Software engineer labors so Chartiers Valley graduates can browse their old yearbooks online

By Bob Podurgiel / For the Post-Gazette

After Austin Pilz earned a degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017, he left for Boston to work as a software engineer.

During holidays, he returned home to Scott Township and sometimes cracked open his Chartiers Valley High School yearbook, class of 2013.

“I always loved my community. It was special for me to look back at myself in the yearbook and remember where I came from,” he said.

Pilz thought other graduates of Chartiers Valley and Scott and Bridgeville high schools — which joined with Heidelberg and Collier to become one school district in 1956 — would like to reminisce, too.

He set out to create an online project that would allow anyone with access to a smart phone or computer to look back at over 300 yearbooks from 16 senior high, intermediate and elementary schools dating back to 1925.

Pilz spent seven months and about $4,000 — including $800 for a digital scanner — to create the Chartiers Valley Yearbook Project (chartiersvalley.com/yearbooks).

He also traveled to Harrisburg to scan documents in state government files documenting how the district was formed after years of negotiations between the four communities, Allegheny County and the state. Those documents became a second part of his project, chronicling the history of the formation of the Chartiers Valley School District.

“The school district never officially endorsed the project or contributed any taxpayer dollars,” Pilz said.

Starting in February, working on winter evenings and weekends, he began the long and arduous task of scanning over 300 yearbooks page by page. A lot people may have given up when confronted with the sheer volume of material, but Pilz said he has “a completionist attitude.”

By September, he had the website up and running, allowing anyone to search for a yearbook from the year they graduated or any year in which they or friends or family attended Chartiers Valley schools. 

Pilz was a little apprehensive when the website went live, thinking he might receive an email from Chartiers Valley administrators upset with the project. But he was pleasantly surprised.

“The district not only reached out to me to tell me how wonderful it was and to congratulate me, but got me in touch with local news sources,” he said.

“I still wouldn’t consider this an official endorsement, but they’ve been supportive of me in a way I didn’t expect. I honestly thought I might get in trouble for this project.”

Pilz said his inspiration was Alan Welding, a Chartiers Valley English teacher who gave him permission to borrow and scan Scott and Bridgeville high school yearbooks going back to 1925. 

School librarians and teachers at Chartier Valley Primary and Intermediate schools gave him access to those school’s collections of yearbooks, and individual alumni of the district allowed him to borrow yearbooks from their personal collections to scan.

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society gave access to all of the yearbooks in its collection, including those from Bridgeville High School, which closed in 1960.

Pilz is deeply grateful to all of the teachers, school librarians and alumni who helped with the project, but he also had one significant advantage when it came to digitalizing the yearbooks — prior experience in archiving data.

While in high school, he was an active member of the CV theatre department, working on stage crews for the high school shows and often specializing in the stage lighting.

During the summers in 2016 and 2017, while in college at Pitt, he digitalized all of the old CV theatre playbills and histories of the productions, then made them available online for free at cvsdtheatre.com/showcase. Last year, he digitized archival footage of the Chartiers Valley marching band, captured on super 8mm film, and made it available on YouTube.

The reviews are in

Since the yearbook project has gone online, the website has logged 8,000 unique viewers who have looked at all the pages on the site over 80,000 times, generating 10 terabytes of file traffic, Pilz said.

One of those viewers, local comedian and author Michael Buzzelli, used the website to look back to his own high school days and the class of ’81.

“I cheaped out in high school and didn’t buy the 1981 senior yearbook and I always felt I was missing out. It’s a decision I regretted,” he said.

“It was such a joy to go back and look at all of the old pictures. I was never one for high school reunions, but I loved reminiscing over those old photos.”

The stand-up comedian also got a laugh while looking at his and other senior photos through the years.

“Seeing some of the older years, you can tell the entire history of the modern world through hair. We were the class with the teased-out, blow-out hairdos. We all look like the Bon Jovi rejects. Except me, I looked like Spock [from “Star Trek”],” he said.

“I had a shiny black bowl haircut, but as hideous as that cut was, I miss those beautiful follicles. Now I have a receding hairline of salt and pepper — mostly salt.”

Kenneth LaSota, class of ’73, enjoyed looking back. But the longtime Heidelberg mayor and associate professor of geology and earth sciences at Robert Morris University found a more serious use for data from the yearbook project.

“I would think that the school districts could incorporate the data set into their history, economics, civics, sociology and other curricula. I’m sure bright students could create interesting historical reviews of the local area from the data — photographic time capsules of fashion, geography, technology, politics and social behavior — all in one well-designed longitudinal space,” he wrote in an email.

One good example of this can be found in “The Scottie,” the Scott High School year book from 1942. In it, the students remark on the rituals of high school life — a football game against arch-rival Carnegie High School and worries about finding a prom date. But just a few weeks after their June graduation, almost all of the Scott High senior boys found draft notices waiting for them in their mailboxes at home.

They abruptly went from the relatively care-free days of high school to shouldering the burden of defending our country in the bloody battles of World War II. Those high seniors at thousands of high schools across the country became known as the Greatest Generation for their heroism and sacrifices in the war.

By the 1954 edition of “The Scottie,” students had their eyes on the future in outer space. The yearbook features artwork by student John L. Bird depicting the coming age of space exploration with images of the moon, rockets, astronauts and the solar system.

By the time the 1968 Chartiers Valley yearbook was published, young people were embracing rock music, expanding their consciousness and developing an anti-establishment attitude toward life.

“The entire yearbook is a photographic essay capturing the era,” Pilz said.

Internet vs. physical storage

Carol Dlugos, a longtime volunteer at the Carnegie Historical Society and a former teacher in the Carlynton School District, has helped to assemble an impressive collection of high school yearbooks from Chartiers Valley, Scott and Carnegie high schools as well as the Carlynton School District, created in 1964 from the merger of Crafton, Carnegie, and Rosslyn Farms.

The collection also houses yearbooks from two Catholic schools, St. Luke’s High School in Carnegie, now closed, and Bishop Canevin High School, still in operation.

Dlugos searched garage, yard and estate sales for yearbooks she could add to the collection. Visitors to the historical society will also occasionally donate a yearbook.

Having the physical copies available to the public presents some challenges. There is the wear and tear on the books as people examine them. Then there is the possibility they could be destroyed in a fire or flood. In 2004, flooding from Hurricane Ivan damaged the first floor of the historical society, and a fire next door to the building in 2005 resulted in damage to the upper floors.

Dlugos considers the yearbook collection an important resource for genealogical studies and said visitors often seek out the yearbooks in their collection to look up a relative, parent of grandparent.

Scott resident Jane Sorcan, CV class of ’64, did just that when she became aware of the Chartiers Valley Yearbook Project. She was able to look up friends and family members she had lost touch with to learn where they went to school and to find out more about their educational background.

She found the search process on the internet easy compared with making a special trip to search out the information from a historical society or library.

There can be other obstacles to finding hard copies of the yearbooks. Jeff Keenan, Carnegie Historical Secretary, said the organization has had to limit public access to the yearbook collection, since people have walked off with a few yearbooks that were its only copies.

Pilz believes digital storage offers a few advantages over physical storage.

“A lot of people feel that physical media is safer, and to some extent, it can be. With yearbooks, it’s easier to keep track of a large, 5-pound book than a file in your email. However, if your house catches on fire, the physical media is lost forever.

“I’m amazed that most of the yearbooks going back to 1925 survived since changing hands so many times. Now we have digital archives of everything on the website.”

Pilz noted that he stored the digital media file in a data center in the United States, but it also mirrored into a data center in Stockholm, Sweden, “for safekeeping if something were to ever happen to the U.S.”

All that storage, however, comes with a price. Although Pilz receives a nonprofit credit from Amazon Web Services each year, it is not enough to cover all the costs associated with hosting the site.

There is a donation tab on the website for people who want to help keep the project available on the internet. For more information or to access the yearbooks, go to chartiersvalley.com/yearbooks.

Bob Podurgiel is a freelance writer who lives in Carnegie. His father was a 1942 graduate of Scott High School