Lauren Coodley, a history professor at Napa Valley College, has written a city of Napa history that celebrates the lives of ordinary people, with a special sympathy for the downtrodden.

Her new book, "Napa: The Transformation of an American Town," mourns the loss of Brewster's Army-Navy store, Ruth von Uhlit's fruit stand on Soscol Avenue and the Woolworth's luncheonette on First Street.

It tells the stories of service employees who went on strike against Silverado Country Club and an administrator who sued the Napa Valley Unified School District for sexual discrimination.

Looking back on the city's roots, it recounts the plight of displaced American Indians who kept white settlers awake by howling at night along the river and of 54 Japanese-Americans who were rounded up at the start of World War II for internment.

"I think history should be about the controversies. It should be about the forgotten people's stories," said Coodley, who calls herself a fan of small town America.

Local histories tend to focus on the Napa Valley and how it became the premium wine capital of America.

Not Coodley's. It spotlights the nitty-gritty of everyday life in the blue collar town that was once defined by the prune industry, small factories and Napa State Hospital. This is the story of ordinary people caught up in the social and economic change that swept over Napa at the end of the 20th century.

Coodley's book, now hitting local stores, is rich in photographs, some 50 pages' worth. There are images of downtown parades, prune harvesting crews, floods, peace marchers, picketing employees and Browns Valley before the subdivisions.

Starting last summer, Coodley wrote her history in just six months, while also carrying a full teaching load at Napa Valley College and serving as president of the faculty.

It was an opportunity she could not resist, said Coodley, who has lived in Napa since the mid-1970s. She was approached by Arcadia Publishing, which specializes in small town histories. After more than a quarter century of teaching history, here was her opportunity to write one, she said.

She interviewed old-timers, culled oral histories that her students had written over the years and dipped into her personal archive of newspaper clippings.

"The stories I sought were not those of the rich and the famous, but of those heroic individuals who tried to save farmlands, raise wages and create and maintain family businesses. I wanted to capture what ordinary Napans experienced throughout the last century, what they did for entertainment and how they felt about this town," she wrote in her forward.

Coodley said she enjoyed memorializing the life stories of ordinary people. In one instance, she interviewed a neighbor's mother, then "I wrote her into history," she said.

"Napa: The Transformation of an American Town" covers some of the same ground as the Lin Weber two-volume history of Napa until 1950. The second half of the 20th century is virgin territory for Coodley's exploration.

Coodley has little to say about the rise of the wine grape industry. She features nostalgic accounts of agriculture before the wine grape was king.

As a "fan of small business," Coodley laments the loss of the local-serving, family-owned stores that once dominated Napa. In an interview with Rachel Friedman, she tells of vintner Louis Martini shopping Brewster's back when "wine snobbery hadn't arrived."

She views voter approval of flood control in 1998 with a jaundiced eye. It made possible "unprecedented development and gentrification and the marketing of the city of Napa as both a destination and a lifestyle," she wrote.

Coodley, 53, grew up in Los Angeles and Bakersfield. She raised two children in Napa while teaching at the college. She is proud to have taught the college's first women's history course in 1977.

With one book under her belt, Coodley said she is working on a second, a biography of Upton Sinclair, the muckraking writer who was almost elected governor of California in 1934.

"Napa: The Transformation of an American Town" is available at local book stores in soft cover for $24.99.