Robert Earl Wildermuth, Army uniform, July 1944

Robert Earl Wildermuth, July 1944, age twenty — standing in U.S. Army utility uniform in front of a clapboard-sided house. The caption affixed to the print reads:

July 1944

Robert Earl Wildermuth, I (1924–1999)

(The “I” designating him as Robert Earl Sr., to distinguish from his son and grandson who would also bear the name across the next two generations.)

This is the earliest photograph of Robert Earl in this archive, predating both his WWII combat log “The Big One” and his 1948 Stanford BA portrait. At twenty, he was either in the early period of his Army Air Forces training or shortly into it; the camera plane B-24 missions for which he is documented as navigator came in 1945, the year after this photo.

The house behind him is almost certainly the Wildermuth family home in Marietta, Ohio — his last address before shipping out for the Pacific. The photograph would have been taken either at his enlistment leave or during a training-base leave home. It is the photograph that introduces the Robert Earl whose B-24 navigator career, MGM camera-plane mission over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1948 Stanford BA on the GI Bill, lieutenant-colonel Pentagon years, retirement to Orlando, and eighteen-year genealogical project would together constitute the documentary spine of the maternal side of this archive.

Source: Eesley/Wildermuth family archive; family-affixed caption.