This Veterans Day, a Gilroy High School teacher will join the
likes of WWII icons in the nation’s capital to pay homage to the
men and women who fought for this country.
This Veterans Day, a Gilroy High School teacher will join the likes of WWII icons in the nation’s capital to pay homage to the men and women who fought for this country.
Last school year, Darren Yafai, a GHS history teacher, and about 165 of his 10th grade students embarked on a journey they never knew would take them and their work all the way to Washington D.C. They spent months finding, interviewing and chronicling the stories of 26 men and women who lived through WWII. From fighter pilots to Holocaust survivors, each had a ‘Story of Service’ to tell. The project was the single biggest endeavor any organization had taken on since Stories of Services was created. A program of the Digital Clubhouse Network, a national nonprofit that mobilizes young people to produce short digital films about those who served, Stories of Service was launched in partnership with National History Day, the History Channel and the Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute to capture the stories of the World War II generation.
For their effort, Yafai and GHS will be honored as the Stories of Service teacher and school of the year at Veterans Day ceremonies in Washington D.C. and New York City, said Warren Hegg, founder and president of the Digital Clubhouse Network.
“Darren is the spark plug that put this all together,” Hegg said. “Gilroy High School is the only school in America that’s taken on more than two or three stories. I was skeptical at first – Darren’s goals were so lofty. But he exceeded them all. And he believes in his students. That’s what made the difference.”
Although Yafai can’t take 165 of his students to the capital, he will showcase their projects along with a documentary they made detailing the making of Stories of Service at the American Veterans Center in D.C. and the New York Institute of Technology. He will use the documentary as a teaching tool to show others how to start up the project at their own schools.
“For me, there was this great sense of urgency,” he said. “One (WWII) veteran dies every 90 seconds. It won’t be long before there aren’t any left.”
The statistics hit home when one of the men Yafai frequently asked to speak to his class died, Yafai said.
“One of my heroes, Aldo Viarengo, was a B-17 bombardier in the skies over Europe during WWII,” he said. “After years of engaging my students with his vivid stories, Aldo passed away, and I was left reading old news clippings of his heroics … we never videotaped his story and that’s what kills me. We have to find a way to preserve their stories now so that they can continue to educate and inspire future generations.”
Along with Edith Shain, the nurse whose famous kiss with an American sailor on V-J Day in Times Square was immortalized in a photo snapped for the cover of Life magazine, Yafai will lay a wreath at the National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C., before heading to NYC where he and his son will be in the Veterans Day Parade, carrying a photograph of U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Jeramy Ailes, the first Gilroyan to die in battle since Vietnam. The Ailes family passed on being in the parade themselves, said Joel Ailes, Jeramy’s father, but was honored that Yafai and his son would be carrying their son’s picture.
“I don’t know if we’re quite ready for it,” Joel Ailes said.
Hegg contacted the Ailes family back in 2005, the summer after their son was killed in combat in Iraq, to do a story about Jeramy.
“It was a pretty remarkable experience,” Joel Ailes said. “It was emotional for all of us. There were definitely a lot of tears shed.”
“It brought us really close together,” he said of the bond that formed between his family and the people from Stories of Service. “It gave them the opportunity to get to know us and what kind of person Jeramy was. We became friends for life.”
“Part of those boys’ legacy is in the fact that we’ve met so many other families that we wouldn’t have met if this tragedy never happened,” he said. “Jeramy’s still at work.”
Like Ailes, Yafai and his students cherish the friendships forged during the project.
“To be able to take the past and bring it to the future was pretty neat,” said Rahni Giardina, 15, a member of the group who helped produce the documentary.
Giardina’s grandfather, a member of the Italian Air Force, passed away during the making of Stories of Service, she said. Although she couldn’t profile her own grandfather, “I got to see what he went through,” she said.
Designed to bring generations together, Stories of Service channeled the efforts of the “YouTube generation” into a project that will help future generations understand the history of their country, Yafai said. His Veterans Day will be devoted to spreading the success his students achieved in telling the stories of the Greatest Generation.
