Donald Anderson 'Don' McMaster

Donald Anderson McMaster was born in 1903 to Robert Thompson McMaster and Alice Anderson McMaster — eleven years older than his sister Peggy (b. 1914), Chuck’s grandmother. He died in 1967, age 64, predeceasing Peggy by forty years.

The WWII communications grid

Per the family memory recorded on Peggy’s page, in WWII Don ran the communications power grid for the northeastern United States — the kind of civilian wartime role that doesn’t appear in citation lists or unit histories but kept critical infrastructure running through the war years. The deck doesn’t say where he was stationed for the work or what agency or utility he was attached to; the family record stops at the line “ran the northeastern U.S. communications power grid in WWII.” It is the kind of fact worth flagging for follow-up.

The AT&T career — 38 years

Charlie Eesley’s 12th-grade autobiography (c. 1964–1965) adds detail Maggie’s deck didn’t carry: Don was a bachelor, was an electrical engineer by training, and worked for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) for thirty-eight years. Charlie wrote that Don “retired last year and spent the winter in Florida and is currently spending this winter in southern California.” Don’s WWII communications-grid role would have been part of that AT&T career; the thirty-eight-year tenure carries him from the late 1920s to about 1964, when Charlie wrote.

Don sent his teenage nephew Charlie a subscription to the Wall Street Journal in late 1964 — one Christmas before Charlie’s senior year. The Wall Street Journal subscription is one of the early seeds of Charlie’s lifelong investing interest that Chuck later named in the eulogy.

The dedicated photographer

The deck flags him twice as a “dedicated photographer” — slides 12 and 13 of Maggie’s Four Generations archive give him the title outright. The frames of him as student and as photographer appear back-to-back. The first photograph of him in the family archive is the one of him as a child on the porch with his mother Alice, c. 1910–12, when he was seven or eight.

The photograph above is the one the deck titles “amateur photographer, caught in the act of snapping a photo” — Don behind a 35mm SLR at Jeanne’s reception, the photographer for once fixed in someone else’s frame. It is the truest picture of him in the archive: not posed, but working.

That his role as the family’s photographer would survive into Maggie’s generation as worth labelling matters: the McMaster line has run an unusual amount of visual record-keeping. Alice’s mother Nancy Jane Shaw sat for cabinet portraits in 1860 and 1888. Alice herself sat for one as a young woman. Don, in his own generation, was the one behind the camera as much as in front of it. Maggie inherited the archive and built the deck out of it.

He is Chuck’s great-uncle — the brother of Chuck’s grandmother Peggy.

Sources: Maggie Eesley, Four Generations of the Eesley Family (PowerPoint archive); Peggy McMaster Eesley’s obituary, which records that Peggy was preceded in death by her brother Don.