Fifty years’ worth of football footage is a whole lot of blocking and tackling. And a nightmare to store.

“I was being asked to get rid of it,” Jim Buonocore, the athletic director and head football coach at Ledyard High School, said last week. “We had no place to put it.”

At Ledyard, a school with a rich football tradition, the film from as many as 10 to 12 games a season had been piling up since 1965. First it was tin canisters containing 16-millimeter reels, later videocassettes.

What to do with all those flickering images of the gridiron?

“I give a lot of credit to Sue Lantelme, the library media specialist,” Buonocore said. “She was the point person in reaching out to the Webbs at Charter Oak Scanning.”

The Webbs — Robert and daughter Candice — had a solution.

Charter Oak, a 2-year-old startup operating in 1,000 square feet of space in the old Velvet Mill building in Stonington, agreed to collaborate with Ledyard on “Glory Days,” a digitization project aimed at converting all that football footage — some 900 hours of it — to DVDs.

“It priced out between $10,000 and $20,000, so they were going to do just a few (seasons),” Robert Webb, Charter Oak's chief executive officer, said, referring to Ledyard High. “Then we went back to them with a proposition: Give us everything and we’ll sell it back to your alumni — the former players who want to relive their memories.”

Ledyard will continue to own the film, while Charter Oak will have the right to market and sell the DVDs it creates. The football program will earn a percentage of the sales, lending the project a fundraising aspect.

The Webbs are hoping that news of the undertaking will help them fill gaps in the Ledyard film archive. Former coaches and players who took a game film home from time to time may still be able to locate them.

“Most years are missing a couple of games; some seasons, a majority of them are missing,” said Matt Edwards, the Ledyard football historian behind the website ledyardfootball.com. Edwards is helping the Webbs identify which games are captured in the films they've got.

Charter Oak has yet to determine a pricing model or decide whether it will market DVDs containing several games or entire seasons.

“Once we prove we can do it with Ledyard, we can approach other schools,” Webb said. “Marketing it also gives us an opportunity to tell people about everything else we do.”

In the digitization world, Charter Oak does just about everything, converting photographs, slides, film and virtually all forms of audio and video recordings (except Betamax) to DVDs, CDs and flash drives.

“At first, we thought we were in the scanning business,” said Webb, 64, who ran a document-scanning service in his native England. “We’re not. We’re in the memory-capturing business.”

“Memory-recapturing business,” Candice Webb, Charter Oak’s 27-year-old marketing director, added.

The idea for the company began to take shape after Hurricane Sandy flooded many an East Coast basement in 2012, imperiling family photographs and memorabilia. The Webbs themselves had plenty to preserve, Robert Webb’s wife, Elizabeth, having inherited the archives of her father, the Rev. George Dreher, a Mystic Congregational Church pastor.

Listening to a digital version of an old Dictaphone recording, Candice Webb heard her grandfather’s voice for the first time.

People drop off their memories in bags, boxes and crates.

Last summer, a Waterford man delivered 13,000 slides dating from as far back as the 1940s, prompting the Webbs to invest in a $4,000 machine capable of the high-speed scanning of such material. Another customer brought in a tape of a student’s interview with an elderly neighbor, who later died. When the neighbor’s relatives heard the digitized recording, they were surprised to learn of his participation in the Battle of Iwo Jima, an experience he had never discussed with them.

“We have story after story like that,” Robert Webb said. “Sometimes, it gets emotional.”

b.hallenbeck@theday.com

Twitter: @bjhallenbeck