Veterans of the Pima Gazette
A Record of Gila River Veterans from the Pima Gazette
Veteran Database ← Click Here to View!
When I first started reading through the Pima Gazette, I kept seeing familiar names. Many were Veterans and families I had worked with years later when I led the AmeriCorps Program and the Veteran Family Services Office.
As I began organizing and preparing the newspapers for digitization at the Huhugam Heritage Center, I started adding notes to my “Interesting Stories” section in the newspaper database. That’s when I realized how many powerful stories about our Veterans were hidden in those pages—especially from World War II.
If you haven’t read my earlier articles, the Pima Gazette was a local newspaper written and published by students at Pima Central High School in Sacaton from around 1935 to 1946. It covered school news, community updates, and, during the war years, letters and reports from service members and their families.
I’ve been thinking about this Veterans project for over a year and finally made time to start it. It’s still a work in progress, but I wanted to share what I have so far. I plan to keep adding to it—maybe even build it into something special for Memorial Day.
So far, I’ve identified just over 200 Veterans mentioned in the Gazette. For each person, I added any information I could find—letters from them, updates from their families, or short mentions in the paper. This isn’t every Veteran from the Community during that time, but it captures many who were mentioned by name.
Here is a preview of what it looks like:
Each record includes tags like:
Rank
Branch
Locations
Other information
Stories/Articles
Non-Community (for people identified as non-members)
I hope this project helps families and descendants of these service members learn more about their relatives and see how they were remembered in the newspaper.
World War II changed life in the Community in a big way. One article I found described how the high school was almost empty—most of the junior and senior boys had joined the military, and most of the young women were out working. The Pima Gazette captured these stories as they happened, showing how much the war reshaped daily life here at home.
If you’d like to explore more, some of these Veterans also appear in the Roots and Rivers Database. That project includes several years of local newspapers that have already been digitized, though it’s still growing. You can search for names there to find other stories from the same time period or related families.
I’ve also included short snippets of each article in this Veterans database. If you want to browse the full newspaper issues, I invite you to visit the full Gila River Newspaper Database I created, where you can read complete issues of the Pima Gazette and other local papers.
With that, I just want to say I hope everyone has a great Veterans Day. If you or a family member are interested in ordering military paperwork—especially for relatives who don’t yet have a headstone—please contact the Veteran and Family Services Office at (520) 562-5148. They can help you with the paperwork and make sure your family receives the honors and services they deserve
