It has been over fifty since I left Western Maryland College as a undergraduate student, and in 2022 it will be fifty years since the graduation of what would have been my class.
In the last fifteen years I have regularly visited the campus with a couple of projects for the archives, regularly attending Common Ground as a student and most importantly visiting old friends and making new ones.
Being one of the campus photographers during my two short years as a student at WMC, I ended up with a fair number of negatives of this period. On one of my original websites I included some of these in a gallery called, “My College Yearbook.” Numerous old friends enjoyed seeing them, however the site got old and I took it down several years ago.
When I started getting emails about the class of 1972’s reunion, I went back and looked at some of these old photos and one day out of curiosity I typed in westernmarylandcollege.com on my computer to see where it would lead . . . no where . . . Laughing to myself I searched to see if the name was available and so for $14.95 it became mine. Here a home is now provided for those old photos and memories.
As the photo editor – photographer for the Gold Bug, a lot of these photos are from my newspaper assignments. Often the film was processed rapidly and archival preservation was not thought of, the negative only had to be stable until a print could be made and storage was usually in a plain paper envelop. Many of the photo scans here reflect the long term condition of these negatives. Perhaps someday I will take the time to properly restore some of the images, but that day is not now.
For those of you who find this site, I hope you enjoy the memories associated with these images!
John Van Horn
