The Three Davis Sisters — Mary (6), Dorothy (5), Betty (4) — "Why so glum?", c. 1930

The second of the Davis-sisters frames in the 1990 Heritage — Mary, Dorothy, Betty at six, five, and four, holding hands in front of a wooden fence. The typed caption Robert Earl added beneath the print carries the joke the photograph poses: “From the left: Mary Davis - age 6; Dorothy Davis - age 5 and Betty Davis - age 4. Why so glum?” All three are looking at the camera with the same flat unsmiling expression — a small documentary in 1930 child-portraiture, where holding still for the exposure mattered more than smiling for it.

What it documents

It is one of a pair Robert Earl reproduced on the same page of the Heritage with the lighter puppies-and-bare-feet frame immediately below it; the two are deliberately matched to show the same three girls a year apart, in different moods. The pair is the Heritage’s central piece of evidence that the Davis sisters did grow up in one another’s daily company through the late-1920s and early-1930s Ohio childhood that the rest of the section narrates.

The “why so glum?” sister set is the same three children whose surnames would later become Wildermuth, Wolfe, and Mary’s married name (TBD in the archive) — the Wildermuth-Wolfe-Davis kinship cluster that runs through three generations of Chuck’s childhood reminiscences. The three faces in the 1930 frame are the founding-image of that cluster.

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