Zama American High School Yearbooks
I hope you enjoy looking at the ZAHS yearbooks. This is a complete set of yearbooks from the very first edition in 1959 to 2000 (with some gaps that you can help fill -- 1987 and 1998 are still missing).
The navigation is simple. From the main menu, click on the yearbook cover and a new browser window will open with that year's front page.
On the bottom of each page is a 'index' link to take you to the album index. There are also navigation links to the next page or previous page on the bottom of each page.
Simply close the browser window when finished. The main index file remains open at all times.
When browsing a yearbook, each page shows two yearbook pages. These are thumbnails which are small representations of the actual page. Click on one of those yearbook pages and a single page will open. This page will probably be larger than your browser window and you may have to scroll around to see it all - but the detail will be there for you to read or see anything with the same clarity as the real book.
A little history of the ZAHS yearbooks online project:
This project is a culmination of many years of effort. It first started in 1999 when a classmate of mine asked me to copy some pages from one of my yearbooks because all of hers were destroyed in a house fire. I did and emailed them to her. I later decided to go ahead and copy the entire yearbook and put it online. Soon, others asked to see their yearbooks online, too. I only had 1969-1971 on hand so a plea for help was posted on the ZAHS bulletin board and soon, alumni from all over the world were sending in their yearbooks to be copied as a donation to this project (ZAHS yearbooks online).
It was an overwhelming task. Fortunately, I didn't do much of the copying. Carolyn Roenneburg Zeiger '66 volunteered to help and she scanned most all of the books and emailed the images to me. Her work was a daily task and including handling mailing the yearbooks back to those that sent them, as well as the scanning and emailing. Also, here scans were much better quality then mine, so I 'let' her rescan the ones I did. Her tireless effort was incredible.
From those raw files, jpeg crunching and resizing were done to make it compatible with most folks internet connection speeds, and the final photos were uploaded to the YAHOO picture site. Yahoo provided web space for free, and we soon ( after 6 months hard work!) had every year from 1959 to 1977 online.
Then Yahoo pulled a Yahoo on us. They got commercial, and the yearbooks were shown only in a small format that was hardly legible. Not only that, we had scanned pages individually not thinking about an electronic reconstruction of the books (page order from front to back, etc). It needed to be re-done. The yearbook online project was in shambles within a year 1/2 after all our work!
In June of 2002, I was preparing for the 2002 reunion in San Antonio. Designing and printing T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc, my wife came up with the idea of 'fixing' the online yearbooks. I thought this would be easy and set out to do it, not realizing how much work was really involved. The task was to reconstruct the yearbooks as accurately as possible as entire volumes, viewable with any internet browser on Windows, Macintosh, Unix, and whatever computers. The ability to peruse and navigate the entire book and be able to zoom in and print were also needed.
What a task. It took a while to find all the old original scans, and then the task of reconstructing each book began. Figuring out proper section sequence was sometimes a best guess, so if you see your book and something looks out of order -- sorry! it was the best I could do. Some books had a table of contents and it was easy. Most did not, and many didn't have page numbers or the page numbers were cut off when scanned. But, it got pulled together, and CDs of the complete collection of all yearbooks from 1959-1977 were available on CD.
During the reunion, I talked with George Mosier '71 about the need for a HUGE amount of online disk space (over 1.5 gig bytes !! --- or, aprox 2 CDs worth). George volunteered to provide the space needed. Shortly after we got home and set it up, the zamayearbooks site was online.
The collection continues to grow -- as of August, 2005 we have every volume with the exception of 1987 and 1998 - which we hope to be able to get soon.
In July of 2005, I installed a new server at a large data center in Tampa, Florida. This allowed me to put all the yearbooks onto a single server site, and provide much faster access.
Good old Spydercat - the original server for several zama sites (as well as his own, palmbayweather, etc) is now a resident on our newest server: teracafe.net (a joint venture by myself and my 15 year old son - which means I pay for it, he runs it)
Be sure to visit the unofficial ZAHS alumni website at www.zahsalumni.com that hosts alumni photos, old ZAMA pictures, and snapshots from the various reunions! Please email or send in your pictures to be published online to share with others!
enjoy
rick zahs '72
3-August-2005
Rick Pemble -- class of 1972
Carolyn Roenneburg Zeiger -- class of 1966
George Mosier -- class of 1971
Tristan Pemble -- class of 2008
A Spydercat Production
(If you want to know the weather in Palm Bay, Florida, or just to see the web cam looking out my front door, stop by www.palmbayweather.com -- another spydercat production)
IF YOU GOT HERE VIA A WEB SEARCH --- YOU MISSED THE MAIN ZAMA YEARBOOK PAGE -- CLICK BELOW TO GO THERE
A Spydercat Production