Places

The Oxfordshire market town nearest the Eesleys' last English parish at Hanwell — the town the family would have known as the market and trade center of their corner of the county before John Eesley moved the household across into Old Stratford. Photographed by Chuck and Lijie on the 2018 England research trip alongside the Stratford and Hanwell stops.

The Old Stratford building where the Eesleys lived after John Eesley moved his family across the county line from Hanwell — and the address John F. Eesley left from when he boarded the ship for America. Today the building houses the Shakespeare Hospice Bookshop.

The Lutheran parish church of Rielingshausen, built 1758 — the church the Wildermuths attended for generations before Johann Michael's emigration in 1847. Robert Earl's note on his 1992 print identifies the family patriarch who probably worshipped here as 'Andreus Wildermuth.'

The hillside cemetery and churchyard of Rielingshausen, with the family's hand-carved gravestones and the WWI/WWII memorial wall listing the village's war dead — including many Wildermuths across both wars.

The Württemberg village Johann Michael Wildermuth left in 1847 for America, settling eventually in Marietta, Ohio as a shoemaker.

An old walled city about 25 miles north of Stuttgart, birthplace of Friedrich Schiller, with the family surname carried into German civic memory in two places: Wildermuthstraße (named after Ottilie Wildermuth, the 19th-century children's writer) and her preserved childhood home with its memorial plaque.

The town square of Rielingshausen — Robert Earl's note on the 1992 print is direct about what it is: 'town where Wildermuth name originated.' The square holds the Old Church (1758), the Bürgermeister's Haus, the Town Hall, and the central fountain. On the lintel of one civic building, three Wildermuth names are carved in 1811 as the village's Schultheiß, Bürger, and Heiligenpfleger.

The capital of Baden-Württemberg and the big city at the center of the Wildermuth homeland — Rielingshausen, where the name originated, and Marbach, where it became literature, both sit within about twenty-five miles. Robert Earl Wildermuth, the family genealogist, photographed one of Schlossplatz's ornate fountains on his November 1992 ancestral trip; Chuck stood at the same fountains in 2018.

Catherina Boeshar's birthplace (1840) — the maternal side of the German line. The one stop on the family pilgrimage no Wildermuth has yet reached.

The 4th-century Chan Buddhist temple complex in the western hills of Hangzhou where Lijie's parents — Ling Zhou and Xun Li — were photographed twice in front of the same gate, decades apart: once on their honeymoon just after their 18 September 1982 wedding in Qingdao, and again on a return visit on 29 May 2019. On that same 2019 visit Chuck and Lijie stood in the same pose at the same gate, completing a three-frame echo of one couple's honeymoon across the next generation.

The Yellow Sea port city on the Shandong Peninsula where Lijie was born and where both her parents and all four grandparents were born or settled — a 20th-century Chinese metropolis with a German-concession beginning, an early-century beer brewery as its most famous export, and the deeper inland ancestry in Jiaozhou behind it.

Small coral island off the northwest coast of Okinawa, captured by U.S. forces in April 1945 during the Battle of Okinawa. War correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper here on 18 April 1945 — the most prominent American war-reporter death of WWII. The 90th Bomb Group moved forward to Ie Shima for the last months of the war. From this strip Robert Earl Wildermuth's Van Valen crew flew the cancelled-then-Shanghai-redirected suicide mission of late July 1945, watched the Japanese surrender delegation land in three green-cross-painted Betty bombers in August, hid in foxholes through the peace-celebration friendly-fire night, rode out the 185-knot Pacific typhoon, and finally flew the MGM newsreel cameraman over Nagasaki c. mid-September 1945.

The U.S. Air Force base in Fukuoka, Kyushu, where Robert Earl Wildermuth was assigned as Chief of Maintenance — and later squadron commander — of the 1955th Communications Squadron from 1965 to 1968. The base under Brigadier General Anthony Shtogren's Far East command, where Robert Earl turned a 29th-of-31 squadron into the #1 Far East communications squadron and was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel below the zone. The Japan years also frame the period Chuck's mother Terrie Lee — at sixteen to nineteen — spent abroad with the family per her own 2017 obituary's 'traveled the U.S. and Japan until graduating high school' line.

Betty Jean Davis Wolfe and Norman Graham Wolfe's home for most of their adult lives — the Marietta house where Chuck Eesley spent many holiday dinners and sick-day visits across his childhood. The maternal-side Davis-Wolfe equivalent of Highland Ridge on the paternal Eesley side: the elder-generation house Chuck went to and was kept by, alongside Grandma Peggy's 424 N 7th Street widow's house. Documented in the archive through the 2011 Thanksgiving photograph, the c. 1980s boy-on-the-couch frame, the bookshelf living room group, and the 1960s family at the brick fireplace, plus Betty's 2015 obituary line that her daughters wrote: 'She was an excellent cook and baker who loved to have people come for a meal. Everything was delicious.'

The Eesley family's Marietta house after their 1983 move back from Annapolis — the home Chuck Eesley grew up in through his early childhood, a few doors down the same street from his great-aunt and -uncle Betty and Norm Wolfe at 108 Hillcrest, before the family moved on to Highland Ridge Road. Documented in the archive by a winter exterior photograph from Charlie's own album, c. mid-1980s.

The three-bedroom brick-foundation house Earl Adam and Sadye Irene Wildermuth bought in 1929 — three blocks up from the Muskingum River, on the West Side of Marietta — and the central physical anchor of Robert Earl Wildermuth's childhood. The family lived there over fourteen years; four of Earl and Sadye's five children were born and raised there. It is the house Robert Earl's 1989 memoir opens its sustained passages from, and the venue of the 1937 Marietta flood story when four feet of water came in on the first floor and the wooden fireplace mantle floated off its base and broke every window.

The first of Will and Peggy Eesley's three Marietta addresses. The two-story blue clapboard house Will the architect bought c. 1950 and spent eight years remodeling around his growing family — with Maggie's bedroom in the former bathroom and Jeanne and Anne's in the former upstairs kitchen. The house Charlie Eesley's 1965 12th-grade autobiography names explicitly: 'where we are living now, at 651 Sixth Street.' Charlie grew up here from age three through his graduation from Marietta High School in 1965. The family moved to Highland Ridge Road later in the 1960s; Will then designed and built that next house himself.

Black Lake in northern Michigan was the Eesley family's summer place across the 1920s–1940s. Charles Leonard and Lillie Dale Eesley owned a cottage on the lake; every summer their children and grandchildren came up. It is the place where Dale Eesley drowned on 14 July 1939 — and where the family's summer stories are set: a household of relentless practical jokers, the false-teeth prank that finally got 'Consarn it!' echoing across the water, the Reveille record a brother flung into the lake, Charles Leonard's Chief Whitecloud canoe act, and the long ties to the Feathers of Petoskey. The cottage burned down in the 1950s and was not rebuilt.

A mile-long sand atoll in the Phoenix Islands of the central Pacific, 1,100 miles southwest of Honolulu — Robert Earl Wildermuth's first ferry-leg stop on the way to the war in November 1944. The airstrip ran water's-edge to water's-edge across the atoll's narrow width. The Van Valen crew's first overnight stop after the Honolulu hop; a grizzled sergeant met them at the nose compartment asking if they had any whiskey aboard ($50 a bottle on these atolls). Operated as a U.S. wartime air-ferry refueling stop and now a remote Kiribati-administered atoll.

The house Will Eesley the architect designed and built for his own family, with the orchard he planted and the small red bridge he constructed over the pond out back — in Lowell, Ohio (a small village on the Muskingum River about 10 miles north of Marietta proper, in the same Washington County). The second of Peggy and Will's three Washington-County addresses (after the in-town 651 Sixth Street, Marietta and before Peggy's later 424 N 7th Street widow's house back in Marietta), and the house Charlie raised Chuck in across the 1980s and 1990s. Will the architect made his designed-and-built family house just out of town, on a wooded ridge above the river valley. The pond Chuck broke through while testing the ice in winter. The tractor Charlie flipped over on himself; John Arnold across the hundred-yard yard came to help him up. The house the eulogy named as one of 'the places that should hold his name longest.' Will Eesley died here on 2 June 1986 — his death record gives Lowell, Ohio as the place.

The flour mill John F. Eesley built in Plainwell, Michigan in 1887 — converted from a downtown roller rink, then moved and merged with a grain elevator in 1903–04 — that grew into the second-largest producer of buckwheat flour in the United States under the 'Sunshine Brand Flour' label. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010; now The Old Mill Brewpub.

The campus that links Chuck and his grandfather Robert Earl across more than seventy years. Robert Earl took his Bachelor of Arts in Biological Sciences here on October 1, 1948, on the GI Bill, after coming home from flying B-24s over the Pacific. Chuck joined the Stanford faculty in the next generation. The two photographs of family return visits here — Memorial Church in the 1960s and the White Memorial Fountain in the 1980s — bracket the years between.

Peggy McMaster Eesley's home after the death of her husband Will Eesley on 2 June 1986. The third of the three Marietta addresses in the Will-and-Peggy arc, following 651 Sixth Street (c. 1950–late 1960s) and Highland Ridge Road (the house Will designed and built, late 1960s through Will's death in 1986). Peggy lived at 424 N 7th Street as a widow for the next twenty-one years until her death on 21 May 2007 at Harmar Place in Marietta. The 'Grandma Peggy's house on 7th Street' Chuck Eesley's eulogy for his father names as one of the places that should hold his father's name longest.

U.S. Army Air Forces airfield at Tacloban on the northeast coast of Leyte Island in the central Philippines. Captured by U.S. forces during the October 1944 Leyte landings — Douglas MacArthur came ashore here on 20 October 1944 with his famous 'I have returned' speech. The 22nd Bomb Group moved to Tacloban from Peleliu in early January 1945, and Robert Earl Wildermuth's attached Van Valen crew flew five night Taiwan missions from this strip — 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 January 1945. Heavy Japanese counter-air-raids hit the town nearly every night.

U.S. Army Air Forces airfield on Mindoro Island in the central Philippines, named for Major Thomas B. McGuire Jr. — the war's number-two American fighter ace (38 kills) who went missing over Negros on 7 January 1945. The 90th Bombardment Group moved here from Biak on 26 January 1945. From McGuire Field, Robert Earl Wildermuth's 400th BS flew its core combat tour — Corregidor pre-invasion strikes, Luzon close-support, repeated Taiwan strikes, the Sydney R&R that became 21 days, the Saigon oil-installation missions, and finally the Canton airdrome strikes — across February, March, April, and May 1945, before moving forward to Ie Shima for the war's last months.

Airfield on Biak Island, in the Schouten Islands off the northwest coast of Dutch New Guinea (now Papua, Indonesia). Captured by US forces in June 1944 after the bloody Battle of Biak; became the 5th Air Force's main bomber base in the Netherlands East Indies. The 400th Bombardment Squadron, 90th Bomb Group ('Jolly Rogers') moved here on 12 August 1944. Robert Earl Wildermuth joined the squadron at Mokmer in late November 1944 after his Travis-Honolulu-Canton ferry route. The squadron stayed at Biak until late January 1945, when it moved forward to McGuire Field at Mindoro in the Philippines.

U.S. Marine Corps and Army Air Forces airfield on Peleliu Island in the Palau Islands group, captured in the Battle of Peleliu (September–November 1944) at a cost of nearly 1,800 American dead — one of the war's most costly small-island campaigns. Robert Earl Wildermuth's B-24 crew operated from Peleliu on temporary attachment to the 22nd Bomb Group in December 1944, flying their first two night missions over Taiwan from the strip. Heavy fighting was still going on; Japanese stragglers were hiding in the island's coral caves. The crew slept with .45-caliber pistols under their pillows after a duffel-bag intruder incident.

The city Charles McMaster 'Charlie' Eesley wrote home from during his 1969–1971 U.S. Army tour. The letters that survived the trip back to Marietta, Ohio are the primary record of his two years there — a span he carried with him for the next four and a half decades and the subject of the [Letters from Vietnam](/docs/letters-from-vietnam/) collection in this archive.

The deep natural harbor on the south-central coast of Vietnam — the principal U.S. logistics base in country during the war, hosting the 6th Convalescent Center where Charlie Eesley recovered from his September 1970 bout with malaria. The second of Charlie's two surviving Vietnam coastal-rear locations in the letter corpus, alongside the Saigon stand-down referenced in the 29 May 1971 letter.