San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
ARCHIVE TELLS HISTORY ON FILM
Negatives donated to Cal State San Marcos by retired photojournalist feature more than 200,000 images
For more than 40 years, Dan Rios has been the careful steward of more than 200,000 images documenting local history. But soon, the public will be able to explore the retired photojournalist’s vast archive.
Rios, who worked as a photographer for the Escondido Times-advocate and North County Times newspapers in Escondido from 1968 to 2001, has donated his massive collection of print negatives to the Special Collections department at Cal State San Marcos. For the past 18 months, university archivists have been going through the 40,000 labeled envelopes of negatives with the goal of publishing a searchable text database of the collection’s contents in about six months, according to Sean Visintainer, head of special collections at CSUSM.
“Newspapers and archives go together really well,” Visintainer said. “From my perspective, it’s incredibly important. The work Dan did in his daily life all those years ... to make it available to researchers is really valuable.”
On Tuesday, Rios was on campus picking through a box of negatives in the University Archives room on the bottom floor of the Kellogg Library. Working with archivist Laura Nelson and volunteer Alexa Clausen, he helped identify people and places and dates that had escaped labeling in the vast archive, which Rios and his wife, Theresa, had stored for decades in the garage of their Escondido home.
and ruins of long-gone buildings in Balboa Park; sailings of the Star of India tall ship; and the early years of the San Diego Chargers. Over the years, Rios shot everything from politicians to wildfires, business openings to courtroom trials, car crashes to flash floods, and high school football games to human interest stories.
“I loved it all; well, maybe not the Friday night sports so much, but the variety was great,” Rios said. “I particularly loved shooting portraits because I enjoyed meeting people.”
Rios was one of six children born in the San Joaquin Valley town of Hanford to a day laborer and housekeeper. The family moved to San Diego for the weather when Rios was 13, settling in a house near the Ocean Beach pier. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade to work for a landscape maintenance company. Two years later, he started his own gardening business that became so successful, he hired his father after the first year.
But at age 21, he realized he’d hit the ceiling of what he could accomplish in his career because he couldn’t speak or read English, couldn’t do complicated math and didn’t have a high school diploma. So he went back to school to get his degree, then enrolled in community college, studying for a degree in civil engineering. When a professor encouraged him to find a hobby to enjoy when he retired, Rios bought one of the cameras he’d been admiring at a nearby Sears store and enrolled in a photography class at City College. At 26, he knew instantly that he’d found his life’s calling.
“I loved everything about it,” he said. “I loved shooting, I loved working in the darkroom. I’d buy 100-foot rolls of film and go through them so fast.”
His college photography teacher helped him get a job shooting photos for an advertising agency for $1.50 an hour. That’s where he learned to shoot and develop color photos, which made him a hot commodity to the Times-advocate, which in 1968 was looking to hire a photographer who could help the newspaper transition from all black-andwhite photos.
As chief photographer, Rios saw through the paper’s transition to color; its transition from an afternoon to a morning newspaper in 1990; and the merger with the North County Blade-citizen in 1995 to create the North County Times. He also oversaw the paper’s transition from film to digital photography in the 1990s. In 2001, he retired at age 60.
Around 2012, a group of Escondido historians affiliated with the Escondido Public Library’s archive center, The Pioneer Room, began encouraging Rios to find a permanent and public home for his negatives. They included Clausen and former Times-advocate librarian Lucy Berk. Rios admits it took him some time to come around to the idea of giving up the collection, and Clausen said it took a few years to find a home for the materials, which together comprised nearly 800 cardboard banker’s boxes of material.
The Escondido library and UC San Diego turned down the collection because they lacked the space and resources to process it. But in 2017, they found a willing partner in Jennifer Fabbri, dean of the library at Cal State San Marcos.
After she was hired at the university in 2015, Fabbri said one of her first priorities was to create a special collections department at the library. The first collection she secured was the business archives of the Ecke family, who made locally grown poinsettias the national plant of Christmas. The second was the “Brewchive,” an ongoing historical collection of San Diego’s craft beer industry. The Rios collection is the department’s third major collection.
It took Fabbri a year to obtain funding to take in and process the Rios collection, but in April 2018, the negatives — which filled a large truck — arrived at the university. Fabbri said the Dan Rios Photographic Negative Collection is a treasure that will continue to grow in value as the years pass.
“From our scope, it’s one of the pre-eminent collections we will get in terms of its size, time period and its images, which are so important in envisioning what has happened in this region over the years,” Fabbri said. “When you think 100 years in the future, this will be a rich resource for our students and the community.”
Visintainer said that while all of the negatives will be cataloged and cross-referenced, it’s not financially feasible to digitize every image. Instead, negatives will be digitized in photographic form on request at no charge. In order to support the long-term use of the Rios collection, the university is hosting a private fundraiser to announce the collection on April 18. Donors are needed at the $100, $200 and $500 level. For information on the event, call Elizabeth Canavan at (760) 750-4031.