He kept lights — and all things electric — on at newspaper

Readers of The New York Times know the names of White House reporters and foreign correspondents. Podcast hosts, newsletter writers and Opinion columnists become as familiar as relatives.

But few readers know the names of the people behind the scenes who make The Times possible. One of them died last month. His name was Donald Dimmock, and he worked for The Times for 33 years, much of that time as the general foreman for the electric department. Dimmock kept the lights on — along with everything else electric — for the production department, the newsroom and the rest of The Times’s building in Manhattan.

The most important part of Dimmock’s job was making sure the production equipment that printed the newspaper ran smoothly during the entire process, from the metal plate room to the loading docks. If something went wrong with one of the huge machines that printed the newspaper, Dimmock and his team of electricians had to fix it, and fast.

The work spanned day and night, weeks and weekends. Mailroom stackers, strapping machines, metal plate stamps, flickering bulbs — if it was plugged in, it required his attention.

Dimmock was there when The Times went digital in 1996, and he helped oversee the print newspaper’s transition to color in 1997. He saw the printing presses roll out front pages heralding historic moments: “Men Walk on Moon,” “Nixon Resigns,” “The Shuttle Explodes” and “Clinton Impeached.”

Through it all, he carried extra machine parts, just in case, and wore a crisp shirt and tie. Natasza Dimmock, his wife of 48 years, became so adept at cleaning ink-stained clothing that she opened a dry cleaning business.

Dimmock retired from The Times in 2001, but over the next two decades he regularly visited The Times’s printing plant in College Point, Queens, to check in on his friends and the machines he knew so well.

He lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a third-generation New Yorker and quintessential city dweller. He was a regular at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lincoln Center; he walked across Central Park as if it were his backyard, and in some ways, it was.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Dimmock’s union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local No. 3, assigned him to work at ground zero, where he climbed through the rubble and the smoldering ash to help bring the Verizon Building back online. The ruins were so hot that the rubber from his shoes melted. His doctors suspect that the exposure may have led to the cancer that killed him at 79.

The 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund paid for his care.

Dimmock was a man of deep and eclectic tastes; his passions included 17th-century furniture and 18th-century French ceramics. The Dimmocks’ apartment was packed with rows and piles of carefully sourced chairs and tables that were older than America itself. He knew the history of every piece, each one painstakingly researched and acquired from auction houses and estate sales.

In 2022, Dimmock was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.