Lieutenant James H. Macia Jr.

James H. Macia Jr. was born on 10 April 1916 in Tombstone, Arizona. His father was James Herbert Macia and his mother named Ethel Maud Robertson Macia.  James had two sisters. Jeanne and Iris.

James H. Macia Jr's mother

His grandmother was born in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, 16 Augustus 1881, Ethel Maud Robertson was a true Arizona pioneer. Her parents, Alice and Chris Robertson, had arrived in Tombstone from the mining settlement of Leadville, Colorado. His mother’s family moved to the silver-mining camp in 1879–two years before the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday killed two McLaury brothers and Billy Clanton near the O.K. Corral.

Macia’s father arrived in Tombstone 20 years after the famous gunfight and worked for the Tombstone Consolidated Mines Co. as a mining engineer

After graduating from Tombstone High School,  James H. Macia Jr. attended the University of Arizona, studying mining engineering. He was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. 

He started at the University of Arizona in 1934. He was on a football scholarship and played on the varsity team my sophomore year but wasn’t a star by any means. In the middle of my sophomore year, I decided to drop out of school and earn some money because things were pretty tight for my family. Always in the back of my mind was the opportunity to go and mine. My father was working a little mine at the time, and there was a place for me. I dropped out for a year and worked on that and got a few dollars ahead. I went back to the U of A in 1937. I actually ended up going a full four years. Each summer I would work in the mines.

Kappa Sigma is the largest college social fraternity in the world with more than 250,000 living members, including over 17,000 undergraduates and nearly 300 chapters and colonies located throughout the United States and Canada. Founded in 1869 at the University of Virginia, Kappa Sigma International Headquarters is based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 In the spring of 1939, Army recruiters visited the university, and many of my Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers became enthused about joining the U.S. Army Air Corps.

After retirement from the Air Force, he was the business manager for the Catholic Archdiocese of San Antonio, Texas until 1990.

With the outbreak of the Korean War, he was recalled to active duty and assigned to Headquarters USAF, Europe, Wiesbaden, Germany where he served in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. His next assignment was with the Director of Intelligence, HQ US Air Force in the Pentagon. During this period, he worked on the exploitation of intelligence from U-2 flights over the Soviet Union.  He was the last raider who went on retirement.

If someone has more info and pictures on James H. Macia Jr.'s profile, please contact me at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.