Brian Donovan

Website GoFundMe

Goal reached in 2 hours! Thanks. No further donations needed until 2025.

The post below is just for posterity:

Hi Folks,

It’s been three years and time to renew the hosting for the Wayne Alumni website, now in its 25th year. This website includes the main alumni website, Wayne Central Soccer HIstory, and Wayne Central Basketball History websites. It is $9.99 / month for 36 months, for which I am billed $359.64 and paid upfront (to get the discount). I’m looking to offset some of the cost.

Yes, it can be had cheaper initially, which we did the first three years, but it would require moving the website, which is a huge amount of effort.

I also cover the cost of the domain name separately.

Much work has been done in the last year to restore past content and add new. The Wayne Basketball History site was completely reworked and redesigned.

So I am looking to raise $250 from alumni to help support the website. Smaller donations are preferred.

Thanks to all who have supported this site for the last six years. They are named on the About page on the website.

-Brian Donovan ’74

Posted in Website
Brian Donovan

Sad Ontario History

This is not directly Wayne Central Alumni related. I recently came across this news from 1949. Though I have essentially lived in Ontario all of my life, I had never heard about this before. This happened in 1949, about a week after my brother Tom was born, and 7 years before I was born.

Another part of this sad story is that I knew Bernard and Louise Murphy quite well as they were friends of my parents. It must have been a difficult memory for them as well.

This isn’t the type of history we want to hear about. Fortunately, homicides are rare in Ontario. But next time I visit my parents graves in Calvary Cemetery, I will find Anna’s grave and leave a flower.

It’s been many years and no one knows exactly what transpired, and never will. Seems like today with improved trauma care she may have survived. Sad all the way around.

Posted in History
Brian Donovan

Need Yearbook Covers from 2011, 2015, and 2017

There are only 3 yearbook covers not shown on our Yearbook Covers page. They are not in the school library or Ontario Library. If anyone could snap a photo of any of these yearbooks, it would be welcomed. Using a cell phone can be sufficient, try to ensure good lighting and get all the edges in the frame.

Using the Google PhotoScan app would be preferred. It is available in the Google Play store or Apple App Store for free. It is easy to use.

Send any photos to briand”at”waynealumni.org – Thanks!

Posted in Uncategorized
Brian Donovan

25th Year of Wayne Alumni

Still hard for me to believe, but this website has been up in one form or another since 1997, making this the 25th year. Retirement has given me the ability to focus attention on this again. Much of the pre-2016 website has been restored, Registration has been re-enabled, the alumni directory is back, yearbook picture of the week is more consistent, and some broken features have been fixed.

Wayne Basketball History has been updated, and Wayne Soccer History has also been updated.

I get some occasional feedback and comments, and hopefully people still get some benefit from it being available. In a couple of months, it will be time for renewal of the web hosting, and hopefully I can get a handful of people to contribute to keeping the site available. Stay tuned for announcements about this in the future.

It seems like many people access the Wayne Alumni Facebook page to keep up-to-date. Just FYI, all posts on the website are not posted on the Wayne Alumni Facebook page. Facebook won’t allow me to automatically update the page when I post on waynealumni.org, so I have to manually do it. I try to minimize the Facebook clutter, since for most people it is become a vast wasteland. So visit waynealmni.org directly to see all the latest.

Things I hope to do in the future:

  • Get access to more yearbooks
  • Scan more yearbooks
  • Enlist people to contribute content to the site
  • Get more participation form the 2000s classes
  • Develop a succession plan

There are probably more, but I will post updates as required.

Posted in Uncategorized
Brian Donovan

Pep Band

When I was in middle school, I started attending high school basketball games. This was probably 1968-70. The “old gym” was the only gym back then, and it probably didn’t hold a huge number of people. But entertainment choices were more limited then, and the stands were usually pretty well packed, even when the team’s record was not that great.

I’m just guessing, but at least 50% of the crowd were students. There also was a concept in those days called cheerleaders. Before it was turned into a sport, cheerleaders actually attended all the games and tried to keep the crowd enthused. Nothing against it being a sport, but seems odd that the original intention was lost completely.

Anyway, in addition to the cheerleaders, at least in 1968-70 (or thereabouts), there was this thing called a pep band. If you’ve ever been to a Syracuse University basketball game at the dome, and it’s not winter break (Dec 20 – Jan 20), you may have seen the student band playing in the student section. It was kind of like that, but only 15 people. And they somehow squeezed between the two sections of bleachers behind the scoring table.

At that time, I was probably playing in the middle school band as a percussionist, so I always watched them with interest. But I always remembered how loud they were, with no amplification. I don’t know all the songs they played, but think of a college football game. That kind of music. One song I do remember was “Oh Wisconsin”. It was just a great atmosphere that the band contributed to.

1970 Pep Band
1970 Pep Band
Gerald McClure - Conductor
Gerald McClure – Conductor

Maybe my ears were untrained, but I thought they were very good.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it last much beyond 1970. It was probably difficult to get all 15 players to attend every home game. Maybe you could do without one now and again, but it must have been hard. Then to have one of the music teachers also commit as well. So it didn’t last. But even if Wayne didn’t win, you knew that band was good!

Posted in Uncategorized
Brian Donovan

Traditions Lost – The Eagle

Traditions are nice, maybe not always essential, to be maintained. It is also nice to evolve. Sometimes they just fade away. By virtue of working on this website, I have had an opportunity to see most of Wayne Central’s Yearbooks (72 so far). I have around 26 myself. We have a page on the website of all (except a couple) of the yearbook covers. The Wayne Central yearbook has a title “The Eagle”. The early ones, it was prominently displayed on the cover. After about 5 years, for unknown reasons, it was shortened to “Eagle”. Sometimes, the name did not appear on the cover, other times an Eagle was depicted on the cover.

In the 50s and 60s, often the yearbook had a visual theme, with artwork, graphics, font. Starting in the late 80’s, themes were appearing again, but now with the theme given a name, like “Climbing Life’s Ladders” or “On the Move”. Which is OK, but now often replacing “The Eagle” or “Eagle” on the cover. Some still depicted an Eagle on the cover, some not. Themes seem predominate in the 1990s for many years after. In 2018, 2019, 2020, they just say “Wayne Eagles” on the cover (very nice appearing covers), which is not the name of the yearbook, it is the name of our sports teams.

I’m sure the student yearbook staff putting yearbooks together is a lot of thankless work, doing something they never have done before. I would hope a yearbook advisor would be aware of what the yearbook name is supposed to be.

I like the themes and some are very clever. It seems like it would be easy to include “The Eagle” or “Eagle” on the cover and still have a theme. Just a suggestion.

Posted in Uncategorized
Brian Donovan

Alumni Directory Restored

For those who are interested –

Over the last few weeks, effort has been put into creating and restoring the Alumni Directory. Initially, the archived version from 2016 was made available. Then a new user registration system was added. Finally, the two were merged together after some considerable effort.

One significant change was to go to a standard First Name, (Maiden Name), Last Name format for Alumnae who have taken their spouses last name. The directory is sorted by last name now.

Another was to remove the ability to contact classmates via this site. It was never used much, and there are always privacy concerns. This is one (of many) reasons the directory was not continued after 2016. But there were many people who asked why it wasn’t and could we get it back.

Since the directory has been around for 25 years, there are obviously out-of-date listings. There is some clean-up that can be done, like removing duplicates, etc., but people may want to update their listing. The main issue with merging the old and new directories is the logins, user name, email, and passwords. The new system being used now takes user names. User names were generated automatically during the merge, and likely no one will like them. Luckily, the system also allows logins by email address. There is uncertainty about passwords. In the old directory, probably 50% of the listings were before there was any login system. So those users had no password. Again, those users have had an automatically generated password in the new system to satisfy the requirements of merging.

What does all this mean? If you still have access to the email you originally used prior to 2016 on this site and the password, theoretically you should be able to login. If you just have the email (and you still use it), but don’t remember your password, you should be able to click on the Forgot Password link on the login screen. Theoretically, because it has not been tested.

Or you could just re-register. There will be regular scans looking for duplicates, and older listings will be deleted.

Users who never had a login will have to register here (see main menu). If you don’t care, nothing needs to be done.

There will be an FAQ put together to make some of this info easily available if users want edit or replace their listings.

Posted in Website
Brian Donovan

Registration for Alumni Directory Available Again

Some effort has been made to re-enable a registration system again for the website, and also create an alumni directory display similar to what we had previously. An improved registration form has been created to help with this, as the one tried a few years ago was lacking.

Unfortunately, for the 50 or so people who registered a few years ago, you probably received an email (I did) saying your account was deleted. It was necessary as we had to change the database. You will need to re-register if you want to be in the directory.

Hopefully methods to help avoid spam will work. If not, there might be additional steps that can be taken.

Posted in Announcement, Website, What's New
Brian Donovan

Problems with Contact Form

Apologies to all who tried to contact me via the Contact menu. Though at one time I would get an email with the information, apparently it stopped working at some point. The good news is, all was not lost, I have found where a copy of all attempts to contact me are stored. So I am working on addressing all that I can. Unfortunately, anything that was time sensitive is now irrelevant, like reunions.

Anything else, I will address ASAP. I have already added some In Memory requests and I will continue until I am caught up.

Using this off the shelf system has many advantages, but many disadvantages as well. Now that I know that the email notification isn’t working, I will just need to manually check or find other alternatives.

So the Contact and Submit Reunion menu items are working such that they can still be used, I’ll just need to adjust on my end. The Submit Photos does not seem to working, so I will disable for now.

Posted in Website