World War II—Arroyo Grande
On December 7, 1941, war came to Arroyo Grande when two local sailors were killed on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. People from what was then a small farm town were thrust into grave circumstances and quickly answered the call for action.
A local storekeeper’s son won the Silver Star after he brought his flaming B-17 safely back to base. A valley farmworker served with the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of soldiers of Japanese descent. Chinese guerrillas commanded by Mao Zedong–the future Chairman Mao–threw a birthday party for an Arroyo Grande soldier serving in military intelligence. At home, community groups like the Arroyo Grande Women’s Club brought packed lunches for their Japanese American neighbors on the morning they were forced to leave for the internment camps and may have been the turning point in welcoming them home again at war’s end. Local author Jim Gregory grew up here and brings to life the sorrows and triumphs of a dramatic period in local history.
Jim Gregory, author of World War II—Arroyo Grande, taught American literature, modern world literature, cultural anthropology, advanced placement U.S. history and AP European history for thirty years at Mission College Preparatory School in San Luis Obispo and at Arroyo Grande High School. He, with his brother and two sisters, was raised in the upper Arroyo Grande Valley and attended the two-room Branch Elementary School. He then studied journalism and history at Cuesta College; California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo; and the University of Missouri-Columbia where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree. He was an editor at ABC-Clio in Santa Barbara and a newspaper reporter in San Luis Obispo before becoming a teacher. He has also worked as a research historian for the San Luis Obispo County Historical Society.
Gregory was the Lucia Mar Unified School District›s Teacher of the Year in 2010-11. In 2004, he received a Gilder-Lehrman Fellowship to study the Depression and New Deal with Pulitzer Prize-winning Stanford University professor David Kennedy, an experience that only deepened his fascination with the 1930s and 1940s. He has led several student trips to Europe, including visits to many of the villages and cities where young Americans fought in 1944-45. He recently taught a class on descriptive writing for young people as part of the Central Coast Writers Conference in San Luis Obispo.
Gregory is married to Elizabeth, a teacher and campus minister at St. Joseph High School in Santa Maria, and is the father of two sons, John and Thomas. The Gregory family shares increasingly precious space in their Arroyo Grande home with one Basset hound, two Irish setters, one tortoise and a small army of cats.
The book sale and signing event takes place Saturday, Feb. 27 from 2 p.m. to 4.p.m.at the
IOOF Hall, 128 Bridge Street in Arroyo Grande. For more information, call 489-8282