M. Gorman, 77; Widow of Navajo Code Talker

Mary Gorman, who helped bring belated honors to the World War II Marines known as the Navajo code talkers, has died at age 77.

The widow of Carl Gorman--the painter, lecturer on Navajo culture and father of noted artist R.C. Gorman--who was one of the original 29 code talkers, she died Sept. 9 en route from her home in Gallup, N.M., to a hospital in Albuquerque, a few weeks after being treated for a heart ailment.

The code talkers were an elite communications unit that used a version of the Navajo language to relay messages to combat troops in the Pacific that could not be broken by the Japanese. Most code talkers were assigned to advancing rifle companies and have been long credited by military historians for playing a decisive role in the Pacific campaign.

The operation was kept secret by the military for 25 years, until 1969, when the Pentagon finally declassified the information about their work.

In the early 1980s, when then-President Ronald Reagan was preparing to issue a proclamation praising the code talkers, an effort began to track down the code talkers or their survivors. It fell to Mary Gorman, who served for some years as the secretary of the Navajo Code Talkers Assn., which her husband had headed, to compile a list, which was no easy task.

Finding the few surviving code talkers and the next of kin of those who were dead was “a difficult job in the Navajo Nation,” said Roy Hawthorne, vice president of the Navajo Code Talkers Assn., “because sometimes you have no telephone communications. And then many of the men married more than once.”

There was no list of the code talkers, who numbered about 400, because they had not been an official military unit. “So the Marine Corps could not go to a unit file and pull up a list of names,” said Gorman’s daughter, Zonnie, who assisted her in the work.

Mary Gorman began interviewing association members, relying on their memories of other code talkers, and checked the names against military records. She eventually collected more than 400 names, sometimes going on as little as someone’s recollection of, say, a code talker named N.A. Brown.

Through her efforts, nearly all of the first 29 code talkers were represented in Washington in July when Congress honored them with the Congressional Gold Medal.

Until shortly before her death, she was working to locate family members of as many as 380 other code talkers who will be recognized with silver medals Nov. 24 in a ceremony at the Navajo Nation in Arizona.

Gorman, a Rhode Island native of English, Irish, Scotch and French ancestry who could trace her family back to the Mayflower, lived in Northridge and Barstow for many years before moving to Arizona and later to New Mexico.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by four stepchildren, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.