Carl Theodore Hansen, Jr. (1921–2019)
Lieutenant Colonel Who Never Stopped Flying
Carl Theodore Hansen, Jr. Photo: Campbell-Biddlecome Funeral Home, Seneca, Missouri.
Carl Theodore Hansen, Jr. is your great-grandfather. He was the oldest child of Carl Theodor Hansen, the Danish-born nurseryman from Copenhagen, and Hazel Alberta Atkins, the Seneca girl who tucked her address into a sewing kit and started a pen-pal romance. Our family tree often lists him as Carl Theodor, the same name as his father; the funeral home and most records call him Carl T. or Carl Theodore Hansen, Jr. He lived ninety-eight years, flew for the military and then for a living, and came home to Seneca at the end.A Kansas BoyhoodCarl was born in Neosho, Missouri, on June 12, 1921, when his father was 36 and his mother was 19. His brother Donald Max was born there in 1923. In the mid-1920s the family moved to Chanute, a small town in Neosho County, Kansas, where his father had taken a job landscaping the grounds of a cement company. Carl grew up there with Max, his sister Mary Paul, born in 1927, and his youngest brother, Robert, born in 1928. Those were Great Depression years, and his father was often on the road selling plants.SixteenOn February 16, 1938, when Carl was sixteen, his father died after a long struggle with his health that went back to World War I. You can read that hard story on his father’s page. Hazel kept the children in Chanute until the school year ended, then brought them home to Seneca, Missouri, her own hometown, right on the Oklahoma border.The 1940 census, the count of every person in the country that the government takes every ten years, found Carl at eighteen, living in Seneca with his mother, Max, Mary, and Robert. In 1941 he was a freshman at Joplin Junior College, about twenty miles up the road. A junior college is a two-year school where you can take your first college courses close to home for less money. That one later grew into Missouri Southern State University.Navy, Air Force, Air National GuardCarl went on to travel the world with the military. He served first in the Navy, then in the Air Force, and finally retired from the Air National Guard as a Lieutenant Colonel. The Air National Guard is the state-based air arm of the National Guard, part-time military flying that can be called into federal service; a Lieutenant Colonel is a senior officer rank, just below colonel. We don’t yet have his unit names, bases, or the years of each stretch of service, but the funeral home’s account is clear on the order: Navy, then Air Force, then Air National Guard.After he left the Guard, Carl stayed in the air as a civilian. He served as a flight instructor for the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, the government agency that licenses pilots and sets the rules of American flight. He also worked for private companies as a helicopter pilot. One story the family still tells: while he was on a cross-country flight, he set his helicopter down on the Iva Wells school grounds in Seneca, and gave his nephew instant celebrity status among the schoolkids.Marriage and Later YearsHe was living in Seneca again in 1950. At some point he married Phyllis Jean Tracy, born in 1930, the daughter of Hanford Wesley Tracy of Cranston, Rhode Island. They had a daughter. The marriage didn’t last: Carl and Phyllis were divorced on December 13, 1956, in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. He never remarried.By 1981 he was living in Anacortes, Washington, a harbor town on Fidalgo Island in Puget Sound, north of Seattle. He was still there in 2014, and when Max died in April 2017, Max’s obituary listed “a brother, Carl Hansen, of Anacortes, Wash.”Home to SenecaCarl Theodore Hansen, Jr. died on October 10, 2019, at ninety-eight, two years older than his mother lived to be. The funeral home listed him of Seneca, Missouri. He was survived by a sister and a daughter, and he was predeceased by his parents and by his brothers Robert and Max. A military memorial service was planned at Seneca Cemetery, 739–741 Cemetery Road, Seneca, Missouri; the date was still to be set when the notice was written. The funeral home put it best: he will be forever joyfully flying among the stars.