Robert Earl Wildermuth — life story — Eesley

The full original document is available here: Read Robert Earl’s life story (PDF, 55 pp.).

This is the flagship document of the maternal line — Robert Earl’s account of his own life, written about 1989 and extended with a 1993 travelogue. It carries the family story from his grandfather Johann Michael Wildermuth’s emigration from Württemberg, through the Marietta years, his own Pacific service aboard a B-24 with the 90th Bomb Group, his Stanford BA in Biological Sciences (1948), his career through Korea and the Pentagon, his teaching years, his medical-records second career, and into the genealogical research that produced The Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage and the German-ancestor sketches.

The closing pages address themselves explicitly to “future genealogists.” This archive is one of them answering.

The transcription below is narrative-pass coverage from the OCR — not verbatim of every line, but every consequential passage in his own voice, organized by the life-arc the memoir follows.

Boyhood — 413 Harmar Street, Marietta

“It was a beautiful Spring day, the kind that Southeastern Ohio is noted for, when I, Robert Earl Wildermuth, first saw the light of day as a new member of the Earl Adam and Sadye Irene (Fleming) Wildermuth family. In addition to my mother and father, I had an older sister, Ruth Irene Wildermuth who was born two years prior to my arrival. I entered this life at 11:00 A.M., born at home, at 123 Franklin Street in the Harmar Section of Marietta, Washington County, Ohio. I had light brown hair and pale blue eyes, a trait I received from my father and maternal grandfather.”

He was a year and a half old when his parents joined his aunt Lenora (Fleming) Eagle and her husband Ogden Eagle on a tent-camping car trip headed to Florida. The mountain roads through West Virginia were so narrow and winding the drivers had to back the cars up the steep grades so the gravity-fed gasoline could reach the engines. They never made it to Florida — the men took work in the cotton mills at High Point and Thomasville, North Carolina, stayed about a year, then drove home to Ohio. The Eagles never came back; they settled in Roanoke, Virginia.

In 1929, Earl Adam bought the family’s dream house at 413 Harmar Street — three bedrooms, large dining room, brick foundation four feet high, on a rise three blocks from the Muskingum River. “This was a three bedroom house… it sat upon a brick foundation approximately four feet high and was located on a steady rise three blocks from the Muskingum River.” When the March 1937 Marietta flood hit, the water came up four feet on the first floor and floated the wooden fireplace mantel off its base; the mantel banged around inside the house breaking every window. Robert Earl, who had a paper route, ran the family boat to the newspaper office on its second floor and “could sell more papers than the news company could provide me.”

Six blocks away was Harmar Elementary School, built on the high point of land where the original settlers had built Old Fort Harmar in 1787. The school looked across the Muskingum and the Ohio rivers to West Virginia.

The bicycle and the basketball

In seventh grade, his father took him to Baltimore for a summer, running a manufacturing plant for the concrete-silo-stave company he worked for. The factory needed a water boy to wet down the staves so the cement didn’t dry too fast. Robert Earl walked the tops of the stacks with a hose all summer, earned a dollar a day, and bought himself a super deluxe bicycle at a Baltimore warehouse store — shipped home on the train.

He was six feet tall and 130 pounds by ninth grade; football wasn’t his sport; he hated running so track was out; basketball turned out to be it. He played in phys-ed during the day, on the school team in the afternoon, in the industrial men’s league at the YMCA at night, and in pick-up games at the Catholic High School gymnasium on Saturdays. “I wore out more gym shoes than my dad could afford to buy.”

In about the second or third grade he had decided he wanted to be a medical doctor. He took the college-prep curriculum at Marietta High. Senior year, his father told him there was no money for college past graduation — three younger siblings still needed raising, and Robert Earl was expected to work. He placed twenty-fifth in the Southeastern Ohio District on the state academic exams; Marietta College offered him one semester’s tuition as a grant; he figured one semester wouldn’t get him started.

“Besides a blow to end all blows had occurred in the middle of my junior year. World War II started on 7 December 1941 and my Class of 1942 all of a sudden became a wartime class.”

The riveting job and the draft

After graduation he worked the hardware department at Montgomery Ward for about forty cents an hour. His aunt Laverna (Fleming) Raison in Newark, Ohio invited him for the summer; he and his cousin Charles Fleming enrolled in an aircraft riveting course sponsored by Curtiss Wright in Columbus. Charles quit and joined the Navy; Robert Earl finished the course and got a job in the Curtiss Wright aircraft factory in Columbus — “over thirty thousand employees around the clock… we made Navy observation aircraft and dive bombers. A great many of them were sold to the British Navy.”

He commuted thirty miles daily and watched his college-tuition savings grow. On 24 March 1943 he reported to the Marietta draft board with the rest of his high-school class. He could have claimed a defense-industry deferment but “by then patriotism had caught up with me.”

Fort Hayes, Miami Beach, the lost personnel file

A bus took the inductees to Fort Hayes in Columbus for the more thorough exam. “A few hours with our ‘kindly’ sergeant showing us the ins and outs of proper military dress, we at least got half way presentable.”

On 31 March 1943 — “one of the coldest days of the year” — the troop train pulled out of Columbus. He woke up in Jacksonville, then Miami Beach, assigned to the Army Air Corps. The McAlpin Hotel on Beach Street was the barracks — “They told us the rooms we occupied normally rented for $100 plus per day and the rules were that at the end of the war the government was to return the hotels to their rightful owners in as good a shape as when they were first leased. You can thus imagine the spit and polish demanded of us by our drill sergeant.”

At the end of basic training everyone got promoted to PFC and assigned to specialty schools. Everyone but Robert Earl. “I got no assignment and no promotion and no one seemed to know what to do with me so I was assigned to go back into basic training.” He did basic training three times before figuring out that his entire personnel file had been lost at the basic-training records center. Had he not noticed a bulletin-board notice for Aviation Student Training and signed up himself, “I might have stayed at Miami Beach for an indefinite time, if not for the entire war.”

Massachusetts State College — Amherst

A College Training Detachment at Massachusetts State College in Amherst was set up as a West Point extension. “We had upper classmen with the usual hazing, we studied mathematics, physics, meteorology and officer etiquette (how to dine instead of eat, how to converse instead of talk, how to dress and general deportment).” Most male students had gone to war; the campus was full of coeds; the agricultural-school orchards and dairy supplied blueberry pies and cold cream milk to the cadets. “I began to think that this Army life wasn’t so bad after all.”

Nashville classification, Selman Field, Class 44-9

The next stop was the Army Air Corps Classification Center at Nashville. Tests by the hour. His parents made the long bus trip down from Marietta to see him; the city was choked with coal smoke and Third-Army-on-maneuvers soldiers. He admits he was never able to stay overnight away from home as a child without becoming homesick, and the visit meant a great deal.

He had decided he wanted to be a bombardier — “After all, I couldn’t even drive a car” — and deliberately did poorly on what he thought were pilot-skills tests. The motor-skills tests overlapped with bombardier classification; the strategy backfired and he was classified as a navigator. “This had no big adverse effect on me… being a navigator was the most self satisfying job I have ever had.”

Sixteen weeks of ground school at Selman Field, Monroe, Louisiana — dead reckoning, celestial, map reading. Then C-54 trainer flights, three navigation cadets per plane, with predicted-vs-actual position scoring. “In all of my training flights, I had one ‘zero-zero’ mission.” The next mission after the perfect one, he argued with his instructor about a grade of 80% — the instructor crossed it out and gave him a zero. “I learned never to question an instructor.”

Graduation day was the Fourth of July 1944. Silver navigator wings were pinned on by Colonel “Killer” Kane, a leader on the Ploesti oil-fields raid. He wasn’t yet 21 so he became a Flight Officer by warrant rather than a Second Lieutenant by commission — “I received my commission almost a year later when I became twenty-one in the jungles of the Philippine Islands. By then I had flown over twenty combat missions against the Japanese.”

Boise, Lincoln, Langley — and meeting Dottie

Ten days of leave in Marietta, then to Lincoln Air Base, Nebraska for crew assignment. The backlog meant immediate leave back home — and it was on this second leave home that he met Dorothy Davis, who would become his wife. She was admired by his best friend Duane Lankford, an airborne soldier home on leave with only two days left, who urged Robert Earl to look her up. “Duane was later killed in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe.”

Crew training at Gowen Field, Boise, Idaho on a B-24. Robert Earl lists his ten-man crew by name and hometown — the roster that becomes the crew biographies in The Big One combat log:

Lt. Maxwell Van Valen — pilot, Newton, Massachusetts (MIT)
Lt. Robert Steckroth — co-pilot, Hazelton, Pennsylvania
F.O. John McDonough — bombardier, St. Louis, Missouri
Cpl. Lyle Found — engineer, Great Bend, Kansas (oldest at 23)
Cpl. Frederick Kuszmaul — radio, Logansport, Indiana (second-year pre-med at Indiana University; “my best friend on the crew”)
Cpl. Milton Emkow — ball turret, Madison, Wisconsin
Cpl. Charles Bojt — nose turret, Buffalo, New York
Cpl. Orland Young — waist gunner, Akron, Ohio
Cpl. Jesse Murdoch — tail gunner and crew photographer, Tyler, Texas

At Langley Field, Virginia they were photographed in French civilian clothes and given French passports — the European theater seemed certain. Then assignment came through to the Pacific instead.

The Pacific tour — Biak, Tacloban, Ie Shima

Island-hopping from Hickam Field, Hawaii westward. The final leg, a thousand miles along the northern coast of New Guinea, was their first flight in the war zone. They crossed the International Date Line and the Equator en route to Biak Island in the Netherlands East Indies — coral island seven miles south of the Equator — base of the 90th Bomb Group, the Jolly Rogers.

The combat tour itself is the subject of The Big One (Robert Earl notes here he’s already written it up); the memoir adds three stories that the combat log doesn’t carry:

The night he got lost over the South China Sea

After about fifteen missions, on an all-night radar-bombing mission from Tacloban airstrip in the Philippines to a Japanese naval base on the northern tip of Taiwan, Lt. Adler the radar bombardier was over-confident in the new equipment. 120 miles from base he told Robert Earl he had the home airstrip locked on radar — “if I wanted he would direct the plane back to home base and I could take a nap if I liked.”

Robert Earl made a bed of flight jackets and slept. He woke up to the pilot telling him they were lost — what Adler had been homing on was a thunderhead full of lightning giving back a brilliant radar return. They had flown the wrong way. Radio bearings came back inconsistent — “We did not know that it was the Japanese that were picking up our requests for radio bearings and they had us flying in every direction to further use up our fuel supply.” Through a break in the clouds Robert Earl spotted a U.S. naval convoy headed northwest, told the pilot to fly over it and take up the same heading, reasoning that if they had to bail out the convoy might pick them up. The convoy was headed to Tacloban. They landed; the two outboard engines stopped while taxiing — “out of fuel.” Mechanics estimated they had had fifteen minutes of fuel left.

“I caught hell from the 5th Air Force Chief Navigator for several weeks thereafter… Please learn from my experience, if you want a job done to your satisfaction — DO IT YOURSELF.”

He told this same story a second time, decades later, in the margin of his copy of the group’s published history — dating it to the night of 13/14 January 1945 and naming Lt. Adler outright. See his annotations to Alcorn’s Jolly Rogers, which also carry his note about the Japanese soldier found in the next tent on Peleliu.

The Peleliu sleeper

Before the Tacloban basing, the bomb group flew briefly from the Peleliu Islands, recently retaken from the Japanese. One day the whole crew went to lunch except one co-pilot who had flown all night. They heard a scream from the tent area. The co-pilot had been awakened by a Japanese soldier ransacking the tent for food and clothing — not aggressive, just hungry, bypassed in the recapture. “Needless to say from that time on, no one stayed behind when the whole group went to eat and everyone slept with their pistols under their pillows at night.” Twenty-five years later in Japan he had a Japanese secretary whose father had supervised a coconut plantation on Peleliu and evacuated one week before the American campaign began. “It’s a small world after all and even enemies can become partners.”

The mission that got cancelled and the MGM cameras

From Ie Shima, the small coral island off Okinawa where Ernie Pyle was killed by a sniper, the crew had finished its required missions and was assigned a brand-new airplane to fly home. Then their names went back up on the operations board for one more mission. At the briefing tent only the oldest crews were present, the Group Chaplain — who had never attended a briefing before — was there, and no target was marked on the map. The target was in a sealed envelope to be opened thirty minutes into the flight.

The mission was cancelled three days running. On the fourth day, in the air, it was aborted and they were sent to the secondary target — Shanghai aerodrome — where they destroyed 54 enemy aircraft on the ground. Only after returning was the original target revealed: the camouflaged remains of the Japanese fleet in the Inland Sea of Japan, just discovered by reconnaissance. The flight up the inlet, with heavy land-based anti-aircraft on both sides for thirty miles, would have been a suicide mission. “The Navy sent low-level dive bombers in and thoroughly damaged the naval vessels. Hurray for the Navy!!!”

Then Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August). With the Japanese moving toward surrender, the crew was assigned one more mission — to fly an MGM newsreel cameraman over Nagasaki to film the bombed city. “We flew up to Nagasaki and made several flights over the city from tree top level to 5,000 feet while the camera/newsman hung out the waist window taking pictures. He promised us some one of a kind still pictures of his movie but we never did receive them.” The fully-built-out treatment of this mission — cameraman, suppressed footage, and the Hiroshima/Nagasaki question — sits in The Big One.

The surrender, the celebration, the typhoon

He watched the Japanese surrender delegation land at Ie Shima in three Betty bombers painted with green crosses; the door opened and “the first thing we saw was a hand with a bottle of champagne sticking out.”

The peace celebration on Ie Shima was where he came closest to being killed in the whole war. Drunk friends fired rifles in the air; one officer was killed and another wounded by friendly fire. “I took my radio and crawled into a fox-hole and hid. I heard drunken friends during the night saying ‘Where’s old Wildermuth. Let’s go find that so and so and shoot his a—’. All in jest I hope but never the less intimidating.”

Then the biggest typhoon on record delayed his trip home. The mess hall — a two-unit Quonset hut anchored on a concrete slab — “blew away in one piece and it didn’t touch ground until it had flown across a baseball field about 150 feet in distance.” The weather station blew away with winds at 185 knots.

Three days of repairs to his plane after the storm, then the long flight home via Hawaii to McClellan Field, California. He and Fred Kuszmaul rode the train together to Wright-Patterson, “had a scrumptous last meal together in the swankiest restaurant in Dayton, Ohio,” and parted. On 30 November 1945 he was separated from the Army as a first lieutenant. “It was now time for me to get on with my life.”

Stanford on the GI Bill

He had nervous condition — what was then called “combat nerves.” “I could not sit still and constantly paced from room to room. I even ate my meals while pacing.” Painting old squadron insignias helped him calm down.

Marietta College started a winter session for returning servicemen on 2 December 1945; the GI Bill had just been enacted, paying full tuition plus books plus ninety dollars a month. He started a pre-med program, then on 20 April 1946 (Easter Sunday) he and Dottie married — Dottie’s father Homer Davis was hospitalized that week with appendicitis, so the big church wedding became a small ceremony at the preacher’s house with both sets of parents.

After two years of pre-med at Marietta, he applied to Ohio State, Western Reserve, and Cincinnati medical schools and was rejected by all three. His advisor said Ohio State had had 1,400 applicants that year for ~60 spots. The advisor suggested western schools. He applied to UC, USC, and Stanford — the two California state schools were limited to three out-of-state students each per year; Stanford accepted him conditionally.

“I really didn’t know much about Stanford except that their football team had played in the last Rose Bowl before the war and that wasn’t much of a recommendation to head west for.”

No new cars had been built during the war. His name had worked up to number three on a Marietta dealer’s waitlist, then stayed there — “I found that men were paying dealers ‘under the table’ to get delivery on cars.” In disgust he bought the best 1939 used car he could find and drove Dottie west.

“Stanford University turned out to be a dream. It is one of the most beautiful universities in America… It is situated on the outskirts of Palo Alto, California, a small city of about 30,000 people, thirty miles south of San Francisco. It’s architecture is Spanish with two story, sandstone buildings with red tiled roofs… Academically Stanford was rated number three in the United States when I attended and it is known as the ‘Harvard of the West’. Millionaire’s sons and daughters go there and movie star’s children strived for admission and here I was a young guy from rural Ohio and from the wrong side of town at that. All during my stay there however, I never felt inferior and since white tee shirts and blue jeans were the accepted student attire I fit right in.”

They rented a house on the Stanford golf course. Dottie worked at the Hoover Library. Robert Earl’s conditional admission was lifted after the first semester. His senior-year medical-school application was again denied. He took his BA in Biological Sciences (conferred 1 October 1948) anyway, “thoroughly discouraged,” and went looking for full-time work.

Container Corporation, Marietta grocery, Hamilton Field

He took a trainee job with Container Corporation of America in Oakland, found an affordable apartment in Richmond, California — “a war-time industrial city built by the government with city block after city block of wooden apartment buildings to house shipyard workers… 90% black and since the war had ended there was about 75,000 people in that town unemployed. Crime was rampant.”

Their first daughter Terrie Lee was born on 13 January 1949 — colicky, in a three-room apartment with drunken brawls in the street outside. Dottie’s mother in Marietta was diagnosed with lung cancer; the couple resigned and drove home with what they had.

Newark, Ohio next — Henry J. Kaiser Aluminum, foundry work, midnight-to-7AM shift in the lab when the foundry closed; then back to Marietta where Robert Earl and his father Earl Adam opened a neighborhood grocery store. Their second daughter Sandra Sue was born 13 August 1950. The grocery prospered slowly; Robert Earl took no salary; “the days and weeks became mighty long.”

Back to California. He took construction work in the Palo Alto building boom — “the pay was phenomenal (with overtime)” — and learned that California crews only work seven months a year. With the Korean War starting and friends enlisting, he went to the recruiter and was offered sergeant’s rank to come back into the now-separate U.S. Air Force.

Korea, the head injury, and back into uniform

He was assigned to a Fighter-Interceptor Group at Hamilton Air Force Base north of San Francisco; the family moved into a new three-bedroom government house in Novato. His clerk-typist job at the squadron orderly room had him logging flying hours in official logbooks under a tyrannical TSgt. Kelty — “no errors; no erasures; no strike-overs.”

A bulletin-board notice asked ex-flying officers to apply for recall to active duty. Robert Earl was eligible; the Reserve Headquarters happened to be at Hamilton. He was sworn in as a First Lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve without telling Kelty what he was doing. “After a particularly bad week with Sgt. Kelty, I told him he’d better ease up because someday soon I would be an officer and I could make it difficult for him.”

In May 1951 he was recalled to active duty. He went to Mather for bombardier training (now Navigator/Bombardier), then Langley for low-level night training. Before shipping to Korea he was sent to Stead AFB, Reno for survival training. Dottie took the girls to Marietta to wait out the year. At Camp Stoneman, California — the point of embarkation — he and friends went into Oakland for a last big dinner. On the way back to base they were in a serious automobile accident. Robert Earl spent ten months in the hospital at Parks Air Force Base with a fractured skull and left facial paralysis. “When discharged from the hospital, I was grounded and told that due to my head injury, I could never fly again.”

A year at Scott AFB Illinois for ground communications school followed; then Korea after all, this time on the ground — “commanded a communications squadron, was promoted to Captain and got back on flying status.” The family bought their first house in Holly Hill, Florida, just outside Daytona Beach.

Through the 1950s — flying schools, Sacramento, Tampa, Denver

A series of flying-school and staff assignments. Mather AFB, Sacramento for radar-observer school — daughter Debra Jean was born at about 9 AM on 1 January 1956 (“happened to be the first baby born on January the first 1956 and won a baby ‘derby’ sponsored by the local merchants and was named Miss Sacramento County of 1956”). He became “a ‘three headed monster’ — Navigator/Bombardier/Radar Observer” with the Air Force Observer’s silver wings.

McDill AFB, Tampa for B-47 jet bomber duty (“my first jet aircraft”); Lowry AFB, Denver for the year-long Armament/Electronics School; back to McDill as Armament/Electronics Supervisor in the 306th Bomb Wing. In 1962 the 306th won the Strategic Air Force Command Bomber Competition and his squadron was named best in SAC; he received the Air Force Commendation Medal.

SMU, Kennedy, Marina Oswald, and Itazuke

When the 306th was deactivated in 1964, the Air Force needed engineering degrees. He was accepted into the Air Force Institute of Technology and assigned to Southern Methodist University in Dallas for an industrial-engineering degree. His son Robert Jr. was born 16 February 1965 there.

“President Kennedy came to Dallas for a visit and he was subsequently assassinated there. I had planned to take the family to the airport to see President Kennedy and I was planning to have my daughter Debbie present him with a bouquet of roses… Fortunately or unfortunately, I had a final examination in an engineering course on the day of the President’s visit and my plans at the airport had to be cancelled.”

In the SMU student snack bar before the assassination, Texan civilian students had been saying “That so and so better hadn’t come to Dallas or he’ll get his a— shot off.” Dallas was strongly Republican; Fort Worth fifteen miles away was strongly Democratic; “political feelings ran very high in these two cities.” After the assassination Marina Oswald and her children moved to his neighborhood in Richardson — “we saw her quite often in the local market. She was readily accepted in our community and to my knowledge there were no threats or harassment made towards her.”

After his promotion to Major and his graduation, the whole family — “four children and Dottie and I, loaded ourselves into our family car and headed for California by way of Ohio” — drove west, then flew to Itazuke Air Base, Fukuoka, Japan, where he was assigned as Chief of Maintenance in the 1955th Communications Squadron — “the third worst Communications Squadron out of thirty one in the Far East.” Rob, six months old, “was a seasoned traveller at less than one year of age.”

The Itazuke turnaround — and Brigadier General Shtogren

Brigadier General Anthony Shtogren — the highest-educated general in the Air Force (three undergrad degrees plus a Harvard and an MIT Masters), and “the meanest general in the Air Force and one of the foulest talking men on earth” — was coming to inspect. At a breakfast with Maj. Hamelin and Robert Earl, the general “ranted and raved, cursed and threatened” and promised to “fire everybody and ship us off to Viet Nam where we’d be stuck out so far in the jungles the ‘Gooks’ would be sure to get us.” “My glass of milk was curdled at the end of our meal.”

Maj. Hamelin (an alcoholic, Robert Earl notes) retired suddenly. Robert Earl became squadron commander of the next-to-worst communications squadron in the Far East. His method:

“I called all of my officer and non-commissioned officer staff together and apprised them of the situation and asked for their help and expertise to get this squadron turned around. I picked their brains for ideas and methods to improve. I called all the airmen in the squadron together at a Commander’s Call and apprised them of our situation and asked for their complaints, ideas and ways that we could become the BEST squadron in the Far East. I even put a suggestion box in the orderly room… I always felt that to find out better ways of doing a job, one should ask the people who were doing the job.”

The squadron jumped from 29th to 8th in the first quarter; to 3rd in the next; eventually to #1 in the Far East, where it stayed for the rest of his tour. “We had won every Far East Communications Commander’s Trophy that there was to win and some of them we won so many times that we retired them permanently to our squadron trophy case.”

At a Commanders’ Conference at Wheelus AFB in Tripoli, Libya — where General Shtogren liked to fly his commanders for his “secret promotion party” tradition — Robert Earl’s squadron adjutant called from Japan to tell him a message had come down from USAF Headquarters: he had been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel “below the zone of those normally eligible for promotion.” He kept the secret so as not to upstage the general’s announcement that night.

The Pentagon — and the proposal that took four years

At the end of his Itazuke tour in 1968 the orders came: the Pentagon. “Only one in fourteen hundred eligible ever got such an assignment. It was a great boost in a military career but it was the most frustrating assignment possible.” He worked on a proposal blessed by a three-star general from his first month there. Every day for three years he spent at least two hours on it. The project had to be coordinated through thirty-three other offices.

“When I retired at the end of three years, the project had finally been approved by all concerned and after I had been retired one year, it was finally published in the Air Force Policy Manual. This kind of frustration in getting something accomplished that had the highest approval originally was what led a lot of promising officers to retire from the military rather than face another tour of duty in the Pentagon.”

Pentagon-Washington-Pentagon rotation, plus the cost of Washington-area housing, made “one seemed to feel like a yoyo.” He had reached twenty-eight years for pay purposes against a thirty-year maximum. In May 1970 he flew to Florida, bought a house, took a teaching job, and on 31 May 1970 retired at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

The day they drove away from Terrie and Sandy on the University of Maryland campus (they had chosen to stay at Maryland rather than transfer to a Florida school) — “it was a mighty sad day for me when we drove away from our two oldest girls on the campus of the University.”

Florida — diabetes, teaching, the medical-records second career

A month after retirement the Department of Defense notified him: the discharge physical had shown sugar in his urinalysis; tests at the Jacksonville Veterans Hospital confirmed diabetes. For fourteen years he controlled it by diet; in 1984 he had to start insulin. “To this date in 1989, I have had no serious problems resulting from my diabetes so to anyone of my progeny that I may have passed the diabetic gene onto, have faith for diabetes can be lived with if certain care is taken.” (This is Chuck’s father Charlie’s likely father-in-law diabetes-risk reference — the line passes through Terrie.)

A second letter from DOD a month later: he had been awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for the Pentagon work. His full decoration list also included the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, the Southwest Pacific Area Medal with two battle stars, the Philippine Liberation Medal with two battle stars, the National Defense Medal with two oak leaf clusters, and the Air Force Commendation Medal.

He started teaching mathematics at Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach in fall 1970. It was the first year of school integration in the South; he taught four levels of math; the bussing schedule, the part-time-job culture, and the lack of preparation at all levels left him “sadly disenchanted with the school system and education in general.” He resigned.

A sequence of jobs followed — sales, state unemployment agent, golf course, electronics technician — until he remembered a Pentagon-era briefing from HEW about medical-records administration as a coming field. At 48 he enrolled at the new Florida Technological University in Orlando (now University of Central Florida) and earned a degree in Medical Record Administration in two years.

“Not bad, three degrees for a person who at graduation from high school did not have the where-with-all to take advantage of a short term scholarship.”

He went to work for Blue Cross of Florida as Hospital Representative and then Charge Auditor — “making sure that the Blue Cross patients got the health care that Blue Cross was being charged for.” In 1986, at 62, he took early retirement to pursue genealogy full time.

“To any future genealogists, I say good hunting for the details that I couldn’t find and have a good time for knowing one’s origin and family background is a valuable and rewarding insight into how and why you are what you are.”

This is the line the rest of the archive is built on.

The 1993 return to Württemberg — with Sandra

A 1993 travelogue closes the memoir. On 2 November 1993 Robert Earl and his daughter Sandra (Wildermuth) Clement flew from Atlanta to Stuttgart via Amsterdam. “After our experiences going to Wiesbaden, we decided to give that trip up…”

In Stuttgart they stayed in a hotel in the central train station — “the country side around Stuttgart and the city itself with its location on the sides of hills and down in the valley looked exactly like West Virginia.” In Marbach, the home of Schiller and of Ottilie Wildermuth — “Germany’s most famous female publisher and poetess… A main street that runs through Marbach is named Wildermuthstrasse after Ottilie Wildermuth.”

In Rielingshausen — the village seven miles northeast of Marbach where the Wildermuth name is said to have originated — they found the old Evangelische church built in 1752 and the old cemetery beside it. A hostile cleaning lady clung to their sides inside the church; he took no pictures inside. Outside, near the cemetery wall, “about twenty hand-carved, small gravestones clustered in a small group. Carved into the stones were some symbols of unknown meaning.”

A WWI memorial at the cemetery gate listed twenty-three Wildermuths killed in the war. Inside, tombstone after tombstone with the Wildermuth name. Two elderly women showed them to “the Wildermuth section of the cemetery.” Nineteen Wildermuths in the local phone directory; more in Grossaspach twenty miles east, the village from which great-grandfather Johann Michael Wildermuth had emigrated to America in 1847.

“I have now been to the origin of my family who came to America so many years ago, saw some wonderful sights, ate some of the finest baked goods and sausages in the world and have a fuller understanding of my origin. I hope to return to the home towns of grandma Catherina Boeshar and hopefully that of Johann Peter Schlicher at some later date. But for now, Auf Wiedersehen.”

Ruth Irene Wildermuth — sister’s parallel sketch

The memoir also includes a parallel autobiographical sketch from Ruth Irene Wildermuth Ridenour, Robert Earl’s older sister:

“It was on a beautiful spring day, 29 April 1922, that I first saw the light as a member of the brand new Earl Adam and Sadye Irene (Fleming) Wildermuth family. At precisely 8 [AM] I came into this world at the Tremont Hospital, Sixth and Montgomery Streets, Marietta…”

Her version of the family’s southern trip, the move to 413 Harmar Street, her father’s apprenticeship to become a machinist, and the births of brother Carl Edward, sister Norma Jean, and sister Betty Joan. (The memoir thereby names Earl and Sadye’s children as five: Ruth, Robert, Carl, Norma, Betty.) She worked at the Marietta Telephone Exchange through the war years; her aunt Laverna (Fleming) Raison played cupid and introduced her to Jack Ridenour, whom she married 6 May 1943 at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, a week before he shipped to the China-India-Burma Theater. She returned to Marietta as a “warbride ‘widow’” until Jack returned at the end of the war. Their daughters Karen Kay (b. 8 January 1949 — same week as Terrie) and Marcia Ann (b. 7 April 1951) round out the next generation on Ruth’s side.

Ruth’s sketch also records the deaths:

Sadye Irene (Fleming) Wildermuth died 4 August 1976 of multiple myeloma.
Earl Adam Wildermuth suffered a massive stroke and died 8 December 1977 — “grieving for his dear wife was a major contributing factor.”
Carl was blind and lived with their father after Sadye’s death.
Jack Ridenour later died of the same multiple myeloma their mother had had.

Fleming lineage section

The memoir closes with a lineage chart of the Fleming line (Sadye’s side) going back to John Roe — Revolutionary War Veteran (m. Susannah Meeks), then John Fleming m. Clarissa Roe → Lewis Fleming m. Synthia Bailey → Thomas Baily Fleming m. Martha Turner → James Wesley Fleming m. Verona Belle Kelley → Earl Wildermuth m. Sadye Irene Fleming → Robert Earl Wildermuth m. Dorothy Marie Davis → Debra Jean Wildermuth m. Angelo Massaro.

The “Little Histories” project (pp. 46–55)

Pages 46–55 of this memoir carry Robert Earl’s “little histories of all of my family members” — one-page sketches of each Wildermuth-side ancestor he had documented by December 1988. The sketches run from his great-grandmother Catharina Boeshar (the rocking-chair-and-apples grandmother) back across the Atlantic through Johann Michael the 1847 emigrant, Johann Christian the Großaspach shoemaker, the Schmidgall-Landai-Wild generations of 18th-century Röhrach, and finally to Johann Georg Werner and Barbara Phillipp (b. 1712 Großaspach) — the deepest names Robert Earl reached. The full transcribed sketches are catalogued as a standalone document: Robert Earl Wildermuth’s “Little Histories” (1988–1993).

Original document: Read the full memoir PDF (55 pp.). Companion documents: The Big One (combat log); Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage 1990 (genealogy); The “Little Histories” (1988–1993) (ancestor sketches).