Champion of War Veterans Nears His Goal

He is 74 years old now and he can’t march anymore. There are moments these days when John Grijalva can’t even remember the time he served his country, his own wedding or the days his three children were born.

But nobody was standing taller at last month’s unveiling of a design for his brainchild: A proposed wall of “legacy etchings” to honor Sierra Madre veterans from the Civil War to the Gulf War to the present.

After almost a decade of doing research and battling bureaucracy, Grijalva, who was a couple of birthdays too young to fight in World War II, sees his dream nearing reality in this town of fewer than 11,000 residents near the San Gabriel Mountains.

Grijalva, who never fought in a war, has worked for years to commemorate all the men down at the VFW where, as a young Navy reservist, he listened in awe to their accounts of wartime horror and unassuming heroism.

“This Veterans Memorial Photo Wall ... is for my friends and all the other Sierra Madreans who served their country in any branch of the military and lived in this town for at least one year,” Grijalva said.

Since the concept was approved by the City Council last year, Grijalva has raised more than $10,000 of the estimated $81,000 it will cost for 1,500 images and 600 bricks. He hopes to live long enough to see it happen.

Grijalva used U.S. Census Bureau reports back to 1906, turning up as many as 1,500 Sierra Madre veterans, including 69 from World War I and even a few from the Spanish American and Civil wars.

It wasn’t an easy task for Grijalva, who is fighting age and illness. Over the last dozen years, he has had six major surgeries, including four heart bypasses. He suffers from paralysis and memory loss.

“We call him the Energizer Bunny, he just keeps going,” said Mignon, his wife of 52 years. “He should have been dead a long time ago, but he has the tenacity of a bulldog.”

Grijalva believes his brushes with death have given him a sharper perspective on what really is important, and the wall project has driven him to keep going. So have his wife, his three children and five grandchildren.

Grijalva, a retired engineer in the field of precision optics, carried a top-secret clearance for government work. He also crafted projection lenses for major movie studios.

In retirement, he turned his focus to persuading Sierra Madre’s City Council to approve the Veterans Memorial Photo Wall.

His battle with City Hall’s youthful council was a clash of generations. “I’m old enough to be everyone’s father, with the exception of one,” said Grijalva. “It took two years for them to decide if the project had merit and then where to put it.”

Like a warrior, he recruited a team of volunteers to help with the project, including friends from the movie industry.

They settled on a new technique, developed by Legacy Design Group for a project at Epcot Center in Orlando, which etches digital images onto stainless steel.

All the photos and the applicants’ information will eventually be cataloged and scanned for an online database at www.sierramadreveterans.org. Donations are being coordinated by the Sierra Madre Chamber of Commerce.

The memorial wall is the grandest of many community projects Grijalva has worked on in his adopted hometown. Grijalva’s family moved to Sierra Madre from Los Angeles in 1936, when he was 8.

Within two years, he was running around with a group of older boys, including the town prankster, Warren Jones, who once filled the town’s landmark cannon with buckshot and aimed it at the steeple of the Sierra Madre Old North Church. He missed.

Perhaps to deter future Warren Joneses, the city embedded the cannon in concrete at Sierra Madre Memorial Park.

Barely out of high school in 1946, Grijalva enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserves. He began listening to his friends swap stories down at the town’s smoke-filled VFW Post 3208.

From his seat near the beer taps at the no-frills VFW post, Grijalva listened to the accounts of Netherlands-born World War I veteran Louie Van Iersel, the oldest of the group and a winner of the Medal of Honor.

Van Iersel received 14 other American and French decorations for heroism during World War I.

“My favorite story about Louie was how he earned his Medal of Honor by swimming across an [icy Seine] River under heavy fire and eavesdropping on the Germans. He lost his rifle crossing the river, but learned they had an artillery barrage all set to wipe out his battalion,” recalled Grijalva.

Despite his failing memory, Grijalva remembers his friends’ war stories as if they were yesterday:

James Dunnagan was a 21-year-old gunner aboard a B-24 Liberator bomber that sprang a gas leak and crashed in the Pacific. The crew was rescued; only recently was the plane found at the bottom of the ocean.

As his friends began passing away, Grijalva became the keeper of more than two dozen scrapbooks, which include thousands of photographs taken during the different wars.

Some photos contain haunting images from the Korean War taken by 13 veterans from Sierra Madre, all members of the 223rd Infantry Regiment, 40th Infantry Division of the California National Guard, who were awarded the Combat Infantryman Badge for front-line fighting.

“There are a lot of guys who went above and beyond the call of duty, and many didn’t make it home,” Grijalva said. “Their images and others will be etched on this wall and they’ll last for 100 years.”