Obituary

Betty Holbrook Bain Hornbaker ? Plv. Cemetery, blk. 350

Funeral services for Betty Holbrook Bain Hornbaker, 78, were held Monday at St. Mark?s Episcopal Church with the Rev. Charles Chapman Jr., officiating. Burial was in the Holbrook family plot in Plainview Cemetery. Mrs. Hornbaker died Thursday, Dec. 8, 1994 in Baptist Memorials Center in San Angelo.

She was born Betty Holbrook on March 15, 1916 in Deerfield, Kansas, the daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Winfield Holbrook. Her father, a captain in World War I, moved to Plainview in 1919 as general manager of the Texas Land and Development Company. He was a former mayor of Plainview. Her mother organized the first Girl Scout troop in Plainview in January of 1936.

Betty attended Plainview schools and graduated from Plainview High School. She attended Our Lady of the Lake College in San Antonio and the University of Texas at Austin, and graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

She was interested in aviation and was a licensed pilot. She helped organize and train pilots in 1941, and organized the first Civil Air Patrol in Plainview. During World War II, she was among a select group of 4,000 women serving in the Marine Corps? Women Reserve. She was stationed at the Marine Air Station in Mojave, California, where she taught navigation and meteorology until the end of the war. She retired as a first lieutenant in 1945.

She made her home in Plainview, Ruidoso and Capitan, New Mexico. She moved to San Angelo in 1994. She was a member of St. Mark?s Episcopal Church, Great Books, PEO Chapters BL and CZ, and the Plainview Humane Society where she had served on the board of directors and as secretary.

She married Luther R. Bain in 1952. He died in 1971. She married Fletcher Hornbaker in 1980. He died in 1984. She was also preceded in death by her parents and a brother, Raymond Holbrook.

(Plainview Daily Herald)