Over 50 years of New Richmond High School history now has a permanent digital home thanks to the efforts of one dedicated alumni.
Dennis Spurgeon, a New Richmond Alumni Association board member and 1966 NRHS graduate, has scanned approximately 75 hard copies of NERIHI yearbooks and made them available to alumni and the general public via the alumni association website.
For a $25 donation, alumni and their families can relive memories from their high school days via a database of PDF files created by Spurgeon, who attended the University of Cincinnati after graduation from New Richmond.
“Initially I was pre med and that didn’t work out for me,” Spurgeon said. “Too much calculus, too much German and all that other stuff. I went and got a business degree, and around the same time I got involved in computer stuff. It’s just kind of a natural thing for me.”
Spurgeon started a similar project for personal reasons but quickly realized he could use it to help his community as a whole.
“I had inherited all of these family photo albums, so I started looking around for a tool that I could use, that essentially I could scan photos and then share them with my family members so that they'd have a copy of the photo album,” Spurgeon said. “So I started scanning some of my old albums, including the yearbook of the years that I had in my library. I said, man, this would be a really good tool for the alumni association.”
The project got a boost from former New Richmond High School Principal Larry Graves, who made his personal archive of yearbooks available to Spurgeon for scanning.
“He had yearbooks from the time that he had started there,” Spurgeon said. “It was around 1974, I think, and he had yearbooks all the way through the year he retired. He was willing to share those with me. I'd go over to his house, grab four or five of them, bring them home and scan them.”
Spurgeon scans full pages at a time, but the app he uses allows him to break down each page by picture. That allowed him to create a senior photo for each class he’s scanned thus far. He also leveraged his time with the Kroger Company and his knowledge of database creation to aid the alumni association in building out a list of graduates.
“Every year, we’re buying new yearbooks to scan into the system too,” Spurgeon said. “We’ve been going backwards and trying to find yearbooks prior to when [Larry Graves] was principal. We’ve got all copies of New Richmond’s yearbook from 1954 to the current year.”
There are a handful of years prior to that in the collection. Spurgeon says there are roughly 25 years worth of yearbooks missing from the archives: 1923 through 1939, 1941 through 1949, 1951 and 1952. Due to the Korean War, there was no yearbook printed in 1953, according to Spurgeon.
Alumni can make a $25 donation to access the NERIHI archive. Since the webpage launched in September, roughly $1,000 has been raised for alumni association scholarships thanks to Spurgeon’s efforts.
“One of the things we really need, we have a bunch of old people running the organization right now,” Spurgeon said. “Hopefully by providing this, we can get younger people involved in the organization and help it go forward too. It’s not just funding, it’s creating a sustained organization of volunteers…We’re always looking for volunteers, particularly people that might have some skill sets in computers, because at some point in time I’m going to be too old to do this stuff.”
For more information on the New Richmond Alumni Association, visit https://nralumniassociation.com.