Photographer Gary Haynes shot everything from civil rights protests to presidential inaugurations, and the World Series to the Summer Olympics. He also photographed the likes of Nikita Khrushchev, Martin Luther King Jr., and Frank Sinatra. Named the first national photo editor for the New York Times in 1969, Haynes then spent 20 years as assistant managing editor for photos and graphics at the Philadelphia Inquirer. But his most memorable years, he says, were spent with United Press International, where he worked as a photographer from 1958 to 1969.

Today, Haynes lives a quiet life in rural Oregon, Ill., USA. He joined the Rotary Club of Oregon three years ago – something he never expected to do. “I’ve never been a joiner,” he says. “But I wanted to get to know people when we moved here. The Oregon club is a diverse group, a splendid cross-section of the town’s citizens,” he adds. He has even donated time to shooting events such as the club’s Angel Ball fundraiser.

Haynes also completed a book, Picture This! The Inside Story and Classic Photos of UPI Newspictures, convincing Bill Gates to donate the photos and Walter Cronkite, a former “Unipresser,” to pen the foreword. “The broadcast years were the glamour years,” Cronkite writes. “But I still count the experience with newspapers and particularly  United Press as the golden years.”

Dateline: anywhere in the world • By Gary Haynes

At 43, John F. Kennedy became the youngest U.S. president. Despite the chief executive’s youth, his office featured a rocking chair – something normally associated with older people. The world would later learn that he used it because he had a painfully bad back.

In 1963, Kennedy became the youngest president to die in office. When he was pronounced dead in Dallas, I was at the United Press International (UPI) Atlanta bureau. I was soon heading to Washington, D.C., with just the clothes I was wearing.

On the way to a news scene, photographers try to visualize picture possibilities. I’d been in the Oval Office and believed that a photo of the empty office, with the rocking chair that belonged to the slain president, would be touching and symbolic.

By the time I reached the White House, I realized that our democracy had kept the machine moving. The nation had a new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who’d just been sworn in aboard Air Force One, then en route back to Washington with his predecessor’s body and widow, Jacqueline. And the office had been refurnished.

A light rain fell as I rushed up to the White House and found a porter at a side door, moving everything across the street for storage in the first Executive Office Building. I asked him where “the man’s” chair was, and he pointed down the hall. He agreed to signal me just before he moved the chair.

I went around to the front of the White House, by now populated by at least a hundred of the world’s best photographers, and I put my camera bag down near another UPI photographer. I took just one camera  and wandered away from the crowd so I could keep an eye on the side door.

The porter’s high sign came. I meandered into position just before he wheeled the chair across the rain-slicked street. The photo captured a dreary moment at that sad time, as the chair that had brought comfort to a great champion of civil rights was pushed into storage. The picture ran full page in several major newspapers.

On the front lines: Being a news-service photographer was a dream job – if you didn’t look too closely at your pay stub. For most of us, it was our first photography job. UPI took a chance on us, and we worked cheap, but we got to do things that most newspaper photographers never do in an entire career. We were all 20 or 30 years old, many of us from small towns in the Midwest. Suddenly, we were at the world’s news fronts, meeting people we otherwise would’ve never met, going places we most surely would’ve never visited, and even getting shot at by people who didn’t know us.

You’d see our pictures in the newspaper, but you never knew what gyrations we went through to produce and deliver those pictures. Taking them was often the easiest part.

Most of the time, we worked alone, away from a bureau. We had to cover an event, leave at the risk of missing something better, and get somewhere to process, edit, print, caption, and transmit the pictures. We fought the clock and each other, knowing that somewhere in the world, almost every minute, our customers were on deadline.

The “darkroom” was most likely a temporary operation that we cobbled together in advance: a room that could be made dark, with running water, electricity, and a phone. UPI worked out of hotel rooms, friendly local newspapers, public restrooms, and mobile homes parked near pay phones. I once transmitted from a screening room at Paramount Studios.

Converting a hotel room into a photo operation had its amusing moments. An upscale New Orleans Hyatt room was transformed into two darkrooms using heavy, black plastic sheets gaffer-taped floor-to-ceiling over all the windows and door openings, with  extension cords draped everywhere – to safelights, a film dryer, a print dryer, and a transmitter. The maid let herself in the first night to turn down the bed and leave chocolates on the pillows. We can’t know what went through her mind, but for the rest of our time there, she left our clean towels in the hall and pushed our chocolates under the door.

 Election results: Editors around the world judged you only by your work. “Play reports” came in like election results to UPI and Associated Press (AP) headquarters in New York. By choosing one of the competing pictures – UPI’s or AP’s – they had “voted” for that day’s best.

The two major news services slugged it out for more than 30 years in a toe-to-toe battle to get the best stories and photos of world news events to clients first. We operated, in today’s lingo, 24/7, with no holidays. We had 6,000 employees and 200 bureaus in 100 countries. UPI was purchased in 2000 by News World Communications, owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.

In the daily frenzy to process, print, and transmit pictures in the field and then rush both film and prints to New York, where they could be resold, most UPI photographers kept no copies. Most of us have fewer than two dozen prints of our work, despite having spent a decade or more shooting thousands of photos.

All of our UPI film and negatives – more than 11.5 million pictures – are now owned by a Bill Gates company, Corbis, and are stored for posterity in a humidity- and temperature-controlled cave near rural Butler, Pa., USA. Gates took pity on me after I wrote to him in 2003, pointing out that two other Unipressers had recently published books about UPI, but the authors couldn’t afford to pay him the minimum $200 for each picture. He gave me an OK to comb the UPI archive and waived the fees. (Thanks, Bill!) The project has been a labor of love and a tribute to my former colleagues. For many, this is the first time they’ve received a photo credit for their work at UPI.

My book contains a highly personal sampling that only hints at the breadth and depth of the collection and the talent that, for more than 30 years, characterized the photography of UPI.