Young Chuck on a red tricycle — the Annapolis house, c. 1981–83

A summer-afternoon snapshot of Chuck as a blond toddler in a red anchor-print sleeveless romper and leather sandals, sitting on a red Radio Flyer tricycle in the driveway of the family house in Annapolis, Maryland. He is looking past the camera in the focused little-kid stare of a child on a moving thing. Behind him: a yellow 1970s American sedan in the driveway, a lush green front lawn, and the two-story red-clapboard colonial with a brick first floor and a covered front porch that was the family’s Maryland home in the years before the 1983 return to Marietta. On the front-porch step a tall figure in shorts is at work on something — almost certainly Charlie on a weekend project, but the figure is partly turned away.

What it documents

This is the earliest documentary frame of Chuck on the Annapolis house in the archive — the structural anchor for Charlie’s “Annapolis years” section (1971–1983, Sears employment, the family’s first decade of married life). It places Chuck in late toddlerhood — c. 1981 to 1983 — in the front yard of the house the family would leave when they moved back to Marietta to 137 Hillcrest Drive and the 108 Hillcrest neighborhood of the Wolfes.

The Annapolis years and the c. 1972 Charlie studio portrait (whose location was open between Marietta and the Maryland area) sit on the same family-geography thread — the Eesley east-coast decade between Vietnam and Marietta.

Source: Eesley family album, shared by Chuck Eesley June 2026.