George Hanke

George L. Hanke, resident of Abilene and native of Stonewall County, passed away Sunday, February 15, 2009, following a five month illness. Funeral services will be held Wednesday, February 18, 2009, at 1:00 p.m. in the chapel of Elmwood Funeral Home, 5750 US Hwy. 277 S. in Abilene, Rev. Richard Darden, pastor of Shining Star Fellowship Church, officiating. George was 92.

Born December 28, 1916 in a two-room house on the family homestead east of Aspermont to Rudolph and Frieda Hecht Hanke, George was the third of four children. At age 4 he was greeted one morning with the tragic news that his mother had died unexpectedly during the night. His father, seeing himself as ill-prepared to raise four children on his own, relegated that responsibility to Georges grandparents, August C. and Amalie Hecht, and then later to Georges aunt, Bertha Hecht.

As a schoolboy George enjoyed hunting and outdoor pursuits, and as a youth, athletics. In a time when there were no
isions among Texas high schools in athletic competition, George held his own against athletes from many larger schools, once winning the javelin contest against all competitors even from Abilene. Athletic budgets were slim in the late 1920s and early 30s, and it was often necessary for the teams to provide for their own transportation to out-of-town events. George often told a story of a harrowing experience returning from a football game in Haskell when a driving rain made the automobiles sink to their axles in the unpaved highway surface, and the team members were forced to slog in mud to their knees to free the often-stuck vehicles, arriving back home after dawn the next morning, beyond exhaustion.

In 1933 George dropped out of school to run the family farm. But dry land farming was not kind to him in those depression years, so he left to find work in the booming oil fields of the Permian Basin. Booming as it may have been, however, the jobs were scarce and, on a morning when you did get picked for a roustabout crew, hazardous. At the urging of teachers and coaches back home, he returned to Aspermont to finish high school, receiving his diploma two years late, in 1937.

Following graduation George left Texas to join his older brother, Howard, in the insurance business in Norfolk, Virginia. His primary clients were the sailors at the Norfolk Naval Base, an association that led George, having already dreamed as a youth of being a sailor one day, to enlist in 1937. In the Navy George found the two loves of his life, one being the Navy, and the other being Muriel I. Michaels of Bronx, New York. She, however, at the time of their meeting, was betrothed to a young soldier from her home state.

Following boot camp George was first assigned to a cargo ship, the USS Vega, followed by service in a WWI vintage destroyer, the USS Biddle. On the evening of December 7, 1941, he was en route from New York to Boston to report for duty aboard a new destroyer then under construction in Maine when a newspaper boy passed through the train selling Extras announcing the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor. The new destroyer would be the USS OBannon DD-450, and during Georges three-and-a-half years on her decks she would earn distinction as the most battled-tested tin can in the history of the US Navy, earning 17 battle stars, surviving five major surface engagements, meriting the prestigious Presidential Unit Citation, and being appointed by Adm. William F. Halsey, along with her two sister destroyers, Taylor DD-468 and Nicholas DD-449 to the honor of leading the flotilla of American warships into Tokyo Bay for the surrender signing ceremony in September 1945.

On December 23rd of that same year George married the young lady from the Bronx, her first husband having been KIA in Germany, and returned to Stonewall County to again try his hand at dry land farming. In 1957 he was appointed Postmaster of Aspermont, a position from which he retired in 1975, and during these years the couple raised three children.
PAs a father George served on the school board at Aspermont during a time when post-war prosperity enabled numerous improvements to the school system in which he himself had been educated, including an innovative underground high school in this tornado-prone mesquite country, owing also to the quest for nuclear fallout shelters attributable to the Cold War.

Service

Chapel Service

Elmwood Funeral Home Chapel
5750 HWY 277 South
Abilene, TX  79606
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
1:00 PM

Cemetery

Elmwood Memorial Park
5750 HWY 277 South
Abilene, TX  79606

Memorial Contributions

Shining Star Fellowship Church
301 Palm
Abilene, TX  79602

Hendrick Hospice CareHa
PO Box 1922
Abilene, TX  79604