Robert Earl and crew in San Francisco — "Say It Isn't So," c. November 1944

Robert Earl Wildermuth and fellow airmen around a bar table in San Francisco, on the last stateside night out before the crew shipped for the Pacific — the table crowded with beer bottles (Alpen Brau labels), glasses, and an ashtray. The print survives with a typed caption affixed below it, written in Robert Earl’s own wry voice and titled “Say It Isn’t So.”

Who is in the photograph

Robert Earl’s caption identifies everyone at the table:

“SAY IT ISN’T SO — Our last night on the town in San Francisco, California before departing for The Southwest Pacific War Zone. On the left: Foreground: 2Lt. Ralph Wagner a Navigational School cadet friend of mine. Ralph was from Akron, Ohio. Background: Yours truly. Right foreground: A true lady fan from San Francisco — promised to ‘keep the home fires burning while we were gone.’ Cpl. Milton Emkow, assistant engineer and ball turret gunner from Columbus, Wisconsin. Funny he got the girl. Cpl. Fred Kuszmaul, radio man from Logansport, Ind. Wake up Fred and smell the roses. He never could hold his liquor.”

So, around the table:

• 2Lt. Ralph Wagner — foreground at left, a navigational-school cadet friend of Robert Earl’s, from Akron, Ohio (not a member of the crew).
• Robert Earl Wildermuth — “Yours truly,” in the background at left. (The earlier catalogue note that placed him “far left” is corrected by his own caption: the far-left foreground man is Wagner.)
• The “true lady fan from San Francisco,” right foreground — unnamed, who promised to keep the home fires burning.
• Cpl. Milton Emkow — assistant engineer and ball-turret gunner, from Columbus, Wisconsin; the one beside the girl (“Funny he got the girl”).
• Cpl. Fred Kuszmaul — radio man, from Logansport, Indiana; asleep at the table (“Wake up Fred and smell the roses — he never could hold his liquor”).

The high-resolution scan on this page is cropped to the four men around the table; the San Francisco woman sits just past the right edge of the frame, her hand and glass visible at the margin.

The send-off

This is the send-off photograph — the last stateside night out before the Van Valen crew flew, in Robert Earl’s words, “on a dark night in November at precisely midnight … out over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco” bound for Honolulu and the war.

It also rhymes, by coincidence, with the most-told story of his combat tour: two months later, over Taiwan, one of the Jolly Roger crews would heave a case of empty beer bottles out of their B-24, and Tokyo Rose would broadcast that the Americans had unleashed a shrieking new weapon on the “poor rice farmers of Taiwan.” The empties on this San Francisco table and the empties whistling down over the rice paddies belong to the same young men.

Where this was taken

Robert Earl’s caption places the scene in San Francisco, and his memoir dates the crew’s departure to midnight on 14 November 1944, flying out over the Golden Gate from Travis AFB — so this “last night on the town” is almost certainly 13–14 November 1944. The specific bar is not identified in any surviving record, and the photograph offers no signage to place it; the interior (venetian blinds, a chrome napkin dispenser, a vinyl-topped table) is a generic 1940s San Francisco tavern. The Alpen Brau bottles on the table are not a local clue — Alpen Brau was a St. Louis beer (Columbia Brewing Co.), so the tavern simply happened to stock a Midwestern brand.

Source: Eesley/Wildermuth family archive; identifications from Robert Earl Wildermuth’s own typed caption affixed to the print. Surfaced in The Big One: World War II.