Robert Sandager

Robert Sandager learned to shoot as a boy. He attended the University of Minnesota where he was captain of the rifle team, graduating in 1937 with a BS in Business Administration. In World War II he rose to Captain in an anti-aircraft artillery battalion in the 30th Infantry Division, earning a Bronze Star for leading the defense of a roadblock in France and capturing over 100 enemy soldiers. Near the end of the war, he was stationed at Friedensburg Castle in Germany, where he met a 20-year-old Austrian employee, Brigitte Hedbawny. After returning to the United States, Sandager stayed in correspondence with Brigitte and in 1969, after she had relocated to Romania, the two were married, with US Vice-President Hubert Humphrey obtaining a special passport for her.

Robert Sandager competed internationally for the United States at the 1952 Olympic Games, the 1949, 1952, and 1954 World Championships, and at the 1955 Pan American Games, where he won gold with the 300 m high power rifle 3 positions team (with Emmett Swanson, Art Jackson, Verle Wright, Jr., and the non-Olympian August Westgaard) and bronze with the army rifle 3 positions team (with Verle Wright, Jr., Art Jackson, Emmett Swanson, and the non-Olympian August Westgaard). His business career was a loan officer for the First National Bank of Minneapolis, and he was with them for 39 years, until his retirement in 1979. Sandager stayed active his entire life, competing in the American Birkebeiner races into his 70s, and raised and raced sleddog teams of Siberian Huskies. At the 50-year reunion of his artillery battalion, they honored him with a plaque that read, “He was the best of the best.”