It’s not exhaustive and it’s not the first, but a newly published book about Sahuarita comes the closest yet to telling the story of a town most residents have known
Share This:
In March 1924, the battleship Arizona (BB-39), the flagship of Admiral William Pratt’s BatDiv 4 commanded by Captain Percy Olmstead, anchored in New York City for a nine-day visit to the Big Apple. During the interwar years, this was a quite common occurrence. What followed next, however, was far from routine as enlisted members of the crew snuck a hooker on the ship. The prostitute remained a stowaway for several weeks. She wasn’t caught until the Arizona’s passage through the Panama Canal at Balboa, after a voyage of about 2,500 miles.
USS Arizona waits to clear one of the locks of the Panama Canal in 1921. (Library of Congress)