Robert Earl Wildermuth

Robert Earl Wildermuth was born in 1924 in Marietta, Ohio — the river town where his grandfather, Johann Michael Wildermuth, had set up shop as an immigrant shoemaker in the 1840s. He flew combat missions out of Biak, Leyte, and Mindoro in 1944–45 as the navigator on a ten-man B-24 crew.

After the war he came to Stanford on the GI Bill and earned his Bachelor of Arts in Biological Sciences — conferred on October 1, 1948, signed by President J. Wallace Sterling. The diploma itself survives in the family’s keeping. A young portrait of Bob from the same period — suit, leaves behind him, the unmistakable Stanford post-war light — is now this entry’s lead image. The next Christmas, 1949, he and his fiancée Dot sent out a photo greeting signed “Love, Dot + Bob — 1949.”

He served again in Korea, worked at the Pentagon, retired as a lieutenant colonel, and spent the rest of his life teaching and researching the family back to the early 1700s in Württemberg.

That his grandson Chuck would join the Stanford faculty seventy-some years later is the generational rhyme this archive was built to record. Robert Earl closed his last manuscript by addressing “future genealogists.” This site is one of them answering.