I had the bright idea of making an online photo gallery with 100 images – one for each year of the 100 years Homecoming at the University of Arizona. The first stop: The film archives in our own building.
The °µÍø³Ô¹Ï has film archives back to the early 1970s. The Star acquired the °µÍø³Ô¹Ï Citizen film archives after it closed in 2009. The Citizen files date back to the early 1950s.
I found homecoming event photos as old as 1954 in the Citizen archives. They covered it reliably until early 1970s. There was a gap in the mid-70s where I could not find any photos taken by either newspaper. But the Star covered it every year from the 1980s to present. I had to edit old black and white and color film, then scan the selected images as JPEG files to make the digital photo gallery. After about 1995, Star photos are in digital form in our Merlin archive system. The newspaper switched to digital cameras in the late 1990s.
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But what about 1914 to 1953? I turned first former Star staffer Jaynelle Ramon to the Arizona Alumni Association. She sent several old photos pointed me to a great timeline page with key facts on 100 years of homecoming at .Ìý
Then I sought help from Maurita Baldock, assistant librarian and archivist at the University of Arizona Special Collections. They have a wonderful digital repository of all UA yearbooks at . That's what really saved me. It was a gold mine of fun observations and tidbits about games and events. Photographer Fred Araiza was able to copy some original photos at Special Collections, but many lack key information like the year they were taken. So, I also extracted several photos from the digitized yearbooks. Those images helped with the early years and the aforementioned gaps in the Star and Citizen film archives.
