Robert Benjamin Hastie
April 24, 1924 – May 23, 2020
From the 95th BG Memorials Foundation Facebook page;
Robert Benjamin Hastie was born in Lead, South Dakota 24 April 1924 and was baptized in the Finnish Lutheran church. The family moved to Kenosha Wisconsin in 1926, where his father became a machinist with Nash Motors. He was always intrigued with flight, as his dad served with the 156th Aero Squadron in WW I. So early in the 1930's, he and a friend saved up their money to take their first flight on a Trimotor Ford that was visiting Kenosha.
In 1942 he graduated from high school and with the war on, he enlisted in the USAAF as an Aviation Cadet. On 17 August 1943 he flew his first plane solo and became a PILOT! During WWII, he served as a B-17 pilot in the 95th Bomb Group 334th Squadron flying 35 missions over occupied Europe then transitioned into Mosquitos and flew reconnaissance with the 25th Bomb Group 654th Squadron. He returned to the USA in 1945, sailing on the Queen Mary.
His decorations include: Pilot Wings, European-Africa-ME Campaign Medal (with 5 Bronze Stars), Air Medal (with 4 Oak Leaf Clusters), AAF Presidential Unit Citation (with 1 Oak Leaf Cluster), World War II Victory Medal, Russian Commemorative Medal (The 50th Anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War) 1994, Polish Uprising Cross 2004, Polish Merit for Warsaw 2004, and the French Knight of the Legion of Honor 2014.
After returning he married Bette Lu Haake, his high school sweetheart who was a Registered Nurse during the war and went on to Northwestern University using the GI Bill. He graduated in 1948 with a degree in engineering and was in the Pi Tau Sigma International Mechanical Engineering Honor Society. They moved to Dallas Texas where he worked as a pipeline engineer for Atlantic Pipeline Company. They had two children and in 1955 he accepted an assignment to work with the Army Corps of Engineers on a pipeline in France. They all flew to London on a Stratocruiser for their great adventure and took a ferry across the channel. It was a short assignment and later that year they returned on the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner.
They returned to Dallas where they had a third child and the family became Unitarians. He worked on pipelines in Dallas, Midland and throughout Texas for Atlantic Oil as it merged and combined eventually becoming ARCO. While in Midland, he was a founding member of a new Unitarian Church.
His proudest work and most technically challenging position was designing and becoming Project Manager for the Trans Alaska Pipeline System. They all moved to Houston in 1969 and he made many trips to Alaska to prepare and build the pipeline and insure it was operational. The family then moved to Independence Kansas in 1971, headquarters for ARCO Pipeline where he was VP and Manager of Operations and he joined the Elks. In 1978, he became Vice President of ARCO Transportation in Los Angeles California area, where he retired in 1985.
In retirement, he flew light aircraft with friends on trips around the country and went sailing in Southern California and took sailing charters around the world with family and friends, on small sailboats to cruise liners while traveling the world.
He is survived by his wife, two married daughters, son, 3 grand kids, and one great grandchild. In all, he survived the war, lived a very full life and flew on many aircraft - from the Trimotors to Jets.’'