At age 84, Hill & Lake Press’s award-winning photojournalist Dorothy Childers concedes it may no longer be wise to climb seven foot ladders or slide down embankments to achieve the perfect angle.
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For over three decades Dorothy’s see-all lens has been present to record the people, places, and events of our extraordinary neighborhood. With this special retrospective edition, we say thank you for saving memories, chronicling changes, and preserving history for future Hill & Lake area citizens.
Jim Lenfestey, Hill & Lake Press (HLP) co-founder and longtime columnist, said with appreciation, “Dorothy’s photos are the eye-candy that gets people into a story.” And Tom Cook, recently retired Hill & Lake Press columnist of “Sand Upon the Waters” wonders “If Dorothy didn’t photograph it, did it really happen?”
Putting another perspective on it, Craig Wilson, editor-in-chief of HLP, reflects, “Every month I’m made aware of the importance of building community at a time of endemic rise of increased social isolation, crime, rise of social media and loss of local media. Dorothy’s photojournalism celebrates the normalcy of neighbors working and playing together.”
In the Beginning
In 1973, Roger and Dorothy Childers and their brood of five arrived here after Roger was transferred from Newark, New Jersey, to the Minneapolis Field Office of the FBI. Because the kids were promised their own rooms, a stately six-bedroom Tudor-style home at Humboldt and Mount Curve became home base. Dorothy found herself joining five PTAs at five different schools. Years later when mom-related duties relaxed, Dorothy looked to reconnect with an old love, the camera.
“Photography had always been a hobby,” Dorothy recalls. “In high school I took lots of pictures and made personal albums for friends.” A class at Metropolitan Community College rekindled the flame and led her to Film in the Cities (FITC) where she studied and volunteered in the community darkroom.
In 1988, Joyce Murphy, a friend, editor, and cartoonist for HLP, invited Dorothy to cover a memorial planting of daffodils at Lake of the Isles for Jeanette Rivera. As a teacher told the class, “You don’t have to go far to find interesting subjects to photograph. Look in your own neighborhood.” And for 34 years Dorothy has done just that. “This opportunity has been such a gift,” she says. “This neighborhood offers so much. We have beautiful nature, amazing architecture, major institutions that bring in world-famous artists and celebrities. And I got to be right in front with my camera.”
And Now What?
Dorothy describes herself as “a completionist.” You see it in her attention to detail, her choice of hobbies like sewing, chair caning, and reupholstering furniture, her lists and files and methodology. Is it attributable to being a coalminer’s daughter, brought up in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania? She credits her father and mother, a seamstress, for instilling a strong work ethic. In notes for a show at the Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, Wisconsin, she wrote “This town has a lot to do with who I am, and I felt a need to share this with my children and grandchildren.”
Also, no conversation goes without a salute to her high school business teacher, Miss Helen Carroll, who gave her the skills and confidence at age seventeen to leave for a job with the FBI in Washington D.C., where she met and married a handsome Marine 66 years ago.
Now the task at hand is documenting all the work she’s done for HLP, a guesstimate of 1,500 published photographs. All 34 years of them are waiting for inclusion in the Special Collections Department of the Hennepin County Central Library, where they will be digitized and placed on their website. It will be named “The Dorothy Childers Collection.”
Thank you for your years of service and bearing witness and documenting the late 20th century and early 21st century Hill & Lake community, Dorothy. You have bestowed upon us a great treasure that will endure for generations.
