© Jim Ryder

© Jim Ryder

Interview transcript,
by Lew and Gail Steiger

Career Path

Interviewer: If we could get from you just a little background info, like where'd you grow up, a teeny bit of your circumstances.

Dykinga: Okay. I was born the son of a poor black sharecropper ... (laughter) Okay, I was born in Chicago — outside of Chicago, actually — and was there 'til I came to Arizona, went to high school there, did a little bit of college and a little bit of working for the Chicago Tribune. Then I went to college and [worked at] the Tribune at the same time, so I was getting a formal education in two different ways. And then I went to work for the [Chicago]Sun-Times, and then I went back to the Tribune. I won a Pulitzer at the Sun-Times, then I went back to the Tribune as management as the photo editor. And then I quit, to kind of go find myself (chuckles) and instead they gave me a leave of absence, and I went west and discovered Arizona in about 1972. And I named the state "Arizona." (laughter)

Interviewer: So how'd you first get interested in photography?

Dykinga: I started off in high school, takin' pictures for the school newspaper, basically, 'cause my brother took pictures and I got one of his cameras. And I won a Look magazine photo contest when I was, I think, a sophomore in high school — which was really pretty neat, for a little kid. And that sort of put a stamp on me

Interviewer: Tell us about the contest. You won it?!

Dykinga: Yeah. Well, I won a category, I got a "first". It was a football picture, nothing really that good. I look back at it now and it was just terrible, but back then it was a big deal. I had really gotten into photography to make money. I was gonna process film (laughs) and make money. Boy! Did I have a lot to learn.

Interviewer: In junior high?

Dykinga: No, high school.

Yeah. So then I worked for the school newspaper, and that leads me into the thing about "your disabilities becoming your benefit." You know? Because back then they didn't really test you that much. And I had a problem reading in high school, and so I really was drawn to visual publications, like [National] Geographic. I was probably the only kid that looked at Geographic not for the naked breasts, but I really got into the visuals of it. So it was a way to push me towards communicating visually — my inability to read. I would always do well on tests, but I never finished the test, so therefore I didn't do well. So nowadays, you know, they find out that I'm left-handed, pretty well dyslexic. If I type things, it's all inverted, which are all great attributes for somebody to choose four-by-five landscape. So it turned into a real boon.

Interviewer: So you were gonna process film to make money. You won this contest...

Dykinga: It was published, so I kinda had a reputation at a camera store as a kid who knew what he was doing. And a job came up from a guy that took pictures of celebrities at O'Hare Airport. Actually, back then, it was Midway Airport. He wanted me to go out and photograph celebrities. So I did that for a while. Anyway, I don't know if I told you guys, I can remember the day that Kennedy was shot. I was photographing Andy Williams at the airport. Actually, I told him the president had been shot. Whew! You can always remember that date. So I did that for a couple of years, and then my images or pictures — snaps — started making their way into local newspapers. So again, your reputation kinda is built that way.

Interviewer: Now, you're outta high school by then?

Dykinga: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm out of high school. I'm like about eighteen.

Interviewer: Aside from Andy Williams, were there any celebrities that leaped out?

Dykinga: I photographed Barry Goldwater a lot. It turns out Barry Goldwater was a friend of my old boss, a guy named Mike Rotunno, who is, in himself, pretty famous. He was a good friend of Harry Truman's, and people like that. But Goldwater used to always stop in his office and raise hell with him. So I photographed him a few times. Photographed Nixon a few times. You know, pretty much anybody who passed through the airport. Back in those days you photographed celebrities in such a way that there was an American Airlines tail of an airplane in the background. Every time it would appear in the paper, [Mike] would make money from the different airlines, as a way of publicizing. He was hired by the publicity department. And it sounds like a scam, but it was actually legitimate in a sense. So any of these pictures of Howard Hughes or any of these guys comin' off these ramps that were in Chicago, they were shot by Mike Rotunno, and he got paid from the airlines.

Interviewer: And he just had a spot where he lined it up so you'd see ...

Dykinga: No, no, you just did that in the composition. I mean, it was always on the run. But sometimes it was before jetways, you know, and they had ladders and things like that. But it was interesting.

He also shot aerial photos, so I started taking aerial photos too. Some of the pictures made their way into the newspapers, so you gained a little bit of a profile that way.

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