MUSCATINE, Iowa — Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, John Travolta and Jay Leno got a glimpse of places they probably haven’t seen before thanks to students at Bishop Hayes Catholic School.
Fifth-graders at the Muscatine school mailed 178 postcards with images they photographed and developed during a one-week workshop in May.
“My class and I are making postcards and I wanted to send you one. I hope you like it,” student Matt Wieskamp wrote to Leno.
Teacher Pat Phillips said some of her students recently received autographed photos back from Leno.
Alex Amerine, 11, of Muscatine, said he sent a postcard to Travolta, one of his favorite actors, at an address he looked up on the Internet.
“I think he’d like it because he’s never been here before,” Alex said.
The 14 students in the class each shot two rolls film during visits to the top of the Muscatine20County Courthouse, the Pine Creek Grist Mill historic site at Wild Cat Den State Park and Mississippi River at Fairport. They also traveled to the Coralville Reservoir, stopping along the way at a rural cemetery, and the Amana Colonies.
Alex said that from the top of the courthouse, “We could see almost the whole city. It was cool because you could take pictures of almost anything from up there.”
He took a photo of what he said he liked the most, which was the riverfront.
Phillips, parent volunteers and photographer Bob Campagna accompanied the students.
“It was fun to see the types of pictures and the things they took, because he taught them everything can be a picture,” Phillips said of Campagna.
“It’s many layers of decision-making they have to do ... and I never tell them what to photograph,” Campagna said, describing his teaching. “I will help them learn how to see, but they have to decide what to photograph and what to print.”
This is the 10th year Campagnaconducted the workshop with Bishop Hayes students. It is sponsored in part by the Iowa Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and Home and School Association.
Campagna, who now resides in Cedar Rapids and conducts photography workshops with students nationwide, is a former Muscatine public housing assistance director. Two past projects Campagna did with Bishop Hayes students, color posters picturing the doors and windows of Muscatine,20are popular in the community.
All of his workshops, however, are based in black-and-white photography. The renewed availability of photography paper that is preprinted on one side for postcards inspired this year’s event, he said.
“This is what used to happen around the early 1900s and late 1800s. People would take their photographs and make postcards out of them,” he said.
Campagna pulled another lesson from the past in teaching students how to develop film in a darkroom as opposed to processing a digital image on a computer.
Student Anna Rauenbuehler, 10, of Muscatine, said her favorite part of the lesson was “definitely the darkroom. That was sweet.”
She said she learned how to develop pictures, and “why you should not open the camera before rewinding it.”
Student Jaden Carey, 11, of Muscatine, was impressed with Campagna’s darkroom tricks.
“You can put salt crystals on your picture and make it look really neat,” Jaden said. “I took pictures of water and put it in saltwater. I called it ‘Saltwater.’”
Students selected photos they then developed into prints for themselves, and mailed others as postcards to celebrities and family.
Anna said she took one photo of “all the flooding and all the trees at Fairport,” which she sent to “famous people like Oprah.”
Anna sent a photo of the Pine Creek Grist Mill to her family.
Student Emilee Meyer, 11, of Muscatine, said she turned one of her favorite photos, a cross in the cemetery, into a postcard.
“I sent it to my principal, Sister Cheryl, and I sent it to the Pope,” Emilee said. “I thought it would be cool for him to see it.”
Jaden sent postcards to family as far away as Tennessee and Minnesota, as well as relatives in Muscatine, Wapello and the Quad Cities.
“The postcards are just simple homemade images of the region,” Campagna said. “The Muscatine area was really well advertised in these postcards. This is a real promotion for the community.”

One Former Resident’s Career has Come Full Circle in Muscatine

Bob Campagna began his photography career with a darkroom kit given to him as a gift in 1977, when he left his position as the director of Muscatine’s public housing assistance program.
More than 30 years later, Muscatine was the last place Campagna used various tools of his trade before the flood of 2008 destroyed thousands of dollars in equipment.
Campagna, who now lives in Cedar Rapids, teaches photography workshops to students throughout the U.S. He taught his 12th program in 10 years at Bishop Hayes Catholic School from May 19-23.
A trip with the students to the Devonian Fossil Gorge at the Coralville Dam on one of those days, he said, “turned out to be kind of a prophetic stop.”
Flooding expanded and reshaped the gorge less than a month later.
On June 13, the flooded Cedar River reached Campagna’s mother’s house, where he and his wife now live, about a mile and a half away. Campagna returned from a teaching trip in Colorado and made his way to the basement, where he stored his teaching supplies.
“What happened when I got to my mom’s backyard, about a quarter to nine at night, was that I went around the National Guard, and opened the door,” Campagna said. “The door opens to the basement, and saw my photo stuff floating in four feet of water.”
Campagna said about 20 cameras, some darkroom electronics, about $1,000 in matting materials and $1,500 in photo supplies were destroyed. So too were 40 years of correspondences, 25 years of teaching notes and about six exhibits.
He said some of his neighbors were pumping out their basements, but that risks weakening the walls. So instead, “You’ve got to shut the door and wait till the water goes down,” he said.
Campagna will have to replace the equipment, and insurance won’t cover his losses because it was not his house. The worst part though, he said, was losing the correspondence and teaching notes, which he planned to use later in his career.
“So a lot of resources are going to have to be brought out by hypnosis or something,” he said jokingly.
Despite his losses, and a missed teaching opportunity when a workshop at Coe College was cancelled because of the flood, he keeps a positive perspective.
Nobody was killed, he said, “and we’re not as bad off as the people down by the river.”
“It is totally surreal even yet down by the river,” he said earlier this month. “You see houses where the brown lines are 10-20 feet up on the houses.”
“It shows the humanity in Iowa because the people in Cedar Rapids really helped each other out.”
Campagna worked in Muscatine from 1972-77. He said got his start in photography after he photographed all the residents at the Clark House and compiled the photos in a book.
“As a farewell gift to me, they gave me a darkroom set,” he said. Campagna said he was employed for two years at a weekly newspaper in Mount Pleasant, where he lived for 30 years, before working as a freelance photographer.
Then he learned about the Iowa Arts Council’s Artists in the Schools program.
“I got involved in that, and ever since that moment, being an artist in the schools, I’ve been doing workshops and keep getting more workshops and it just keeps going,” Campagna said.
“I love the fact that it’s a really beautiful part of the education process, that students discover things,” he said. "I’m there for the moment of discovery for a lot of kids.”