NORTH COUNTY — 

Dan Rios, a longtime North County newspaper photographer who donated his 1 million-image collection to Cal State San Marcos in 2018, died Sept. 6 at his home in Escondido. He was 84.

From 1968 to 2001, Rios shot roughly 43,000 assignments for the Times-Advocate and North County Times newspapers, ranging from wildfires to U.S. presidential visits to murder trials. Sean Visintainer, head of special collections at CSUSM, described the vast collection of image negatives as “an exceedingly important” chronicle of the region’s people, places and historical events.

Over the past eight years, Rios battled kidney failure with thrice-weekly dialysis treatments. Three weeks ago, he chose to end treatments and enter hospice care. Theresa Rios, his wife of 42 years, said that in her husband’s dying weeks, he hired workers to complete an unfinished home remodeling project to ensure that nothing was left undone when he died.

“He was very good to me, and he was a good man,” she said. “I loved the way he always kept his word on anything he promised me to the end.”

Born April 10, 1939, 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 had 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 returned to school to earn 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 had been admiring at a nearby Sears and enrolled in a photography class at City College. At 26, he knew instantly that he had found his life’s calling.

“I loved everything about it,” he told the Union-Tribune in 2020. “I loved shooting; I loved working in the darkroom. I’d buy 100-foot rolls of film and go through them so fast. I’d spend eight or nine hours a day in the darkroom without even realizing how much time had passed. It was so much fun.”

His college photography teacher helped him get a job taking 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-and-white photos.

As chief photographer at the T-A, 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. He retired in 2001.

Among the many images he captured during his career were visits to the region by several U.S. presidents, wildfires, flash floods, courtroom trials, sailings of the Star of India, Chargers games, animal births at what’s now the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and the opening of the Coronado bridge. Asked in 2020 to pick a favorite image, Rios said he couldn’t choose because he loved them all.

Retired marketing manager Laurie Brindle, who worked with Rios at the T-A and North County Times, said she remembers him as someone so full of life, laughter and joy that “you couldn’t help but smile when you saw him. He was just the greatest guy, so much fun to work with. He lit up the room. And he was such a good photographer because he was so sensitive to the people he captured on film.”

Rios began storing the newspapers’ negative archives at his home in 1977 when T-A editors decided to throw them out to make room for a newsroom expansion. He credits his college photography teacher with instilling in him the value of the archive, saying: “Your negatives are the most important thing you have. Don’t sell them, don’t give them away and don’t ever lose them.”

Around 2012, a group of Escondido historians affiliated with Escondido Library’s archive center, The Pioneer Room, began encouraging Rios to find a permanent and public home for the negatives, which at the time were stored in nearly 800 cardboard banker’s boxes in his garage.

In 2017, he began working with the Special Collections staff at CSUSM on a plan to donate his archive and work with the staff to help catalog the images. Over the past several years, and with the help of the public, the images have been logged and identified, and those spreadsheets are in the process of being uploaded online. Only 1 percent of the images themselves have been digitized so far, but the online database can be used to request images in the collection at archivesearch.csusm.edu/repositories/3/resources/8.

“Dan and his family were kind enough to donate us the copyright, so the images are freely available to the public for nonprofit education purposes without charge,” Visitainer said. “It’s really a great public good that Dan left North County. We’re happy Dan thought of us and we were able to make it available.”

Besides photography, Rios was also an active gardener and furniture-builder.

Rios is survived by his wife Theresa, his three children and Theresa’s four children, as well as many many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He was pre-deceased by one son. Rios’ remains were cremated at his request. His family is planning a private memorial.

pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com