These three Palisades High School yearbooks were purchased on Blurb, thanks to teacher Rick Steil.
After the Palisades Fire destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in the Palisades, people started tallying losses. Some were large like homes, others small, but meaningful like baby books and yearbooks.
Rick Steil, photography teacher at Palisades High School was asked by his two adult sons, and Pali High alums, Tyler and Tucker, “How are we going to get our books back?” Steil and wife Nicole’s home in the Alphabet Streets had burned.
The teacher had produced the Pali yearbooks for many years and started a search to learn how to get reproductions of the destroyed copies. Blurb Publishing, which specializes in large productions, had done a book for the Booster Club.
Steil reached out to them and started working with Blurb’s Dylan Failla, “he was great,” Steil said. “The company is taking no profit from this project and are essentially doing it for the cost of the book.
“They thought it was a good project,” he said, but then was faced with the cost of the setup – and finding original albums. Luckily, Pali High librarian Andrea King had stored a complete set, which was locked up in back storage and unaffected by the fire.
Steil took 61 individual yearbooks, starting with 1963, and took them apart page by page. Then, each page was scanned. “It was a lot of pages,” Steil said, noting that some of the later books were more than 300 pages.
He started working on the yearbooks in April 2025. “It took me nine months to do them,” said Steil, a former professional photographer.
“The whole cost is the set up,” he said and added that it was borne by the Palisades High School Booster Club ($13,000) and from Forever Palisades ($12,000), a nonprofit.
“Forever Palisades was four kids who had graduated from Pali High and felt so connected to the community they wanted to help,” Steil said.
CTN contacted Haley Holbrow (class of 2017), one of the founders of Forever Palisades, which also included her twin brother Will and the Howard brothers, Spencer (class of 2017) and Justin (class of 2019).“As Pali alums, we know the yearbook is more than a collection of photos; it’s a time capsule of friendships and milestones,” Haley said. “We’re proud to support Mr. Steil’s work to digitize and reproduce decades of lost yearbooks so alumni can reclaim those memories, and the school can preserve its history.”
Someone suggested that maybe the albums could be sold for a profit, but Steil, 67, said “No.”
One of the most popular teachers on the campus, Steil has six full classes and had planned to retire this year. But instead, he’s rebuilding and will now need to continue to teach a few more years.
Palisades High School teacher and Palisadian Rick Steil.
“We’re tweeners,” he jokingly said and explained that there’s a group of Palisadians that are too young not to rebuild, but who are “old” because they have already raised their children. Both his boys attended Palisades Elementary, Paul Revere and Pali High and played sports.
He told CTN, “If I knew I’d have 30 years of magic and then it would all burn down,” he said he wouldn’t do anything different, “I’d still take it.”
Between rebuilding and teaching, He’s leaving it to Blurb to handle the orders.“That’s the beauty of Blurb,” he said, “people can order, pay and Blurb sends it out.” He was asked how long the albums were be available and he checked with the company and said “They said they will host this project for years.”
If you or if you know someone who has lost a yearbook:
1. Visit: https://www.blurb.com/search/site_search
2. Click on the Bookstore tab
3. Search for “Palisades Surf”
Steil said, “We are proud to make this archive of Pali High memories accessible once again.”
(Editor’s note: This editor’s three children graduated from PaliHi. I went to the website and easily ordered the three yearbooks. They are truly great to have back on a bookshelf.)