NORTHAMPTON — It’s believed that only one Leeds resident has ever given his life in a world war, but he now rests somewhere deep in the ocean, his name largely unknown in the community he hailed from. Now, another Leeds veteran hopes to celebrate and memorialize this lost life.

Gordon Tatro, a current resident of Leeds and a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, was at Forbes Library researching old Daily Hampshire Gazette articles regarding the Northampton VA Medical Center when he started gravitating toward stories about veterans in the area who had served on submarines.

“I started saving those articles because being on a submarine is something I could never do,” Tatro said. “It’s weird to think I have no problem being in a big aluminum tube in the sky, but I can’t deal with being in a steel tube under water.”

That led him to the story of Donald Ducharme, a U.S. Navy submariner who lost his life while serving on the USS Amberjack, which was sunk by a Japanese torpedo boat in the Pacific theater of World War II in 1943. Looking through further archived articles, Tatro realized that Ducharme was the only Leeds veteran who died in World War II, and that no Leeds veterans had died in World War I, making Ducharme the only Leeds veteran to give his life during that era of global conflict.

Tatro also found an old Gazette article that reported on the city planning a memorial park named in Ducharme’s honor, but this evidently never materialized, and the planned area for the park is now occupied by the Chartpak arts and crafts store. Although the Ducharme-Smith auditorium in the Leeds School was partially named after Ducharme after the school opened in 1953, Tatro is hoping to fulfill the promise of the city’s original plan by having another public space, a site across from Leeds Village Apartments, named after Ducharme.

The small green area is owned by the city and hosts a bike rack for the ValleyBike Share service.

“This guy has been at the bottom of the ocean for 81 years,” Tatro said. “Let’s finish this job.”

To support the cause, Tatro spent two weeks putting together a poster and managing to get it displayed in the entryway of the Leeds Post Office. He said he’s hoping to raise awareness and get other local residents to aid him on his mission.

Workers at the Leeds Post Office declined to comment on the poster.

“I feel like I’m pulling this whole train by myself,” Tatro said. “I want to make this more of a community thing. In the military, you don’t do things individually, it’s a teamwork thing, and I’ve sort of missed that.”

One person who noticed Tatro’s poster was Donald Judge, a nephew of Donald Ducharme. The two men connected and Judge agreed a park would be a good idea.

Of Ducharme’s 15 nieces and nephews, Judge, 77, is one of just six still alive. Ducharme was Judge’s maternal uncle, whom he is named after, though he died before Judge was born. Growing up, he said he didn’t hear much about his late uncle, and he was surprised when Tatro expressed such great interest.

“I heard bits and pieces about him,” said Judge. “Probably I didn’t pay much attention. At this age, you think, ‘I should have asked this, I should have asked that.’”

Most of what Judge knows about his uncle is very general: he was uncharacteristically tall for the family, over 6 feet, and had “blond, blond hair.” He also had a dog named Luke.

Aside from sparse family anecdotes and Tatro’s collected newspaper clippings about Ducharme, most of which Judge had already seen, Judge also unearthed a clip of Ducharme from a movie called “Crash Dive.” In the clip, Ducharme is tossing a rope from a submarine onto a dock, Judge said. The 1943 film was directed by Archie Mayo, and it won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. It tells the story of a submarine lieutenant and commander who fall for the same woman while German vessels target Allied submarines in the Atlantic.

Though Judge doesn’t know much about Ducharme, he still feels connected to his family’s history, and said he would be glad to see a space memorializing Ducharme in the village.

“It would be really nice to have that there, if it all works out,” he said.

Tatro, who is seeking to install a marker of some kind, hopes to have the memorial completed by Veterans Day this November.

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com. Alexa Lewis can be reached at alewis@gazettenet.com.