Blessed Sacrament creates graduate photo CD

By KENNY KEANE, Globe staff reporter
July 17, 2003

As the saying goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Along those same lines, the alumni association at Blessed Sacrament Church in Sioux City believed that the photos of each graduating class from its school were worth preserving in a way that fit the times.

"We're always trying to do things to involve the alumni, and we knew that we had these pictures," said Krage Feste, head of the development committee at the church. "Rather than just storing them in the basement, we thought we'd get into the 21st century and update them. We knew that the best thing would be to put them on a disk to preserve them."

So the development committee made the decision to have these photos, along with the names of each Blessed Sacrament School graduate, put onto a CD. The disk includes the eighth-grade, graduating class photos from 1932 through the present with just two years missing - '34 and '35. It also has the names from 1931 through the present - again missing just '34 and '35.

The next step was finding someone to do the work. Fortunately for the committee, one of their members, John McCarthy, is a graphic designer who had the necessary equipment to complete such a task.

"Hour-wise it was about 20 hours - a lot of scanning," McCarthy said. "Depending on the quality of the photo to begin with, I adjusted each one to a certain degree as far as improving lightness, darkness and contrast. There were others that might have been printed on a textured paper with a bit of a pebble finish that I would have to slightly blur.

"So I guess all in all each photo needed some type of adjustment. The quality of some are much better than others just depending on the original copy."

McCarthy said Liz Rickert, the school's secretary, assisted him in compiling the names, which were entered into a Word document so that anyone could open it. The photo images are in JPEG format.

"It's very user-friendly. It's very easy to find the picture you want," McCarthy said. "For instance, it'll be '1932.jpg' and so on. So you'll have a long list of year JPEGS. You click on those, open it up and there's your picture. Then the names are the only Word document."

Feste said the CDs will be made available for those who want one. The committee has not finalized the price they will ask to purchase the CDs, but Feste said it will basically just be asking for a donation.

"We don't know if there's going to be a big interest or not," he said. "If we start getting people to want them, we will just make them. If we see that it's becoming a fairly popular thing, we'll make up a few in advance.

"If someone calls and wants one we can get one out to them within a matter of a couple days, or if they just want us to e-mail their class picture, we could do that."

Anyone interested in making a donation to purchase one of these CDs can contact the parish office at (712) 277-2949.

McCarthy said he believes this is a great idea because if anyone has ever been involved with just looking for pictures of their own family, a lot of times they are not very well organized.

"You have to dig for this or dig for that," he said. "Some of these are pictures that no one's every going to get a change to see otherwise unless they would go to the school. Even if they could get permission to dig through the files, it would still be very difficult.

"Here they are right at your fingertips. There's a lot of history fight there on one CD."