As the 1984-85 yearbook Photo Editor, I kept the binder that had every negative shot for the 1985 Argos, the Abbot Pennings yearbook. I'm not sure what happened to all the other years, but I don't throw things like that away. Especially since I spent so much time developing all the negatives and printing the photos we used in that book.
The photos we used in that yearbook were perhaps 10 percent of the photos that were taking. It took 4-5 minutes in a darkroom for every print we decided to make. Between that and the normal vagaries of being a high school senior, I was a busy guy. I spent a lot of time in the darkroom in the basement of the Band Hall. I had a boombox to listen to tunes and comedy. And I had a key. As it turns out, that was a good place to stash a cooler of beer before the weekend.
Anyhow, it is the future now, and there is no need to sit in a dark room with stinky chemicals to turn a negative into an image. I have a scanner that can render 10 negatives in a batch. It takes some time, but I can get a glass of wine, watch a show or do some work, and then come back to see what I got.
Also, in the rush to make the yearbook prints, there was often no time to do a test strip. I'd squint at the negative and guess at how many seconds I needed to expose it. I was pretty good at it, but sometimes the exposure wouldn't be ideal and I'd run with it anyway. So the scanned images are higher quality and resolution that what you will find in the yearbook.
When I get a good batch, I have shared them on facebook, so you may have seen some of these before. I'd say I've shared about 15%, scanned about 60% and still have some more to go. I don't know if this will interest anyone but my '85 Squire brothers and maybe the '85 Sojoac sisters, but here we go. I will try to complete this in 2021 for our Covid-delayed 35th/36th reunion, but no guarantees!
August 1984 - Freshman Orientation and Opening Mass
- 1985 was the 25th graduating class of Abbot Pennings, so we designated it a 25th Anniversary edition. As it turns out, I discovered that there are ‘Argoses’ (Argi?) going back to at least the 1950s for St. Norbert High School. For the inside jackets, we found an aerial photo of DePere taken around 1960 and a contemporary 1985-ish one to compare. I am scanning this in 2010, which would have been the school’s fiftieth year had it survived.
- We copied the Senior photo idea from the yearbook of 1982, our freshman year. We set it up to have a candid shot of each senior and then put their formal portrait in an insert. It worked pretty well, but it was a pain to get a good candid shot of everyone. Most turned out alright though.
- I only could find three major typos in this yearbook. On page 14 we identified Jeff LeMoine as his brother, Greg. On page 24, there is a cool, 25-year-old rendering of Mr. Groves (we asked all the teachers to submit 25yo photos and most did) that was printed upside down (Jostens’ mistake in printing I believe.) And on page 88, we identified an adult talking to the tennis team, as Coach Brimmer. It was not Mr. Brimmer but I don’t know who it was. There may be a few more, but not bad for the days before online editing. (Fish and Dan Lunney had to arrange these all by hand and send them out to a printer.)
- Although I took, developed and printed just about every photo in this book, my two favorites were taken by others. Steven’s shot of the audience at the talent show (page 60) was just a joke, but turned out great. And there is a picture of me telling Brian Oettinger not to take my picture on page 7. I’m glad he did though because I like the shot, especially how Steven is analyzing his returned grade in the background. I got some good ones too, and stuck some of my favorites on the last 3 pages behind the ads. I've always been partial to big, candid crowd shots 1, 2, 3. (More scans from the 1985 Argos Negative files are on the Photo page of the www.abbotpennings.com site.)
- I always thought Fish’s sense of humor was under-appreciated and was glad to see it well represented in the captions of this book. “Faculty cheer for Mr. O’Connell, students cheer for car fire.” on page 57 is one of my favorites.
- There was a lot of editorial freedom in the Lance (APHS Newspaper) and the Argos. Although I’m a bit embarrassed by some of our jokes now, where better to push some limits in a safe environment. My brother, Jon Elfner '88, a high school teacher in Illinois is amazed by how much we got away with back then. One example of this is how many beer cans we snuck into the background of these photos!
No comments:
Post a Comment