By: (AP) Valerie McKenzie, a photo technician for The Associated Press who had a hand in distributing the famed picture of Marines raising a flag on Iwo Jima during World War II, has died, her family said. She was 82.
McKenzie, whose AP career spanned more than 40 years, died Monday of brain cancer at Chesapeake Healthcare in Chesapeake, Va.
She was working in the wire service's Washington bureau when the Iwo Jima picture by Joe Rosenthal came in, her son, Robert Wayne Driskell, told The Star-Ledger of Newark. The photo, taken Feb. 23, 1945, won a Pulitzer Prize and became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial.
At that time, newspapers did not receive photos by computer and satellites. Technicians in Washington and other major bureaus would receive a negative transmitted by wire, then make prints that would be taken to newspapers by messenger or mail, said Hal Buell, the AP's retired head of photography.
AP State Photo Editor Tom Sheehan, who worked with McKenzie in Washington, said she had a great sense of humor and "took the tension out of an often very tension-filled job."
McKenzie began working for the AP in late 1944 on temporary assignments, and became a full-time employee in 1948, working in Newark, New York and Omaha, Neb., besides Washington. She retired in 1988.
It was in Omaha where she met Lynn Randolph McKenzie, who worked at the Omaha World-Herald and later worked at AP. They married in 1950. He died in 1990.
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