The thrill of the chase, capturing the moment and preserving history in real time.
Thane McIntosh was a master at positioning himself in the right place at the important moments, snapping image after image and propelling them into the pages of The San Diego Union-Tribune and its predecessors.
He was outside the U.S. Grant Hotel when John F. Kennedy campaigned in the waning days of the 1960 presidential election.
He was inside the Sports Arena for The Fight, the heavyweight championship bout between Muhammad Ali and Ken Norton back in 1973.
And there he was on the field at Jack Murphy Stadium in 1984, when the San Diego Padres rallied late to beat the Chicago Cubs and clinch their first National League pennant.
McIntosh, who built a career behind the lens and mentored dozens of younger news photographers along the way, always managed to find the right angles.
The longtime journalist who stitched together a career in the field, in the office and inside the classroom, died last Saturday after complications from a fall at his Spring Valley home. He was 90.
“He would come home smelling like photo-developing fluid,” said his son, Ian McIntosh. “Sometimes he would come home smelling like smoke when he had been out covering brush fires.”
McIntosh said his father always appreciated his role as a witness to history.
“The importance of the event he was covering, he could sense it,” he remembered. “When he took the pictures of JFK, he felt honored to be there.”
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McIntosh was born in tiny Ajo, Ariz., in 1934, the son of an electrician. But the family moved to California when McIntosh was a boy, and he grew up in the small farming community of Imperial.
He moved west to San Diego County in the 1950s and began taking classes at what was then called San Diego State College.
By 1956, he had snagged a job as a wirephoto operator, cultivating images sent from around the world to the Union and Tribune — separate newspapers that shared an owner but competed mightily over the news of the day.
McIntosh was drafted into the U.S. Army and left his newspaper job behind, but only briefly.
He served two years as a company clerk, the go-to records and inventory guy, mostly at Fort Huachuca in his home state of Arizona. He was grateful when the newspapers hired him back after he had completed his military service.
Before migrating west to San Diego, McIntosh graduated from Imperial Valley High School and met Judy Raimond, the daughter of another family from Imperial. The couple married in 1962.
“It wasn’t really a blind date, but one family met the other family,” Ian McIntosh said. “Imperial is a small town now, but back then it was really small.”
The newlyweds settled in Spring Valley, and soon had children. Ian McIntosh remembers tagging along when his father shot the Chargers football games or the Padres team photos.
He was once invited to throw out the first pitch at a Padres home game.
By the 1970s, McIntosh was a standout photographer and family man. But he was so passionate about his work that he began teaching photojournalism at his alma mater, which by then had rebranded as San Diego State University.
“He was like a god to us,” said Charles Landon, one of McIntosh’s early students who later carved out a more than four-decade career in television news.
“We were in awe,” Landon said. “He basically said ‘Go for it. You can do it.’ A great number of people who had that class went on to great success in the industry.”
John Gibbins also studied under McIntosh at San Diego State.
“Sometimes he’d be a few minutes late because he’d been at work and on a deadline,” he said of his instructor. “He’d show us pictures he took from that day.”
Gibbins said he regularly hung around after class to talk shop with McIntosh. One night, he told Gibbins about an opening in the photo shop of a twice-weekly paper in Pacific Beach and encouraged him to apply.
He got the job. Two years later, Gibbins was hired at the Union and Tribune, which shared a photography staff before the papers merged in 1992. The photo team was prohibited from discussing their assignments with reporters, who constantly strove to one-up their rivals.
Once Gibbins joined the staff, he worked under his old professor until McIntosh retired in 1997. He put together his own 40-year-plus career that closed out early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Thane was always learning, always teaching,” Gibbins said. “He covered everything, and he would get sent to a lot of the big jobs. He was very talented technically, creatively, and he was good with people.”
After McIntosh retired in the mid-1990s, he turned his attention to traveling and tending more to his wife and family. Judy is an avid birdwatcher, and McIntosh often accompanied her on tours to photograph different species.
He was hospitalized last month after stumbling while mowing his lawn but was able to return home and enter hospice care before his death.
McIntosh is survived by his wife, Judy McIntosh of Spring Valley; his son, Ian McIntosh of Spring Valley; and four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his daughter, Jennifer Birch of Spring Valley.
A celebration of life was being planned, likely sometime next month.
