Dorothy Marie (Davis) Wildermuth — Memorial Service Program, 13 August 2010

The two-page printed program from Dorothy Marie (Davis) Wildermuth’s memorial service, held Friday, 13 August 2010 at 7:00 p.m. at the Church of Christ, 534 Sixth Street, Marietta, Ohio, five months after her death on 5 March 2010 in Brookhaven, Georgia at age 85. The program carries her full biographical sketch in a single panel and the order-of-service on the facing panel.

What the program records

The biographical panel on the left settles or confirms several facts:

• Born 24 February 1925 in Waterford, Ohio — the second daughter of Bessie Marie Davis and Homer Edward Davis. Grew up in Waterford / Unionville, Ohio, and graduated from Marietta High School in 1943 — the same Marietta school district her own daughter Terrie would later teach in for twenty-three years.
• Married Robert Earl Wildermuth on 20 April 1946 in Marietta, Ohio. The marriage lasted fifty-three years, including the Air Force decades that took them across Florida, California, Oklahoma, Ohio, Colorado, Texas, Maryland, and Japan.
• Career: bookkeeper at Citizen’s Bank, Marietta; the South East Bank in Orlando, Florida; the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and the Maitland Public Library in Maitland, Florida. Two of those four positions place her on the Stanford campus (alongside her husband’s 1948 BA) and in the Florida public-library system — both of which would have meant something specific to her granddaughter Terrie’s later children’s-librarian and Title-I-teacher career in Marietta.
• Faith: attended the Methodist Church — a different denominational seat than the First Congregational UCC which served as the Eesley-side family church across four generations. Dottie was the Methodist of the maternal line, not the Congregationalist of the paternal line.
• What she enjoyed: “flowers, singing, square-dancing, and quilting and creating many beautiful needlework projects for her children and grandchildren.” The list runs parallel to the azalea-garden, library-desk, classroom-reading texture of Terrie’s own life in the next generation — the household-as-creative-space practice passed from mother to daughter to granddaughter.
• Survived by her four children — Terrie L. Bain (Benjamin) of Marietta; Sandra S. Clement (Dunwoody, Georgia); Debra J. Massaro (Angelo) of Pembroke, Virginia; and Robert E. Wildermuth, Jr. (Dawn) of Sarasota, Florida — and her grandchildren Charles Eric Eesley, Giancarlo Salvatora Massaro, Briana Marie Massaro, “Trey” Robert Earl Wildermuth III, Thomas Mathew Wildermuth, and Sarah Marie Wildermuth.
• Died 5 March 2010 in Brookhaven, Georgia, age 85. Brookhaven is just outside Atlanta — the same metropolitan area where her daughter Sandy was living at the time (and is named as living in Terrie’s own 2017 obituary).

What the program names of the service

The right-hand panel records the order of the Friday, 13 August 2010, 7:00 p.m. service at the Church of Christ, Marietta:

• Message by Roger Rush.
• Solo: “Ave Maria” — Julia Dryer, Junior, Marietta College.
• Family remembrances: Terrie L. Bain, Sandra S. Clement, Debra J. Massaro — the three Wildermuth sisters, in birth order, each speaking for their mother.
• Solo: “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” — Julia Dryer.
• Concluding thoughts by Roger Rush.
• Solo: “Peace Like A River” — Julia Dryer.

The closing line of the program, printed below the music: “This is a time for gathering all the best of a good life into the pages of memory, to be held in the heart forever.”

The program sits in this archive as the most complete single document on Dottie that survives.