Obituary of William S. Husztek

“The finest son, brother, husband and father that any family ever had.” A man everyone went to with problems that they needed to solve because they knew that Bill would not only help them but that he would go the extra distance with and for them to get them through their trouble. He didn’t know how to let people down. Born in Goldsboro, MD. Oct. 5, 1915. Died in Annandale, VA. Jan. 2, 2014. Between those two dates, 98 years of life to be summed up in a few words. What finally killed him? Old age. As Justice Thurgood Marshall so famously said when asked, “I’m old, I’m getting old and coming apart. So too did he finally outlive all the expectations of Science and medicine and just quit living. But what a life! As a farm boy on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Delaware one of his first jobs was to clean fruit for the local cannery for .03/ 10# of fruit. The World and Nation was on the thresh hold of a new exciting world. He was impatient to get into it and graduated from high school at the age of sixteen. The same year he enlisted in the Army Reserves. After school, with a friend he hoboed his way around the country gambling on the ponies until they could win enough money to buy an old Dodge sedan and travel in style. Over the next few years he worked as a busboy in a fine New York restaurant, driven a taxi cab in Baltimore and at Crown Cork and Seal in their Baltimore factory. Then with the help of his future father in law he moved up to the Standard foundry on Sparrows Point working shoveling coal into the huge furnaces which created the molten steel and ceramics used in bathtubs and toilets. Now prosperous, he married Lucille K. Hess and started his family. It was 1939. By 1941, he and his wife and his first son had bought a water front cottage on Bear Creek off the Patapsco river. On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor he was just 26, but he was an “old man” for military service and entitled to sit it out since he had a wife and son and was working in a vital industry to the war effort. He volunteered for active service as a Army Air Force Cadet and earned his commission and wings as a Navigator in 1942. He was soon overseas in North Africa as the Desert Fox campaigns were winding up flying in Military Air Transport C-47’s. In 1943 he moved to England as a member of the planned invasion of Europe. He flew on the “Bridge Too Far” mission as a lead navigator transporting men and materiel to the battle. In 1944 he flew over Normandy dropping paratroops behind German lines and then transporting men, supplies and materiel to the Invasion as it moved across France into Germany. Back home after the war, from 1945 to 1954, he was stationed in Spokane, Washington, Los Angeles, and Sacramento, California, El Paso, Waco, and San Antonio, Texas, and Montgomery, Alabama working his way up the chain of command, from 2nd Lieutenant to Major. In 1954, he returned to England serving at Sculthorpe AFB flying what were the forerunners of later U-2 flights he served in Tactical Reconnaissance B-45’s over the Iron Curtain Countries which included his parent’s homeland of Hungary. In 1955 he moved to South Ruislip AFB in London. 1957 he was transferred to the Pentagon as a Lt. Colonel on General LeMay’s staff. In 1959, he divorced his first wife. 1960 he went to Andrew AFB where he would retire in 1962. From 1962 to 2014 he returned like Cincinattis to private life, and never looked back. He and his second wife, Lucille S. Husztek and her two children traveled back to England and the Continent, where they visited his relatives in Budapest during a tour of the Continent by car. He especially enjoyed the London live stage shows, and they took a flat in London one summer so that they could enjoy themselves to the fullest. One summer they traveled to Hawaii, and on to Australia and New Zealand. Back in the U.S. they bought a tobacco farm in the community of Westfield, N.C. where he turned back to the life he’d lived as a boy in Maryland. He would name his farm, Pinchgut Farm for the narrow creek which ran through it by the same name, which had come from a village of Algonquin Indians who meeting their first white men when asked what their name was said Pinchgut, meaning they were hungry and wanted the whites to give them some food. In later years, he slowed down. Although he had no fear of heights and was photographed one year in his early nineties over 100 feet up in the top of a dead tree which he was cutting down branch by branch. Even in his last years the family still sought him out for help which he gave without hesitation. He is survived by his widow Lucille S. Husztek, and his sons William A. Husztek of Annandale, and Paul J. Husztek of Stokes County, N.C.