Feb 23, 2017 By Harry Funk 4 min read

After three years’ worth of research, Robert Rodrigues drew a reasonable conclusion about the work his Chartiers Valley High School social studies students had done tracking down information about local residents who died in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

“I thought we were pretty much done.”

Then Rodrigues had a conversation with Bridgeville native and area historian Joseph Oyler, whose book, “Almost Forgotten,” chronicles those who gave the ultimate sacrifice.

“Joe comes up to me and says, ‘You know, there were at least 38 others who were killed,'” Rodrigues related.

And so 14 of his students embarked on another project for this school year, adding to the list that has been compiled since 2013, when Superintendent Brian White discovered a memorial from the now-closed Rennerdale Elementary School containing the names of 17 residents of the Collier Township neighborhood who lost their lives in World War II.

Rodrigues – he’s “Mr. Rod” to his students – subsequently put together a team to research and write biographies about the servicemen, while he also worked on a fitting way to memorialize them.

“I’m a Vietnam-era person, so right away, I thought of a wall,” he said. “The kids put it together, bricks and mortar. Everything was done within this school.”

The resulting Wall of Fallen Heroes was dedicated at the high school in May 2014, featuring the Rennerdale plaque in the center and a century-old bell on top.

“One of the things that as most touching to me was when we asked the relatives to come up and pull the rope to unveil it,” Rodrigues recalled, “and a couple of them were holding pictures of their lost loved ones.”

During the next two academic years, students researched local casualties of the Korean and Vietnam wars. Rodrigues, who started at Chartiers Valley in 1973, taught one of the latter.

As far as gathering information this year, he reported mixed results so far.

“It’s tough,” he said. “There’s not as much out there as you’d think. We’ve had pockets of great success, and then we have areas where we really have a lot to do yet.”

For example, student Dylan Trainor has learned plenty about one of his subjects, Andrew Orient (1912-44), having discovered two books that address his service and death: “Day of the Panzer” by Jeff Danby and “Operation Dragoon 1944: France’s Other D-Day” by Steven Zaloga and John White.

“He went on to be a lieutenant for a tank battalion, and he was in an operation on the beaches of Italy and then in southern France,” Trainor said. “He was killed in action from a German tank shell after leading his tank battalion through France.”

His two other subjects both went down with the Navy’s USS Juneau in 1942.

“But their research is a little bit thin, other than they were there and serving,” he explained.

Emma Grunebach said she has gained some perspective from the project.

“It’s kind of shocking, because both the guys I’m researching died very young, and they were actually both my brother’s age,” the Chartiers Valley senior said. “They both had siblings, and so it kind of makes me think, that could have been me, almost. So it makes me respect and love my brother a little more.”

For Rachel Chidlow, who lives in Rennerdale, researching the servicemen has given her a deeper appreciation of her neighborhood.

“I can drive by the house where they grew up, and it’s like I’m touching history,” she said. “They’re real people, and they’re your neighbors.”

The project has made studying history more poignant for Jon Henderson.

“I think it’s powerful to put faces to the numbers,” he said. “We hear about war in Mr. Rod’s class, and we hear that so many million people died in a war, a hundred thousand here and a hundred thousand there. But when you can read a story about how they died and where they died, it’s much more powerful to connect to the people.”

Miranda Griffith emphasized the memorialization aspect.

“It’s very rare that you find a lot of information on these guys, so it makes me want to remember them so much more,” she said. “If we don’t do this, these people are not going to be remembered.”