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