, I think, and I said, ‘This is unjust,’ because the reporters had computers. And I said, “The computers, they’re not buying their computers, why do we have to buy equipment?” So, we rather, got a compromise, where they would rent our equipment, we would buy the equipment, and they would rent it. They would insure it, and they would repair it, but we would have to buy our own equipment. And it worked out pretty well. Because I would buy gray market, which is not officially imported by the franchise, and they were cheaper. But if the company is gonna pay for the repairs, what did I care if the company, err, manufacturers would not stand behind... You'd have to ship it back to Japan to...
00:18:35AC: So, what were you using? Did you stay with Yash…
00:18:37DR: Nikon.
00:18:40AC: Because you had mentioned the Yashica camera.
00:18:43DR: Yeah, and uh, eventually, uh, the reporters had the Yashicas. And, then we had the 2 and a quarter Rollies and they were pretty limited. I had a Coma 6 which was a single lens 2 and a quarter. It wasn't as good as the cameras I wanted, it wasn't as sharp as I needed. So, I went to the Production Manager and asked if I can come up with a proposal to buy, I think, four sets of Hasselblad cameras which are 2 and a quarter, single lens reflex. And, he said, 'yea, let me talk to the powers to be and write up a proposal.' And I did. I think I had four sets of them. The camera, a couple bodies, three lenses, filters, other little do-dads that went with it. So, he presented it to the Company, and they agreed. I think they probably spent $20,000. dollars.
00:19:46AC: And they were all for digital?
00:19:48DR: No, no no. These are still film.
00:19:50AC: This is your Nikon with film? When you went to Nikon.
00:19:52DR: These are the Hasselbald, yeah. Hasselblad. I wanted to go to Hasselbald to have the interchangeable lenses. The wide angle, the telephotos that type of thing. And we stayed with those and then when we went to 35mm. That's when we had to buy our own equipment. There was one photographer, John Nelson[RS1], I remember who must have had 5,000 dollars’ worth of equipment stolen from him, from his car. [He] came in, no equipment, no job.
00:20:25AC: Sounds like an inside job. Someone knew to follow him.
00:20:28DR: Yes, somebody just robbed his car and stole everything. Someone just took it out of his car. So, we all loaned him spare pieces until he had the money to buy his own, type of thing. And really, he wasn't insured at the time. So, he struggled. Because of that equipment, no job.
00:20:48AC: Now when they moved to using digital cameras, they stayed with Nikon?
00:20:54DR: Yes. It was a monster of a camera. It was a Nikon camera with Nikon lenses and stuff. But it had a huge back. It looked almost as big as a 4 x 5 camera. And that’s the one they had. I think it had 250 megabytes of memory in each card. We got two cards each. I believe each camera, each setup cost $20,000. And this is the mid-90's, late 90's.
I remember one photographer was taking picture by a pool and he fell in the pool with the camera. David, uh, David… I forget his name. And it ruined the camera. The camera was worthless after that.
00:21:45AC: Well, ya. But they didn't send you for training. They didn’t say to you like “There’s a conference for photographers and journalists.”?
00:21:53DR: No. Gave us the cameras. I don't even remember if a representative came in and told us how to run those. I think we learned by ourselves. I don't remember any training at all. At all. We were doing the digital and the 35 and learning. There’s a period of learning.
00:22:10AC: Migrating over.
00:22:13DR: Yea and I hated it. But I knew it was the future. So, I would come in two hours extra and play because we had the Photoshop. We had the earlier version of Photoshop, and I'd play around with that trying to learn the buttons. And, uh, I've got it in my computer now. But I never have learned the whole system. It's so massive. I just learned enough to...
00:22:35AC: Well, every time I see one of those adult education classes they’ve got, you know, an Intro to Photoshop blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:22:42DR: And it’s just so massive…
00:22:44AC: Yeah, yeah. It’s its own specialty.
00:22:46DR: Yeah. You can get a Ph.D. just learning what it has in it.
00:22:50AC: So, there was really, seemingly, no concern to bring you along immediately into this.
00:22:56DR: No, it was gradual. Gradual from 35mm color. At that point we were shooting color negatives again because they could be transformed to black and white and color.
00:23:09AC: So, who was the last person standing who had their old traditional camera?
00:23:14DR: Oh, I know, uh… oh god… what is his name? A photographer who used to cuss. Because there's no latitude in the digital, there was no latitude. There were no grays. There was darks, colors, or no color. And, God, he would get so frustrated. I would feel so sorry for him because he would try to manipulate the images the way we did in the dark room. There just was no latitude. No latitude in the digital. And it was just so frustrating.
00:23:50AC: Yeah. You are right. When you start to Photoshop that stuff, it is time consuming.
00:23:53DR: Oh, God, yeah. You could spend hours. And if they were… I could go in the dark room and print 25-30 color 8x10's in an hour. And manipulate them, and burn them, and dodge them, and color correct them. And, we had this automatic color processing machine.
At one point during the mid-80's they remodeled the dark room, and they put five color enlargers. Each of the photographers wanted their own enlarger, and it was a Leitz, a very expensive 35mm enlarger. I said no, I want a 4 x 5 enlarger. I want a Chromega, and a color analyzer, and digital timer. And I got it and put it in the back of the dark room and that was my enlarger. And nobody fooled with my enlarger. I had it zeroed in where I could print 25-30, 8x10 color prints in an hour. It was just bang, bang, bang. I would read them, analyze them, expose them, put them in the processor, and go do another one, go do another one, another one in an hour.
00:25:10AC: You were like a little copier machine.
00:25:11DR: Oh yeah! And by the end of the hour, I had 25-30 color prints. Beautifully printed, stabilized, dried, color corrected.
00:25:22AC: Now these are when they planned, they had… this is in the time they were planning… when the color… which weekend magazine or whatever would have color?
00:25:33DR: Yeah, right. Well, no, actually we were doing this in the dark room, we were doing color every day. We were running color every day. Everybody was shooting color. Everybody was printing color.
00:25:42AC: So, when do you think they did everyday color? By the 90's?
00:25:46DR: Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:25:50AC: I was just thinking of when we came to Escondido.
00:25:53DR: It was all color.
00:25:55AC: You know, I’d be three. But it seems like there was a lot of…
00:25:59DR: Right, yeah. I think if we ran black and white, it was unusual. Mostly the AP stuff.
00:26:03AC: But it was new to a lot of people.
00:26:06DR: Oh, yeah!
00:26:07AC: It was kind of exciting that your newspaper had color.
00:26:11DR: Oh yea. And it was offset. Then at that point they started using recycled paper. Which was gray dull, and the color didn't pop anymore. Prior to that we were using virgin stock. And it was pure white paper, and the color just shot out, it just shouted at you.
00:26:30AC: Now when you were assigned just black and white or color. I was going to ask you, when you’d be assigned. You know how the paper had a Rancho Bernardo edition, and it had a…you know, for sections of town. And, then those would be divided up according to, uh, who… which photos and who got the photos and who went where. Was it all done out of Escondido for these various editions?
00:27:01DR: Yes.
00:27:03AC: So, if someone was going to cover Penasquitos or Rancho Bernardo then that… the photographer would be assigned there by assignment or that was kind of their territory?
00:27:15DR: Uh, there were reporters assigned to Rancho Bernardo, Penasquitos, the coast, Fallbrook, San Diego. And they would make their own assignments. They would hand it in to the uh… Because we had a drawer, where the reporter would just put in their assignments. And, then we would just select the assignments which photographer would go where and do what. And that was all shot in color, at that point, color negative.
00:27:46AC: But it wasn’t necessarily on your part that you knew who, what assignment was going to come up, right?
00:27:52DR: No, no, no. Every day we would go to this drawer and all the assignments were in there.
00:27:57AC: Because for a few years, you got a lot more work from an Eloise [Perkins]. But as the paper went forward, and things changed and got bigger there was a whole different…
00:28:03DR: Oh yeah, we had more and more photographers and we split the pot among the five or six photographers. Each photographer had two assignments, three assignments a day. Whereas when I started, I would be doing seven, eight, nine assignments a day and processing.
At this point, we had purchased…because we were doing color positive, color negatives also, but mostly color negatives and we had a machine, had an automatic color processing machine. Prior to that Lowell Thorp had commissioned a manufacturer to give us a hot water tank and we would process all our film manually [by] color temperature by running hot water through this tank and keeping the temperature at, I think, it was 100 degrees and we would agitate manually each tank as it went through the process.
00:29:01AC: Oh, I mean… today that would be considered like you’re using stone tablets.
DR: [Shows his wrist with scars]
00:29:07AC: You got burned?
00:29:08DR: No. Carpel tunnel. I developed carpel tunnel by doing that. Because we had these tanks that were holding reels of film in it. And, we would have to do this [twisting motion with wrist] for about a half hour processing - and then wash them and dry them and then proof them. And, uh, eventually when we got Lowell Thorp, he would do all this as the technician, dark room technician. And, uh, he would then print. But some of us would go in there and do our own printing.
And this was before we got the new dark room, and Lowell had retired by that point. So, each photographer was in charge of doing his own color processing, film processing and his own color printing. Since I had been doing it forever, I was in charge of teaching the other photographers the color balance, and what it needed. Some prints were too yellow, too cyan, too magenta. I'd tell them what they needed to correct the color. It's what's called color balance. And so, I was basically… and a lot of photographers had knowledge, they could figure it out for themselves most of the time.
00:30:27AC: And it probably seems archaic now. These old systems?
00:30:31DR: Oh God yeah. You see photographers now with their digital cameras. They’ll take a picture and look at the image. Take a picture look at the image. Then you took hundreds and hundreds of shots. And through your experience and past knowledge you knew what was gonna work and what wasn't going to work. So, you went to the dark room.
I remember once, and this was taboo. I bought a Nikon camera with an automatic exposure. You just put it on automatic and just shoot your life away. You didn't worry about f-stops, or shutter speeds or anything else. You just click, click, click. It's digital cameras now.
And I remember there was a big fire north of Escondido. And, uh, I think there were three or four photographers covering it. And we all came back, and we’re all dirty, and smoky, and smelly. I had even gotten a brush of the fire retardant, which is gooey and thick, orange all over. And this other fellow, Ernie Cowens, taking pictures for television and I saw the plane coming dropping a load and Ernie was facing away from it. And I said, “hey Ernie a load of fire retardant is coming in, you had better hide your camera.” He turned around to see what I had said, and it just covered his camera. His film camera, his movie camera. He had to rush down to San Diego to get it cleaned and fixed. It just landed—and it was heavy, heavy stuff.
Anyway, we all came back, and we processed the film, and we were shooting color transparencies then. And I had shot maybe 10 rolls, 12 rolls of film. And each of my frames, the exposure was right-on. Dead-on exposure with the automatic. And I selected some frames that I liked and left it.
00:32:27AC: Well, that was a new era, it marked a new era.
00:32:31DR: Yeah, yeah, the automatic. But that was taboo. See? You weren't supposed to do that, you were supposed to be a professional. You were supposed to take a reading.
00:32:38AC: As the fire retardant is coming at you!
00:32:40DR: Yeah, yeah exactly. Take a reading and adjust your camera and shoot. That was the professional way to do it.
Me, I said, “I want to try this automatic thing.” And the camera was so dead on. The ten rolls of film, I bet the exposure was incorrect maybe in 5 or 10, 15 exposures. And I selected the prints that I wanted and by this point my shift was over. It was 5, 6 o clock and my shift had ended at 2:30. So I came home, took a shower and cleaned clothes and had dinner. The next morning the paper ran, and a bunch of my photographs were on it. A big spread, a color spread.
But my boss, Will Corbin asked me into his office, he had all my slides on his desk. 'What did you do that the 'other ones didn't. He had all my strips of transparencies on his desk. He said 'Why are your exposures correct, and the other ones have blotching, over exposed, under exposed, missing…' And I told him. I said, “That shot was automatic, instead of manual.” He said, 'I have to talk to the other photographers, they are wasting a lot of film.' I don't know whether he did or not or if they took his advice or not but, uh.
And I shot automatic from there on. I would just… I mean, why… I mean I would set the f-stop, or I would set the shutter speed and then the camera would compensate by... If I needed a huge depth of field, I would knock it down to F - 22 to F-16, if I wanted it to stop motion, I would set it at 4,000 per second. And the let the diaphragm take over. So, you didn't lose total control of the camera. And if I would shoot manual, I would shoot manual.
00:34:35AC: And good god, you know, you’re at a wildfire in a Santa Ana.
00:34:39DR: Right. You're not fiddling around with f-stops and shutter speed. But I see the photographers now, the professionals. They’ll take a picture and look at the image on the back of the camera. And I just kind of…. They have no idea what photography is.
00:35:00AC: Now we are at 35 minutes and that's generally where my transcribing load stops. But did you have anything else on the color? Now we can always add this in on the other tapes.
00:35:17DR: No, the other thing, because I retired in 2000, at one point I kind of got burned out. I had been taking picture for, sheesh… 40 years. And my curiosity run out. My mojo had run out and I think my photography showed it. I was kind of burned out. And I think it was one of the bosses, Rich Peterson came to me and says, “You know, I’ve got…” Rich Peterson was approached by the advertising department. Because we were never allowed to take pictures for advertising. If editorial took pictures, advertising could never use them. If we took pictures of mug shots of politicians, and the politician liked the photo, they couldn't be used in their advertising.
So, advertising apparently went to Rich Peterson and says, 'We want to hire one of your photographers to work for the advertising department, primarily - solely. And the photographs belong to us. So Rich Peterson had asked me if I would be interested in that. And at that time, they were changing the regime there and they were trying to mess with my schedule. My schedule had always been 7 to 2 -3 o'clock in the afternoon. I'm an early person. I wake up early, I work early, I function early. Later in the day, I'm wiped out.
So, he asked me if I was interested in taking over the position as advertising photographer. He said, 'go talk to the advertising manager', and I did. I found out what the requirements were. They had reps and they would talk to the advertisers, and they would request photography. They would bring me…assign it to me. I worked my own hours. Whatever I wanted. I would call them and set my time. It was a cushy job. And it was a Monday through Friday, sometime Saturdays. I set my own hours. It wasn't what I had started out to do, but I finished my last two or three years doing that. And when I got sick in July of 2000, when I quit. That's what I was doing.
And my last day at work, because I still had my equipment there in the dark room/studio/photo office. I went in 5:00 o'clock in the morning, picked up all my equipment and everything I owned, put it in a big box and hauled it out. I wrote a message to all the photographers of the North County Times, 'thank you for your help and friendship, good-bye, Dan Rios.' And I hung it on the door. Never went back to the building. Ever, to this day.
00:38:21AC: They didn't throw a party?
00:38:22DR: They wanted to.
00:38:23AC: You wouldn't let them.
00:38:24DR: No. At that point there were so many people that I didn't know. So many new people in the management. So many people I had been friendly with, and a lot of the people that I had grown with over the years, had retired and left. So, there really was nobody.
So, the personnel director, Peggy Chapman, called me and said, 'we are going to give you a party’ I said, 'no I don't want a party.' I felt hypocritical. She said, 'what can we do for you?' I said, 'you can buy me a lap top computer.' Because at that point I had gotten into computers. My stepson had bought me one, and we had bought another one and I thought a laptop might be nice. So, they send me $300 to buy me a laptop computer. This was the 2000s, but then computers then, laptops were 8-900 dollars. But it helped. I bought some other stuff, I didn't buy the laptop. I didn’t buy they laptop till way later.
00:39:28AC: Shall we stop here?
00:39:29DR: Yeah, sure. NOTE TRANSCRIPTION END
