ZAMA YEARBOOKS ONLINE

Putting together this site with all the Zama yearbooks has been almost a 30 year effort. I have had Extraordinary help by Carolyn Zeigler (RIP) who tirelessly copied most of the books at her library where she was librarian by day, and camp zama yearbook copier at night. She spent many years laboring over it, copying one section and sending it to me, where I would erase the signatures and comments and try to put them in order that was the original book. It was a learning process. (It took us almost 6 months to scan/transfer/edit/upload a single book with 14.4k dialup MODEMS :)  And since dial up was so slow, we made the pictures small for folks to be able to read at a reasonable rate. We did this yearbook site from dial up modems, to the 1-2 megabit cable days. Now I have 450 megabits download it would be easy to download big pictures of all the yearbooks.  

When we started, it took  months to put together one yearbook.   Also, most people had 640x480 CRT displays and we sized the photos accordingly, and of course as the years went by, screen sizes got bigger, which is why as you go higher in year, the bigger the photos. Carolyn, very unfortunately departed unexpectedly and way too early and I lost a dear friend. We had emailed weekly and talked on the phone for almost 20 years and she was gone (RIP).

Some time after that, I contacted the yearbook staff and they sent several copies of the books to me, but only up to 2010 so that is where it ends now. So, this site was built by hand, receiving books from alumni that had them, Carolyn scanning them and sending them to me to whitewash, resize and renumber to make a ‘book’ from them. And that seemed like a never-ending task.

After 2000, students and ZAHS staff would email me scanned yearbooks which I gratefully accepted. Thanks.

And disaster struck – my site was wiped by the ISP owners. I have multiple backups, of course, but I had always wanted to go back and use ONE single program for presentation of the books – paging through them etc. never got around to it – so I am going to do it on the new site here.

So give thanks to dearly departed Carolyn Zeigler for all her help, and a few others that copied their books and sent them to me – I will add their names to each book as I get it posted. It save me a lot of work getting a softcopy – a rare pleasant surprise.

Rick pemble ‘72 rick.pemble@outlook.com



2021 Update:

Due to unforseen circumstances, the rebuild of the site was delayed. A volunteer rebuilt the site with it's original look and feel, but with reduced complexity. The first prototype was completed in late 2020. After additional unforseen delays, the rebuild was completed in early 2021, and testing began shortly thereafter, but was never quite completed. It became apparent that while the rebuild helped, there were some yearbooks that could not be recoverd from the earlier ISP issue and would not be rebuildable. Those are listed on the main page as being not available.

At this point, it also became necessary to request that ZAA take over hosting of the site and seeking volunteers to help with testing, maintenance, and general upkeep of the site in a more sustainable way. ZAA has graciously accepted the request, and has been actively seeking assistance in this area, particularly in helping obtain yearbooks or better yet, digital images of yearbook pages.

If you would like to help with the upkeep and maintenance of the site and have HTML, CSS, and javascript skills, please contact ZAA leadership.

If you would like to help by providing page scans from the missing yearbooks, all we would request you do is scan the fron and back covers, and all of the pages separately. Name the image files in the following fashion:

  1. Front Yearbook Cover: 0.jpg
  2. Name each image file of each page inside the yearbook sequentially starting at 2.jpg, 3.jpg, 4.jpg, and so on, progressing thru the last page and back cover of the yearbook
  3. Send the image files via whatever means you can. We are working to build in a file upload feature, it will hopefully be available soon. Until then, please coordinate with ZAA leadership or Zamayearbooks.com team.

That's it! The volunteer helpers will take care of it from there! At least, that's the plan for now. It will take some time to get this all into place, but it should happen sometime this year! Thanks for your continued patience and support over the years!