Stanford · California · United States
Stanford University
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.
Why this place matters
The site of the project's clearest generational rhyme. Robert Earl's Stanford BA (1948) and Chuck's Stanford appointment (the present) are the two endpoints of a thread the rest of the archive is, in some sense, written to connect.
Across generations
Robert Earl's [Bachelor of Arts diploma](/archive/robert-earl-wildermuth-stanford-ba-1948/), conferred 1 October 1948 in Biological Sciences. He came on the GI Bill after the war and finished in two years.
Alignment: No surviving photograph of Bob on campus during his student years is yet in this archive; the diploma is the document of record for this visit.
Family at the façade of Stanford Memorial Church — likely a return visit to campus after Robert Earl had moved on to the rest of his career. People not yet definitively identified; tentatively Robert Earl holding a baby (possibly a grandchild), Dottie, Terrie Lee, and one other child. Chuck to confirm.
Alignment: The Stanford Memorial Church mosaic on the façade visible behind the family is the original 1903 facade restored after the 1906 earthquake.
Family at the White Memorial Fountain (the bronze 'Claw' by Aristides Demetrios, installed 1964) in the heart of campus. Identified by Chuck: Uncle Rob Wildermuth, Chuck's mother Terrie Lee, Sandy (Sandra Sue Wildermuth Clement), and Debbie Wildermuth, with their mother Dorothy 'Dottie' Davis Wildermuth — the baby in Dorothy's lap is a grandchild, not Chuck.
Alignment: The fountain and the open arches behind are unchanged in present-day Stanford — a re-shootable frame at any future generation's distance.
Stanford is not an ancestral village or a wartime objective. It is a school. But this is also the place where, by the project’s own framing, the family record turns into a continuous line: Robert Earl came home from the Pacific, finished his BA here in 1948, sent out a Christmas card from the campus the next year with his fiancée Dot — and a long arc later, his grandson Chuck is on the faculty.
The two visit photographs on this page were taken on family return trips between those two endpoints. They are the only known images in the archive of the Wildermuths and their descendants on the campus — Robert Earl never appeared in any photographs of his own undergraduate years that survived.
When Robert Earl closed his “Big One” combat log and his memoirs by addressing himself to “future genealogists,” this is the address he was writing to.