San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Galileo High School teacher rarely spoke of WWII heroics
John Orofino came home from combat in France during World War II carrying enough shrapnel in his body and disillusionment in his spirit that he decided to join a monastery and escape the world he had seen.
A monk convinced him that he could do more good being a part of society than removing himself from it, so instead he became an English teacher at Galileo High School in San Francisco.
Orofino never talked about the war in class or watched war movies or marched in a veterans parade. If not for a dinner guest at his
West Portal home who found a medal in a case and pulled the story out of him, he would never been awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest decoration and one of the most distinguished anywhere.
He received in the award in 2007 in a ceremony attended by a color guard of French sailors aboard a French Navy frigate in San Francisco Bay.
Orofino also earned the Silver Star for Valor, a Purple Heart and seven other campaign medals, none of which he ever displayed, and most of which he never bothered to pick up. He died Aug. 3 at California Pacific Medical Center Van Ness Campus of metastatic bladder cancer, said his wife, Peggy. He was 98.
“John was a beautiful soul,’’ she said. “If you knew him, he made an impact on your life.”
It wasn’t until they’d been married for 15 years that Peggy learned the extent of his heroics, and that was only because she typed a statement that had been requested by the French government describing the part he played in the desperate battle to liberate Thionville from German occupation forces.
“I knew that he had been injured in the war and had spent months in recuperation,” she said, “but I had no idea of the magnitude of it.”
According to the document that Peggy typed, Orofino was a 20-yearold buck sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division, a legendary paratrooper outfit known as the Screaming Eagles.
Three months after D-Day, the allies had broken out of Normandy and were rolling across France under General George C. Patton. Orofino was part of a scout platoon sent 60 or 70 miles ahead of the front to probe for Germans. On Sept. 1, 1944, Orofino was riding in a Jeep when they found what they were looking for.
“It was quite a firefight,” Orofino told The Chronicle when he re
John Orofino, a longtime San Francisco English teacher, was given the Legion of Honor by France for his work in the liberation of the country.
ceived the French award in 2007. “The lieutenant was shot, the staff sergeant was killed. I was left.” Suddenly the ranking soldier, Orofino took control of the scene, got the wounded onto a Jeep for evacuation then held off the Germans with a machine gun while his platoon could make a retreat.
A German concussion hand grenade exploded above him, raining down nails and steel slivers that pierced his skin. But he fought on.
“I did a John Wayne,” he said in 2007.
Removed from the front, he was transported to a hospital in England where he was told he’d never walk again and to forget about having kids. He was put in a body cast, and after four months in England he arrived by hospital ship en route to a long recovery in a convalescent hospital in Battle Creek, Mich.
“The shrapnel was too close to the heart to operate,” said his brother, Art Orofino. “Everything they had packed into the grenade kept slowly coming out. It was a handicap to him but he never once complained about the pain.”
John Battista Orofino was born Oct. 18, 1923, in Detroit, the oldest of five children. His father, John Edward Orofino, worked in the trim department for the Ford Motor Co. His mother, Sadie, was a homemaker.
As a child he was such a voracious reader that his father allowed him to claim a room under the stairs at home as his office and library.
At Farmington High School he played football and ice hockey, was editor of the school newspaper and elected president of the senior class and valedictorian. He graduated in 1942 and was attending the University of Michigan when a sense of duty compelled him to drop out and enlist in the Army in 1943.
After the war, Orofino returned at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on the GI Bill. He majored in English and minored in philosophy. He began his teaching career in Detroit and was married with three young children when he got the urge to move west to California.
He was hired by the San Francisco Unified School District and was eventually assigned to Galileo, the spectacular Spanish Colonial Revival campus overlooking the bay. He rose to the position of department chair, overseeing a faculty of 10. He also worked a stint in the district office developing an approach for teaching English across all of the city’s public schools.
“John was a philosopher, so he wanted to show the district a framework for teaching English,” said Vince Gomez, a teaching colleague and friend for 62 years. “He was one of the most brilliant guys I’ve ever known and a great humanist.”
After finishing his day job at Galileo, he taught evenings at the district adult school. He also lectured in philosophy at San Francisco State University and parked cars on Saturdays at a garage on Nob Hill.
“He was always working,” Peggy Orofino said, “and when he wasn’t working he was reading.”
She had been Peggy McCulloch as a student at Galileo but she never had Orofino as a teacher. They met through a mutual friend after his divorce and were married in 1990 in a City Hall ceremony. That same year, Orofino retired from teaching after 33 years in the district, including a sting at newly opened McAteer High School. But he had another job lined up. In 1978 he had bought a three-unit rental property in Noe Valley and he took on the job of super.
He would go over three days a week to sweep and water the plants and hang around a workshop he kept on the ground floor.
“John was not a typical landlord,” said Amy Campos, who lived in the firstfloor flat for 10 years, during which her landlords never forgot a birthday or holiday. They always sent a card.
“Landlord is a transactional term,” said Campos, who is chair of the Interior Design Program at California College of the Arts. “John was a friend and a mentor. He had a fabulous outlook and a great demeanor and was able to connect with lots of different types of people.”
One of these was Dr. Sharad Jain, a staff physician at the VA hospital, who treated Orofino for a variety of agerelated ailments. Jain said he came to enjoy Orofino’s company so much that they started meeting for coffee in Noe Valley. After reading a newspaper article about Orofino’s Legion of Honor award, Jain asked him about it.
“It was central to his identity,” said Jain, “because once he opened up about it he had clear memories of the situation and all of the people dying and the people he helped save. It was fresh in his mind.”
Orofino did not return to Europe until June 2010, when he was persuaded to attend the annual D-Day tribute ceremony in Normandy in the company of Jerome and Monique Marks of Belvedere, who had been the dinner guests that applied for the Legion of Honor award on Orofino’s behalf.
Orofino wore his medal for the first time and was given the honor of placing the ceremonial floral wreath at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.
Years later, Orofino finally got his other medals, thanks to the efforts of Rep. Jackie Speier. All 10 medals are now together, closed tight in their cases, the way he left them. A celebration of life will be held at a later date. Survivors include his wife of 32 years, Peggy Orofino, of San Francisco; daughter, Holly Orofino-Gruys of Jackson (Amador County); sons, John Orofino of Honolulu and Anthony Orofino; and brother, Art Orofino of Lavonia, Mich.