Norm and Betty Wolfe on Thanksgiving Day, 108 Hillcrest Drive, 24 November 2011

Aunt Betty and Uncle Norm Wolfe on Thanksgiving Day 2011 at 108 Hillcrest Drive in Marietta — the holiday-host house that Chuck remembers as one of the two anchors of his childhood holiday-meal life (alongside Grandma Peggy’s Seventh Street house).

What the photograph records

The typed caption at the top of the print identifies the scene precisely:

November 24, 2011 — Thanksgiving Day at the Wolfe’s, 108 Hillcrest Dr., Marietta, OH

Betty Jean (Davis) Wolfe & Norman “Norm” Graham Wolfe

The two of them stand together in the Hillcrest dining room: Betty in a soft turquoise sweater, dark trousers, with eyeglasses and her hair pulled back; Norm in a dark red shirt, dark trousers, hands resting on the dining-room chair-back in front of him, smiling slightly to the side. A pink-carnation bouquet sits on the table at right — Thanksgiving flowers. A shadowboxed table-setting display (“pitcher and creamer and salt-and-pepper”) sits on the wall shelf at left; a small oil painting of a still life hangs below it; an electric chime clock sits above on the wall. The kitchen window over Norm’s shoulder shows the daylight coming in.

This is their kitchen-and-dining area at the Hillcrest house — the room where the holiday-dinner pattern Chuck remembers happened across decades.

Why the date matters

24 November 2011 — this was Norm and Betty’s last Thanksgiving together at Hillcrest for which a photograph survives. Norm would die just over three years later, on 9 January 2015, age 88. Betty would die six months and nine days after Norm, on 18 July 2015, age 89. Charlie Eesley would die four months and eight days after Betty, on 26 November 2015, age 68. Three of the four elder figures who hosted Chuck’s family holidays through his childhood were gone within eleven months in 2015. The 2011 Thanksgiving captured here is a frame of the world the Eesley family had just before that closing.

The arc the photograph closes

Chuck’s memory of the Wolfe holiday-host pattern is that “Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas were often spent at their house.” This labeled and dated photograph is the closest documentary record this archive holds of that arrangement — the Hillcrest kitchen and the Thanksgiving table photographed at the apex of the long pattern, three years before the closing.

Source: Eesley/Wolfe family archive, transmitted by Chuck Eesley 2026. Typed caption: “November 24, 2011 — Thanksgiving Day at the Wolfe’s, 108 Hillcrest Dr., Marietta, OH / Betty Jean (Davis) Wolfe & Norman ‘Norm’ Graham Wolfe.”