Itazuke Air Base, Fukuoka, Japan — Robert Earl's 1965–1968 station and Terrie's Japan years

Itazuke Air Base — in Fukuoka, Kyushu, Japan — was the U.S. Air Force station that anchored the Wildermuth family’s 1965 to 1968 overseas posting. It is the only overseas U.S. posting in Chuck’s grandparents’ twenty-three-year Air Force arc, and the venue of the squadron-command leadership story that culminates Robert Earl Wildermuth’s Air Force career.

The base

Itazuke was originally a Japanese Imperial Army airfield built in 1944; after the war the U.S. Air Force operated it as a fighter and communications base through the Korean and Vietnam wars. It sat in the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka, on the island of Kyushu — the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. By 1972 the airfield had reverted to civilian use as Fukuoka Airport, and the U.S. Air Force presence in Fukuoka had wound down. Robert Earl’s tour at Itazuke from 1965 to 1968 fell in the last decade of the base’s active U.S. military life.

Robert Earl’s tour — 1965 to 1968

Per Robert Earl’s 1989 memoir, he was assigned as Chief of Maintenance of the 1955th Communications Squadron — “the third worst Communications Squadron out of thirty one in the Far East.” The family came over after he graduated from Southern Methodist University with an industrial-engineering degree in 1965: “four children and Dottie and I, loaded ourselves into our family car and headed for California by way of Ohio,” then flew to Japan. Robert Jr., six months old, was a seasoned traveller at less than one year of age.

The career-defining episode of the tour was the Itazuke turnaround:

1. Brigadier General Anthony Shtogren — the highest-educated and meanest general in the Air Force — came to inspect.
2. Major Hamelin (an alcoholic, Robert Earl notes) retired suddenly afterward.
3. Robert Earl became squadron commander and led the unit from 29th to 8th in his first quarter, to 3rd in the next, and eventually to #1 in the entire Far East, where it stayed for the rest of his tour.
4. “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.”
5. He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel “below the zone of those normally eligible for promotion” — the promotion announced at a Commanders’ Conference General Shtogren had flown his commanders to at Wheelus AFB in Tripoli, Libya, with Robert Earl’s squadron adjutant calling from Japan to give him the news.

The turnaround was the leadership story Robert Earl most prized from his Air Force career — the memoir spends real time on the method: “I called all of my officer and non-commissioned officer staff together… I picked their brains for ideas and methods to improve. I called all the airmen in the squadron together at a Commander’s Call… 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.”

Terrie’s Japan years

Chuck’s mother Terrie Lee Wildermuth was 16 to 19 during the family’s 1965 to 1968 Itazuke years. Her 2017 obituary names the Japan years explicitly:

“Terrie traveled the U.S. and Japan until graduating high school.”

She graduated high school in Japan c. 1967 — the graduation photograph captures the diploma frame with Robert Earl in dress blues and Dottie in a pale jacket with a leaf brooch. Itazuke is the geographic and biographical anchor of those Japan years.

The whole Wildermuth household was at Itazuke through the late 1960s: Robert Earl and Dottie, Terrie (16-19), Sandra (15-18), Debbie (9-12), and Robert Jr. (infant to 3). When the tour ended in 1968 the family came home to a Pentagon assignment in Washington, D.C.

The three-generation Japan thread

Robert Earl and Dottie’s 1965–1968 Itazuke years sit inside a three-generation Japan thread that runs through both sides of Chuck’s family:

• Wildermuth side, 1965–1968: Robert Earl posted at Itazuke; Terrie spent her 16-to-19 years in Japan as the eldest of four traveling Air Force children; she graduated high school there c. 1967.
• Eesley side, c. 1960s–70s: Will and Peggy Eesley had also traveled to Japan and shared the interest. When the two in-law families first met around Charlie and Terrie’s courtship, the conversation found its way to Japan because all four parents had traveled there and shared an interest in the country. The shared Japan thread was one of the first common cultural notes between the two families.
• Third generation, ongoing: Chuck teaches one week each summer at Kobe University and has published research papers on entrepreneurship in Japan — continuing the family interest across the third generation in his own academic career.

Itazuke is therefore the structural anchor of a Japan-interest line that begins with Robert Earl’s posting, runs through his daughter’s high-school years, surfaces in the Wildermuth-and-Eesley parental conversation over a courtship, and continues into Chuck’s ongoing Kobe University teaching.

Photographs from the Itazuke years

Four frames from the 1965–1968 tour place the family on the base in their own faces.

The full Wildermuth family, mid-1960s

Robert Earl and Dottie at Itazuke, 1968

The Wildermuth family of six, Itazuke 1968

Terrie’s high school graduation in Japan, c. 1967

Together the four frames cover the household (the mid-60s family portrait), the parents on base (the boutonnière couple’s portrait), the full family on base (the 1968 group portrait), and Terrie’s graduation — the four most documented moments of the Wildermuth Itazuke years.

Sources: Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1989 memoir; Terrie Lee Bain’s 2017 obituary; Wildermuth family portrait, mid-1960s; Bob and Dorothy at Itazuke, 1968; The Wildermuth family at Itazuke, 1968; Terrie’s high school graduation in Japan, c. 1967; Chuck Eesley family-memory thread on the parents-meeting conversation about Japan, transmitted 2026.