Leroy Kuest

Editors note: Due to corrections supplied by the family after printing on March 5, 2015, we are printing this again.

Leroy Kuest died Saturday, February 21, 2015, at Rockwood at Hawthorne care center.

Born in Odessa on August 25, 1918, he was the last of seven children of Julius and Rosena Kuest, who had homesteaded in the area before 1900. Leroy graduated from Odessa High School, worked for the local Richfield service station and in 1942 joined the Army Air Corps.

Throughout World War II, he was stationed in England near Bury St. Edmunds, where he was a crew chief maintaining B-17 bombers – a...