Haas, financier and photographer, 74, has died
Robert Haas, a financier who in his 50s used his wealth to go in a markedly different direction, becoming a published aerial photographer, and then in his 60s began collecting vintage and custom-made motorcycles and creating a Texas museum to display them, died Sept. 28 in a hospital in Dallas. He was 74.
The cause was a respiratory illness, said Stacey Mayfield, his companion and the director of the Haas Moto Museum & Sculpture Gallery in Dallas.
Haas, known as Bobby, made his fortune in the 1980s. He and a partner, Thomas Hicks, led a group of investors in the leveraged buyouts of 7-Up and Dr Pepper, then sold 49% of the combined soft drink companies for $600 million to Prudential-Bache Securities in 1988.
“I was 41 years old and I’m where I thought I might be when I was 71, times 10,” he said in “Leaving Tracks” (2021), a self-produced documentary film. “What do I do now?”
He and Hicks, who had formed Hicks & Haas in 1984 in Dallas, ended their partnership after five years. And although Haas remained in the private equity business for another two decades, he sought other diversions that his great wealth could afford him.
With $2,000 in newly purchased camera equipment but no knowledge of how to use it, he traveled in 1994 to a game reserve in Kenya on a photographic safari. He learned quickly from professionals, returned to Africa several times and published a book of photographs, “A Vision of Africa” (1998).
On another safari the year his book was published, he chartered a helicopter from which he found a thrilling new perspective.
“Once that helicopter lifted off, I looked down at the earth from above and felt like a completely different photographer,” he told the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2011. “My eyes, hand and brain began working differently.”
Tethered by a harness to his seat so that he wouldn’t fall from helicopters with their doors removed, Haas produced wildlife and landscape photography that he brought to National Geographic Books, which published his work in “Through the Eyes of the Gods: An Aerial Vision of Africa” (2005) and “Through the Eyes of the Condor: An Aerial Vision of Latin America” (2007).
The latter book contains an improbable image that he found while flying over the Yucatán Peninsula: hundreds of flamingos who had somehow formed the shape of a giant flamingo.
“That was the Holy Grail,” Haas told The Toronto Star in 2010. “The Holy Grail is the ability to capture an image that no one else has ever captured before and is very unlikely to be captured again.”