Dorothy Marie Davis Wildermuth

Dorothy Marie Davis was born at 11:15 a.m. on 24 February 1925 in Waterford Township, Washington County, Ohio, daughter of Homer Edward Davis (then twenty-five, a truck driver) and Bessie Marie (Hill) Davis (then nineteen). She was the second of three Davis sisters — older sister Mary (b. 17 January 1924) and younger sister Betty (b. ~1926). Her birth certificate, registered 10 May 1925 by H. S. Dickson, is one of the documents reproduced in Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1990 Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage.

The Waterford home and the Unionville fire

The family lived first in Waterford, Ohio, where Dorothy was born; the home is one of the photographs in the 1990 Heritage. They later moved to Unionville, Ohio, where:

While the parents were away from home, they suffered a tremendous calamity. The house caught fire and burned to the ground. This was a real tragedy but with the help of friends and neighbors, they recovered, moved into a small shed not damaged in the fire while their parents lived in a poorly insulated one-room garage throughout the cold winter that followed.

Dorothy was still a child. She and Mary started school at Unionville Grade School and later transferred to Marietta High School, where Dorothy graduated in June 1943.

A portrait, c. 1941

A studio portrait of Dorothy as a Marietta High School student, c. 1941, arrived in this archive in June 2026. She is about sixteen — in a dark sweater with a lace-edged peter-pan collar, a small oval pendant on a chain at her throat, hair curled and pulled to a soft side-bow. The smile is direct and warm; the sepia-toned print is the kind of formal school-or-studio frame a Marietta family would have sat their daughter for in the early war years.

This is the earliest photograph of Dorothy in this archive — predating the 1946 wedding to Robert Earl, the move to Stanford, and the long Air Force years that followed. The lace collar, the oval pendant, the side-bow are exactly the early-1940s American schoolgirl register that the photograph documents. She is two years short of the June 1943 Marietta High School graduation, three years short of meeting Robert Earl when he returned from the Pacific.

Bookkeeper at Citizen’s Bank, then libraries across the country

Upon graduation Dorothy took a position as bookkeeper at Citizen’s Bank in Marietta, where she would work even after her marriage. The working-life habit ran the rest of her life across the moving household: she would later work at the South East Bank in Orlando, the Hoover Library at Stanford University, and the Maitland Public Library in Maitland, Florida (per her 2010 funeral program).

At the Hoover Library — 1947 to 1948

The Stanford-years job is named explicitly in Robert Earl’s 1989 memoir, in the passage describing the young couple’s first year at Stanford after Robert Earl’s conditional admission to undergraduate pre-med in 1947:

“They rented a house on the Stanford golf course. Dottie worked at the Hoover Library.”

The Hoover Institution Library and Archives — built on the holdings Herbert Hoover assembled to document the First World War and its aftermath — is one of Stanford’s signature research libraries, then as now housed under the Hoover Tower on the western edge of campus. Dottie, the Marietta High School graduate who had been keeping Citizen’s Bank’s books just three years earlier, was now working at one of Stanford’s research libraries to support the family while Robert Earl finished pre-med. The marriage and the move had taken them straight from a Marietta bank to a Stanford research library inside two years.

The job appears to have been 1947 through Robert Earl’s October 1948 BA. When Robert Earl’s medical-school applications were again denied, he took the Bio Sci degree and a Container Corporation trainee job in Oakland; Dottie moved with him to Richmond, California, where their first daughter Terrie Lee was born 13 January 1949. The Hoover Library chapter closed when Dottie became a mother and the family left Palo Alto for the East Bay.

Marriage and the Air Force years

On 20 April 1946 Dorothy married Robert Earl Wildermuth not long after his return from the Pacific theater of WWII; the 1949 Christmas card signed Love, Dot + Bob is their first surviving photograph together. She is the Dot of that signature, the Dottie of family memory, the matriarch holding her youngest child — Chuck’s Uncle Rob, the toddler — at the Stanford fountain on 24 August 1965, and the Dorothy Marie Davis Wildermuth who appears in her daughter Terrie’s obituary in full.

She and Robert Earl raised four children: Terrie Lee (Chuck’s mother, b. Oakland, CA 1949 during Robert Earl’s Stanford years), Sandra Sue, Robert E. Jr., and Debra. Robert Earl’s career took the household across the country — Florida, California, Oklahoma, Ohio, Colorado, Texas, Maryland, and Japan, per Dorothy’s 2010 funeral program.

The wedding announcement — 20 April 1946

A Marietta newspaper clipping preserved in the family papers records the ceremony itself. In a quiet double-ring ceremony at seven o’clock Saturday evening — 20 April 1946 — in the parsonage of the First Methodist Church, Rev. Karl B. Alexander officiating, “Miss Dorothy Marie Davis, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Homer E. Davis of 720½ Front St., became the bride of Robert E. Wildermuth, son of Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Wildermuth of 320 Harmar St.” Only immediate families and a few intimate friends attended.

The bride wore “a two-piece suit of light blue” with brown accessories, a single strand of pearls, and an orchid shoulder corsage. Her matron of honor was Ruth (Wildermuth) Ridenour — “Mrs. Jack Ridenour of Newark, sister of the bridegroom” — and Jack Ridenour served as best man. A reception followed at the bride’s parents’ home, the table centered by a three-tiered cake; Bessie Davis wore navy with white carnations and Sadye Wildermuth navy with pink.

The clipping also fixes the groom’s just-finished war: Robert Earl had graduated Marietta High School in 1942, worked for the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Corp. in Columbus before induction, and “served as a navigator for one year in the South Pacific and held the rank of first lieutenant.” Newly discharged, he was attending Marietta College. After a short wedding trip through northern Ohio the couple were “at home in their newly furnished apartment on Fifth St.” — the Marietta starting point of the household that would move to Stanford within a year.

Source: Marietta newspaper wedding clipping (“Wed Saturday”), family papers, transmitted by Chuck Eesley 2026.

The family-of-six photographs

Two newly placed photographs show Dottie at the center of the household she ran across the Air-Force postings:

• The Wildermuth family portrait, mid-1960s — Dottie with Robert Earl and all four children: Terrie and Sandy as teenagers, Debbie school-age, Rob a toddler.
• Terrie’s high school graduation in Japan, c. 1967 — Dottie in a pale jacket with a leaf brooch at the lapel, on the other side of her daughter from Robert Earl in dress blues. The diploma frame, the family at the end of the Japan years.

The Unionville house fire

Dottie’s childhood carries one small but vivid catastrophe that survives only because her son Robert Earl wrote it down decades later in the 1990 Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage. Dottie was a small child in Unionville, Ohio when the family home caught fire and burned to the ground while her parents were away. The recovery he describes is itself a small piece of the “showing up — in small, daily, unglamorous ways” thread in the family-threads essay:

In Unionville, while the parents were away from home, they suffered a tremendous calamity. The house caught fire and burned to the ground. This was a real tragedy but with the help of friends and neighbors, they recovered, moved into a small shed not damaged in the fire while their parents lived in a poorly insulated one-room garage throughout the cold winter that followed.

Two generations later, Dottie’s daughter Terrie would have her own version of “close relatives by way of long entertainment of visiting family” in her 2017 obituary — the Wolfes named explicitly. The Unionville fire is the earliest documented instance of that same Davis-and-Wildermuth practice of kinship-as-mutual-aid in a crisis, run on the Davis side, one generation before Dottie herself would carry it across into the Wildermuth household.

At the birthday table with Uncle Norm

A late-1950s or early-1960s color print from the Maggie Eesley archive deck shows Dottie at a birthday or family-dinner table with Norm Wolfe and family — the Uncle Norm of Chuck’s childhood and one of the “Betty and Norm Wolfe” named in Terrie’s 2017 obituary as “close relatives by way of long entertainment of visiting family.” Nine people around the table, including children; a tablecloth, a cake, a pitcher, the texture of a multi-generation gathering. The print is one of the earliest photographic records of the Wolfe-Wildermuth kinship that Terrie’s obituary names from the other end of the same decades-long relationship — the visiting-family tradition that ran from this birthday table all the way into the Wolfes’ inclusion in her own obituary a half-century later.

The 1990 Heritage photographs of her

Nine images of Dottie reproduced in Robert Earl’s 1990 Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage are now placed as individual artifacts. Together they form a small Davis-side photographic spine from her birth through her late life:

• Her Ohio Department of Health birth certificate — 11:15 AM, 24 February 1925, Waterford Township.
• The Davis home in Waterford where she was born — the only image of the family’s pre-Unionville-fire address.
• Mary, Dorothy, and Betty at ages 5, 4, and 3 — c. 1929, the earliest known image of her.
• The same three sisters a year later — “why so glum?” on the printed caption.
• The three sisters again with puppies and bare feet — c. 1931.
• Her 1943 portrait — the Marietta High School graduation year.
• Her 1944 portrait — bookkeeper at Citizen’s Bank, year before V-E Day.
• With Robert Earl at Itazuke, 1968 — the formal couple’s portrait from the closing year of the Japan tour.
• The family of six at Itazuke, 1968 — all four Wildermuth children with their parents on base.
• At her sewing machine, c. 1988 — at the quilting that the 2010 memorial program would later name among the things she enjoyed.

The memorial program

The fullest single document on Dottie that this archive holds is the printed program from her memorial service, held Friday 13 August 2010 at the Church of Christ on Sixth Street, Marietta — five months after her death in Brookhaven, Georgia at 85. The program’s biographical panel is the single most complete sketch of her career (bookkeeper at Citizen’s Bank Marietta → Southeast Bank Orlando → Hoover Library at Stanford → Maitland Public Library), her faith (Methodist), her interests (flowers, singing, square-dancing, quilting and needlework), and the names of all four children and all six grandchildren as of August 2010.

The 2010 obituary — the contemporaneous document of record

The Marietta Times obituary (Section A, Page 6, weekend of 13–14 March 2010), supplied by the Atlanta-side family who were with her at the end, sharpens several details the rest of the archive had previously held only loosely:

“ATLANTA, Ga. — Dorothy ‘Dot’ Marie (Davis) Wildermuth, 85, died at 4:30 p.m. Friday, March 5, 2010, at the UniHealth Care Center in Brookhaven, Ga.”

The place of death is the UniHealth Care Center in Brookhaven, Georgia — the senior-care facility near Atlanta where she had been living near her daughter Sandra Sue Clement. The 4:30 p.m. Friday timestamp is the specific moment the obituary records. The obituary identifies her as the second daughter of Homer Edward Davis and Bessie Marie (Hill) Davis — the documentary confirmation of her middle-Davis-sister birth order Robert Earl had recorded in 1990 and that the c. 1929 Davis sisters photograph shows.

The career sequence the obituary gives in order matches and refines the memorial program’s panel: bookkeeper at Citizen’s Bank Marietta → Hoover Library at Stanford University → Maitland Public Library, Maitland, FL → Southeast Bank of Orlando, FL. The Hoover Library job is named explicitly here in print — in addition to the Robert Earl memoir mention.

She “attended the Methodist Church, and loved to spend time with her family. She enjoyed singing, square dancing, quilting and other needlework.”

Survivors named at her death (March 2010):

• Daughters and son-in-law/spouses: Terrie Lee Bain (Benjamin) of Marietta; Sandra Sue Clement of Atlanta; Debra Jean Massaro (Angelo) of Pembroke, VA; Robert Earl Wildermuth Jr. (Dawn) of Sarasota, FL.
• Siblings: Betty Jean (Davis) Wolfe (with husband Norman named in parens) and brother William Harvey Davis of Indianapolis. (The Davis siblings inventory at her death was Dorothy + 2 surviving siblings.)
• Six grandchildren named in print: Charles Eric Eesley (Chuck), Robert Earl Wildermuth III “Trey”, Thomas Matthew Wildermuth, Sarah Marie Wildermuth, Giancarlo Salvatora Massaro, and Briana Marie Massaro.

Predeceased by: her parents; her husband Robert Earl Wildermuth (in 1999); and her older sister Mary Louise (Davis) Murdoch — the eldest of the three Davis sisters, the Mary of the c. 1929, c. 1930, and c. 1931 sister portraits. The married surname Murdoch confirms in print here the documentation the rest of the archive had been carrying. (Dorothy’s obituary spells the name Murdoch; Betty’s 2015 obituary spells the same sister Murdock — the two newspaper spellings disagree.)

Burial: Sarasota, Florida — alongside Robert Earl, where he had been laid to rest in 1999.

See also — family threads

Dottie is an anchor for Thread #7 (Showing up — in small, daily, unglamorous ways) in the Family threads synthesis essay through the Unionville house fire recovery — the earliest documented Davis-side instance of “kinship-as-mutual-aid in a crisis,” one generation before Terrie’s own “close relatives by way of long entertainment of visiting family” line about the Wolfes carries the same practice into the next generation.