Veteran Spokesman-Review Photographer Jim Shelton Dies

Jim Shelton, an award-winning newspaper photographer who captured the face of the Inland Northwest for more than three decades, died Tuesday after a 10-year battle with leukemia.

Shelton, 68, was a quiet man whose passion for photographs caught the decisive moments of some of the region’s great tragedies and simple joys.

He started taking photos as a 9-year-old boy when his mother bought him a small Kodak camera.

“I kind of fell in love with images,” Shelton said 50 years later when he retired from The Spokesman-Review and Spokane Chronicle.

After serving in the military during the Korean War, Shelton returned to his native Spokane for what he assumed would be a brief stay. He wanted to make enough money to go to Alaska where he planned to have a cabin, a seaplane and a pet wolf.

He didn’t make it that far north.

But his passion for the outdoors stayed alive with frequent trips to two of his favorite places, Priest Lake and Glacier National Park.

Hired to develop film for The Spokesman-Review in 1952, he became a newspaper photographer one day when he was handed a camera and some flashbulbs. Go to a local track meet and take a picture, he was told.

He took one picture, causing his boss to wonder about his thinking until the picture was developed and revealed the meet’s decisive moment - one sprinter inching across the finish line ahead of other runners.

Shelton photographed floods, fires, mine cave-ins and the Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption.

“I’ve been on all sorts of stories where people have lost their homes or their children,” he said once. “It never upset me at the time because I was looking through the camera. But later, I’d get shaken up realizing what I’d seen.”

Some of his favorite pictures featured special moments with people. One classic Shelton photo is of Mindy, a young deaf girl with a new device that allowed her to hear for the first time.

Shelton may have taken the most famous photograph that never was published by The Spokesman-Review.

Assigned to take a picture of jazz great Louis Armstrong, Shelton went to the trumpeter’s hotel room and was told Armstrong couldn’t talk because he was taking a bath. But Armstrong shouted for him to come in and Shelton did.

“I asked him if he’d pose in the bubble bath with his trumpet,” Shelton recalled. “I didn’t think he’d go for it, but he did.”

Shelton brought the picture back to his editors, who refused to publish a picture of a man in a bathtub.

Years later, when a new photo editor heard the story and wanted to publish the picture, the negative had been thrown away and the photograph mislaid.

Laid-back and quiet, Shelton nonetheless was famous for getting to news events faster than any other photographer in town. He cruised the city’s streets and back roads for pictures, listening to a police radio scanner.

He was first on the scene of a 1981 traffic accident when a car veered into the Spokane River and a struggling woman was pulled from the water by police.

The woman was defense attorney Julie Twyford, whose notorious client Kevin Coe had just been sentenced to multiple life sentences in the South Hill rape case.

The newspaper did publish that picture, prompting criticism from the city’s legal community but strong support from readers in general.

When leukemia forced Shelton to retire in 1987, he said he was proud of his craft. “It’s a thrill to get paid for something you like to do.”

Shelton is survived by his wife, Judy; son, Jim, of Spokane; two sisters, four nephews and two nieces. Memorial services are pending.

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