Robert Earl and Dorothy Wildermuth — Itazuke Air Base, Fukuoka, Japan, 1968

A formal couple’s portrait of Robert Earl Wildermuth and Dorothy Marie Davis Wildermuth taken at Itazuke Air Base, Fukuoka, Japan in 1968 — the last year of the family’s three-year posting to Itazuke (1965–1968), which gave Chuck’s mother Terrie her high-school years in Japan named explicitly in Terrie’s 2017 obituary. Robert Earl stands in a dark suit with a boutonnière on the lapel; Dorothy beside him in a pale formal dress, holding a small bouquet. The typed caption Robert Earl set beneath the print in the 1990 Heritage names the place precisely: “Picture taken at Itazuke Air Base, Fukuoka, Japan in 1968.”

What it documents

The Itazuke portrait is the adult image of the 1943 and 1944 Marietta portraits — the same Dorothy Davis, now twenty-five years married, the mother of four, on a foreign Air Force base on the other side of the world from Waterford, Ohio. The boutonnière suggests an event — possibly the formal occasion of Terrie’s high school graduation in Japan the same year, or a squadron / base function from the closing months of Robert Earl’s tour as commander.

The frame is also a piece of the Japan-side of the family-threads essay’s #8 thread — the Japan-and-China place-and-language curiosity that runs through three generations of the Wildermuth-and-Eesley families.

Source: The Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage by Robert Earl Wildermuth, 1990 — Davis section.