Dorothy Davis — Formal Portrait, 1943

A studio head-and-shoulders portrait of Dorothy Marie Davis at eighteen, the year she graduated from Marietta High School and began work as a bookkeeper at Citizen’s Bank, Marietta. The portrait shows her in dark formal dress with a white peter-pan collar, hair set in soft 1940s waves. The typed caption Robert Earl set beneath the print in the 1990 Heritage reads simply: “Dorothy Davis in 1943.”

What it documents

The 1943 portrait is the graduation-year portrait — the small, formal photograph that documented the closing of high school and the entry into wartime working life. The U.S. was deep into World War II; Dorothy’s future husband Robert Earl, three years older and already in the Army Air Forces, was on the path that would put him in B-24 navigation training and then in the Pacific. They had not yet met. The portrait sits in the archive as the before image of that meeting.

It is paired in the 1990 Heritage with the 1944 portrait on the same page — the two consecutive years carrying a small documentary of one young woman’s transition through the war years.

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