William E Hegarty was a Navy medic assigned to the Marines in the Pacific theater in WWII. After the war he married Mary Katherine Lynch of Kansas City Missouri and had eight children. He became a lifelong teacher in the Scottsdale Unified School District in Arizona.
He was very active in the Democratic Party and ran for a number of public offices. His legislative race against John McCain had a large crossover vote from the Republican Party due to a very bitter GOP primary campaign which McCain won. He was enshrined in the Arizona Democratic Hall of Fame several years before his death in 1999.