EVERETT, WA (August 18, 2008) – Retired Everett Herald photographer Jim Leo, 73, an NPPA member since 1955, died on August 13 just one day after heart surgery, the Herald reports.
Leo spent 47 years working for the Herald, including 38 years as a photographer. He went to work for the newspaper as a teenager in 1950 as a carrier, moved to the mailroom in 1952 where his job for more than two years was to take every copy of the paper off the conveyor belt on the printing press, and after graduating high school in 1954 he went to work in the circulation department. In 1959 he fulfilled a childhood dream by becoming a newspaper photographer when he joined the Herald's photo staff.
(Hear Jim Leo talk about photojournalism in a video here).
Leo's son, Jeff, followed in his father's footsteps and is a newspaper photographer for the Newnan Times-Herald in southern Georgia. The veteran photographer is also survived by his wife, Connie Rae, and a daughter, Lori. The Herald reports that the Leos were married 45 years, and that Jeff went to his first spot news event as an infant in his mother's arms when the accompanied his father to a breaking-news story.
A story in the Herald recounts how Leo was known to be a voracious chaser of spot news, always carrying a police scanner and his cameras and frequently beating police and firefighters to the scene. He is also remembered for helping the police learn how to take photographs of accident and crime scenes, and for putting down his camera to help carry a stretcher when rescue workers needed a helping hand.
When he retired, Leo donated historical photographs to a local search and rescue group for the dedication of their new operations center, the Herald says, as well as providing photographs for the 1992 book "The Fire Boys" written by Charles Henderson, which covered 100 years of Everett firefighting.
On the Herald's Web site, where readers posted comments at the end of the story about Leo's death, Dave DeMarco wrote: "Just weeks ago Jim was out photographing the Fourth of July parade, and even more recently standing on the corner of Hewitt and Rockefeller, camera in one hand and scanner in the other, waiting to shoot some action. ... In is some small consolation knowing that he lived his dream without pause to the very end."
A memorial service is planned for Tuesday, and afterwards Leo's casket will be driven to the Evergreen Cemetery-Mausoleum in an antique fire truck that served the area in the 1940s.
