Charlie Eesley — formal studio portrait, c. 1972, Annapolis area (tentative)

A formal color studio portrait of Charles McMaster “Charlie” Eesley in a dark suit and tie against a soft mottled studio backdrop. Tentatively dated c. 1972 in Marietta, per family memory.

What the portrait shows

Charlie is photographed in classic three-quarter business-portrait framing: dark suit with the wide lapels of the early 1970s cut, white shirt with a narrow point collar, dark patterned tie, hands clasped in front of him on a cream-colored textured surface. Hair dark, slightly receding at the temples, brushed back. Clean-shaven. The expression is calm and composed, looking just past the camera.

Why c. 1972

The styling — wide-lapel suit, longer hair brushed back, clean shave — reads as the early 1970s. He was born February 1947, so c. 1972 places him around twenty-five, the year after his June 1971 ETS from the U.S. Army.

Where it was taken

The likely location is the Annapolis, Maryland area. Charlie and Terrie settled around the Baltimore/Annapolis region after his June 1971 ETS from the U.S. Army, and Charlie worked at Sears through those east-coast years — the household where Chuck would be born in December 1979 and where the family lived until the 1983 return to Marietta. A company-portrait sitting at Sears in the Annapolis area would explain the formal studio framing.

Marietta, Ohio remains a backup possibility if the family was in Ohio for a stretch of c. 1972 — but the Annapolis years are the stronger fit.

If the date holds, this is the earliest civilian-life portrait of Charlie in the archive — on the near side of the Vietnam tour, before the rest of his life folded in around it. The man looking past the camera here is roughly the same Charlie of the c. 1971 Vietnam-return photograph at his parents’ Sixth Street house — just a year or so later, in a studio rather than in front of bookshelves.

What is open

The 1972 date and the Marietta-vs-Baltimore/Annapolis location are family memory, not documentary — the print itself carries no studio stamp, no embossed date, and no caption that fixes it. A photographer’s mark on the original print’s back — if it survives — would settle both questions.

Source: Eesley family archive, shared by Chuck Eesley, June 2026; date and location per family memory.