Grappling with all those grads

Editor's Notes

On June 9, 1939, stories in the Tracy Press told how the fire department extinguished a threatening grass fire, preparations were completed for the 16th annual Holy Ghost celebration and the town’s high school seniors received their diplomas. Individual photos of the 95 graduates, with names like Silva, Parker and Bettencourt, appeared on Page 6.

Grass fires still threaten Tracy in the windy city, the Portuguese community still has its annual celebration and high school graduation is still front-page news in the local paper.

But for the first time in 65 years, we aren’t running the photos of all the high school graduates, which amount to nearly 1,200 students, including those from Tracy, West, continuation, charter and private high schools.

I guess you could say Tracy has finally reached that milestone of being just too big.

While some people have said, “I wondered when you’d cut back,” a few parents have expressed their disappointment in our diminished graduation section, which published Thursday. “I can only assume this is a cost issue on the paper’s part,” a parent wrote in an e-mail with her canceled subscription.

It’s never been a moneymaker to print the special graduation section, with its hard-to-come-by content and labor-intensive production. Tracy’s Johnson Studio has always been accommodating and generous, but local photographers aren’t always contracted to take the senior portraits. Yearbook companies are often less than eager to share the photos, while some have gone out of their way to ship us what they had, even from other states.

Then there are the seniors who somehow missed having their photos taken, which can come as a surprise to parents who look for them in the grad tab. And, of course, there’s human error on our part, which has led to mistaken identities and missing seniors.

Most daunting these days is what used to be the easiest: getting the names of the actual graduates, which schools have become more reluctant to release. Last year, a parent actually sued the school district over the list of graduates provided to us — and threatened us for printing it.

That’s when I knew this wasn’t the Tracy of 1939.

We’ve always considered the grad tab to be a community service that required lots of staff and volunteer help. It was a labor of love, not so different from working on our own school yearbooks. Tom and Sam Matthews recall the hours spent engraving all the photos of the graduates back in the hot-metal days of letterpress printing. A generation or two later, my staff will remember shifts spent scanning senior photos, inputting names and trying to match everything together by deadline.

As for readers, I know they will miss the grad tab. I’ll certainly miss my annual search for familiar faces in the black-and-white photos of smiling graduates, just as I miss recognizing people I know in the grocery store.

But I take comfort in the fact that today’s graduations at Peter B. Kyne Field are still newsworthy events. Whole families will fill the grandstands. Graduates will sit on folding chairs under the bright, June sun. Valedictorians will give speeches about looking to the future. Reporters will jot notes into their tiny notepads. And photographers will try to capture the image of a graduate as he throws caution to the wind — and mortarboard into the air.

Thankfully, the pomp and circumstance hasn’t changed at all.