Bob Hastings spent so much of his life working that his career can be mistaken for several separate careers. Born in Brooklyn in 1925, he began radio at eleven, when children’s serials and family programs still provided a professional training ground for young voices. By the time most boys his age were thinking about first jobs, Hastings already knew microphones, scripts and broadcast timing.

World War II interrupted that childhood profession. Hastings served in the Army Air Forces as a B-29 navigator, then returned to broadcasting and stepped into the title role of Archie Andrews. The part made him the voice of one of America’s most recognizable fictional teenagers. Playing Archie after military service created an odd professional reversal: the adult veteran returned to a high-school character whose problems were dates, jalopies and life in Riverdale.

Hastings did not remain trapped at seventeen. Radio science fiction gave him a very different field. He became a frequent performer on X Minus One and also appeared on Dimension X, programs whose stories asked actors to make impossible futures sound emotionally immediate. His youthful vocal flexibility was still useful, but now it could serve astronauts, clerks, frightened citizens and men confronting technology rather than teenage comedy.

Television widened the career again. Hastings became familiar as Lieutenant Elroy Carpenter on McHale’s Navy and appeared across sitcoms and dramas for decades. Voice acting eventually added another long chapter, including Commissioner Gordon in Batman animation. The common thread was not genre. It was his ability to sound sincere inside material that ranged from broad comedy to science fiction to superheroes.

Hastings died in 2014 at eighty-nine. He had begun professional broadcasting in 1936 and was still recognizable to audiences many media generations later. Few performers provide a cleaner line from children’s network radio to modern animation.