Aunt Betty Wolfe's cards to Chuck, 2003–2005

What these cards are

Aunt Betty (Davis) Wolfe — Chuck’s great-aunt on the maternal Wildermuth-Davis side, younger sister of his grandmother Dorothy Marie Davis Wildermuth — sent Chuck handwritten cards through his college and graduate-school years. Three of them survive in the family archive, all from a tight 2003–2005 window when Chuck had just moved from Marietta to Cambridge, Massachusetts for the MIT PhD. The cards are sentimental in the way American-grandmother-generation greeting cards from that era were — preprinted Hallmark verse on one panel, a handwritten note in pink or pen ink on the other — but the inside text is real: Aunt Betty’s actual voice, in her actual hand, on what was happening in Marietta the week she wrote.

Together they are the warmest small-format correspondence on the maternal-Wolfe side of this archive.

Card 1 — Congratulations on moving to Massachusetts (c. 2003)

A small card with the Hallmark verse “…with warm thoughts to let you know I care.” The inside:

Dear Chuck,

Congratulations Chuck. We are just so proud of you and all your accomplishments. You are so deserving of everything you get also. We pray you will like living in Mass. and that you will be very happy.

Love + Kisses, Norm & Betty

The reference to “living in Mass.” dates this to Chuck’s arrival in Massachusetts for the MIT PhD program, almost certainly the move-in window in late summer 2003 or fall 2003. “We are just so proud of you and all your accomplishments” is the kind of plain-statement family encouragement that doesn’t depend on knowing what a doctoral program in management is to mean what it means.

Card 2 — Birthday card, 22 November 2004

A larger card with the Hallmark verse “Thinking of you… and just wanted to let you know.” The handwritten inside:

11-22-04

Dearest Chuck,

I can’t believe you and Emily are getting so old. We think of you often Chuck and will be anxious to see you at Xmas time.

Saw your Mom yesterday for a few minutes. She is doing better thank goodness. That water in the basement about did her in. Norm has already been sick with his allergy & lung problems.

(maybe this will buy you a little gasoline)

Happy Birthday Chuck Love and Kisses, Aunt Betty & Uncle Norm

The 22 November 2004 dating — three months past Chuck’s actual August birthday — reads as a “thinking of you and meant to write sooner” card with a birthday wish folded in. The “Emily” is Emily Marie Schwartz Crouch, Aunt Betty’s granddaughter through her daughter Victoria Ann — Chuck and Emily were of close-enough age that “you and Emily are getting so old” worked as a single line.

The water-in-the-basement detail about Chuck’s mother Terrie and the “Norm has already been sick with his allergy & lung problems” line are the kind of plain Marietta-family news that this archive otherwise can carry only through obituaries and second-hand accounts. The aside “maybe this will buy you a little gasoline” — the card almost certainly held a check — is Aunt Betty’s small, dry register, the same family humor Charlie’s eulogy names as transmitted-down.

Card 3 — Valentine’s Day, 12 February 2005

A Valentine card with the Hallmark verse “May love brighten every corner of your world this Valentine’s Day.” The handwritten inside:

Dearest Chuck, 2-12-05

Congratulations to a very sweet and deserving young man. I predict you will get the other two!

Terrie called this A.M. and she is good and so is Ben. We still owe she & Ben a Birthday Dinner. Hopefully we won’t have any more ice!

We plan a trip to Florida in March. Haven’t seen Emily and Geoffrey for two years. Emily is doing well in school. It’s a four year program. Be good to yourself with our Love

Love, Betty & Norm

“I predict you will get the other two!” — the predicted other two almost certainly refer to two more graduate-school admissions Chuck was waiting on in February 2005. “Terrie called this A.M. and she is good and so is Ben” records Chuck’s mother Terrie and stepfather Benjamin F. Bain II, still nine years before Ben’s December 2014 death. The “we still owe she & Ben a Birthday Dinner” line documents the close practical relationship between the Wolfes and the Bains in the mid-2000s. “Emily is doing well in school. It’s a four year program” is the same Emily mentioned in the November 2004 birthday card, now in her undergraduate years.

The trip to Florida in March 2005 to see Emily and Geoffrey — not seen for two years — would be a final-stretch visit; Geoffrey B. Schwartz II would die in 2009, four years after this card was written.

What the cards record

The maternal-Wolfe layer of the archive has so far run mostly on documents that are formal and external — the 1945 Betty-and-Norm wedding photograph, the 108 Hillcrest Drive holidays, the 2015 obituaries when both Betty and Norm died. These three cards are the inside layer: who Aunt Betty was to Chuck specifically in the years he was making his life. They show her in her own hand, in her own register, watching Chuck go to MIT, asking about his progress, sending him a few dollars for gasoline, telling him Terrie called this morning, calling him “dearest” twice and “deserving” three times.

Two of the three are signed jointly Norm & Betty or Betty & Norm. Norm’s name on every card is the small documentation that the Wolfe household acted as one social unit toward Chuck throughout the years — the “Aunt Betty and Uncle Norm” of the Terrie obituary’s “close relatives by way of long entertainment of visiting family” line, made specific.

Sources: the three card scans (congratulations c. 2003, birthday 2004, Valentine 2005) — held in the family archive, transmitted by Chuck Eesley to this archive June 2026.