Robert Hanson, the last surviving crewmember of the Memphis Belle, has died...
He won a baseball scholarship to university, but chose instead to go out to work, and in the summer of 1941 enlisted in the US Army. Determined not to become an infantryman, after the attack on Pearl Harbor he volunteered for radio training and transferred to the Air Force.
After returning home in 1943, he spent the remainder of the war as a radio instructor. When peace came, he found work as the district manager of, first, a food company and then a sweets manufacturer at Spokane, Washington...A family man, with a high sense of ethics and a fondness for laughter, Hanson enjoyed golf and square dancing in retirement. To the end, he liked to finish telephone conversations with the wartime Morse Code sign-off: dit, dit, dit, dah, dit, dah. He died on October 1.
He married, in 1942, Irene Payton, who survives him with a son and a daughter. Another daughter predeceased him.
