Donald Wiedenmayer - 196th Signal Photo Company

Don Wiedenmayer, 92, retired on Dec. 31, 1978 after completing 21 years as photographer with the Vermont Department of Highways, now known as the Vermont Agency of Transportation. This date coincided with his completion of a career of over 41 years of professional photography.

Co-authors Julie Whitman Jones and Thomas J. Sullivan, Jr. are especially grateful to Donald Wiedenmayer for offering to us his personal remembrances of the late Edmund Burke O’Connell and helping us to bring to publication, The Last Farewell. 

During World War II, Don served in the Army Pictorial Service as a war photographer in England, North Africa and Sicily. He participated as a newsreel photographer in the invasion of North Africa, and took part in five Mediterranean Theater campaigns.

He was paired with Army newsreel photographer Edmund Burke O’Connell during the final months of the Italian Campaign.

Don generously provided relevant copies of personal and former Army Signal Corps photos he took during his service in Italy, as well as unit rosters, military orders, news articles and background material pertaining to the 196^th Signal Photo Company.

Don and his wife Shirley are the proud parents of three daughters and have enjoyed pleasantly spending the past twenty New England winters (1983 to 2003) in sunny Cocoa Beach, Florida. He continues to be an avid photographer and while in Florida enjoyed photographing many of our nation’s manned space shuttle launches.

Wiedenmayer graduated from the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York in 1937 and was engaged as an advertising photographer in New York City while operating his own studio at 6 E. 46th Street. After the war, Don lived in New York City from 1945 to 1948 while working for the Robert E. Coates Studio and the advertising department photographic studio of the Eastman Chemical Products Corporation, a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak.

Don moved to Wallingford, Vermont in 1948 where he produced advertising photography for Vermont Industries and in 1958 joined the Vermont Department of Highways as a highway photographer. He later managed the Department’s photographic section and took photographs for right of way, construction, traffic, bridge, aerial, planning, materials and public information uses.

Wiedenmayer is a past president of the Vermont Professional Photographers in 1952-53 and 1969-70 and is a former member of the Professional Photographers of America.

He and his wife Shirley make their home in Worcester, Vermont.

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