Longtime Tri-City Herald photographer and darkroom manager dies

Dorothy Adcock, a longtime darkroom manager and award-winning photographer for the Tri-City Herald, died this week in Kennewick.

She was 93.

Adcock was born in Grandview and graduated from Grandview High. She married Olen Adcock, and the couple lived in Hawaii while he served in the military.

When they returned to Eastern Washington, they purchased a home near the Tri-City Herald offices in downtown Kennewick.

He went to work in the printing department and she took a job in photography, initially joining the paper in 1974.

She interrupted her career at the Herald to raise her two sons, Ken and Gary, along with two nephews, Ron Gilmore and Bobby Lewis.

Gary Adcock said she was an involved mom who followed the four boys through their exhaustive sports careers.

“We kept her pretty busy,” he said.

She rejoined the paper when the boys were older. Colleagues remember her as a hard and uncomplaining worker at a time when photography involved long hours in chemical-filled dark rooms.

“She worked for the Herald in the earlier years when photography wasn’t as refined as it is today. Her hands were in chemicals every day,” remembered Wanda Briggs, a retired Herald journalist.

Adcock was an award winning photographer, collecting honors from both the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Press Association.

In 1995, a year before she retired, the Herald credited Adcock with quick-thinking when the Department of Energy demolished a structure that once supplied water for D Reactor at the Hanford site. Media from around the region flocked to record the moment, but it happened so fast Adcock was the only one who got her shot.

Television crews had to use images from a camera Boeing Computer Services kept running through the implosion, according to Herald archives.

In 1996, the year she retired, Adcock won first and third place for feature photography and second place for news photography in the Washington Press Association’s annual awards, competing against photographers from daily newspapers across the state.

Jack Briggs, who was publisher during Adcock’s tenure, joked she should have won an award for working in the confines of the dark room for so many years.

“She was a dependable, hardworking, pleasant person to be around,” he said.

In retirement, Adcock bought an RV and spent her winters in Arizona until she was no longer able to make the trip, her son said.

Mueller’s Tri-Cities Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.

This story was originally published March 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM.