ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Nannie Wilson was hanging clothes on the line when her son walked away for the last time.
As Raymond Luther Wilson made his way down the hill from the family’s Buncombe County home, he kept looking back.
“Bye, Mama. Bye, Mama. I love you.”
His mother never turned around.
“She said she wouldn’t turn around and look at him because she knew something was going to happen, and she wanted to remember him as he was,” Raymond’s niece, Kat Wilson, remembers her grandmother saying.
More than 80 years later, Raymond’s nephew, Ted Wilson, stood beside the grave no one in the family had ever visited.
Much of what Ted and Kat Wilson know about their Uncle Raymond comes not from official military records, but from stories passed down around kitchen tables and beneath the shade trees outside the family home. Those stories, handed down through generations, have kept Raymond Wilson’s memory alive.
Raymond was just 23 when he died fighting in Italy, but his story has never left the Buncombe County family he left behind.
From the mill to the battlefield
Born April 30, 1921, in Asheville, Raymond Wilson was one of six children born to Nannie and William Wilson. Like many young men growing up during the Great Depression, he went to work early.
Before the war, he worked in the napping room at Beacon Manufacturing Co. in Swannanoa, where woven blankets were brushed to give them the soft finish that made Beacon blankets famous across the country.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Wilson trained at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina, before joining the 361st Infantry Regiment of the 91st Infantry Division.
By the summer of 1944, the division was fighting its way north through Italy as Allied forces pursued retreating German troops after the liberation of Rome.
Wilson had earned the rank of staff sergeant.
Two brothers, two ships
The war separated the Wilson family in more ways than one.
Raymond’s brother, Jimmy, was also serving overseas.
At one point during the war, fate brought the brothers within sight of each other, though neither knew it.
One ship carried Raymond toward the front lines.
The other was bringing Jimmy home after he contracted malaria.
“They passed each other on the boats, and they (the soldiers) all waved at each other,” Ted Wilson said, recalling a story told by older family members. “They didn’t know at the time that either one of them was on the other boat.”
It was the closest the brothers ever came to seeing one another again.
Jimmy, who did not know where his brother was serving, later described another memory that haunted him throughout the war.
“He always said when he came across a body laying facedown, he was always afraid to turn it over, afraid it might be Raymond,” Kat Wilson said.
The day the postmaster came
On July 2, 1944, Staff Sgt. Raymond Wilson was wounded during the Allied advance through Italy.
Army hospital records show he suffered a battle wound to his leg and later died from those injuries. He was 23.
The story goes that back home in Buncombe County, Nannie Wilson was sitting on the porch breaking beans when she saw the postmaster coming.
“She jumped up and started running,” Ted Wilson said. “She hollered, ‘No, no, no,’ because she knew what they were going to tell her.”
Like thousands of American families during World War II, the Wilsons received the news every parent dreaded.
Their son would not be coming home.
A grave across the ocean
Staff Sgt. Wilson was buried in the Florence American Cemetery and Memorial in Italy, where about 4,400 Americans who died during the Italian Campaign rest beneath rows of white marble crosses.
Family members said Jimmy urged his parents not to have Raymond’s remains returned home. Having witnessed the realities of war firsthand, he worried that amid the chaos of combat, some soldiers’ remains may have been misidentified after dog tags became separated from their owners.
Although Nannie and William longed to bring their son home, they honored Jimmy’s wishes.
For decades, no one in the family ever made the trip to Italy.
“They would have loved to be able to go,” Ted Wilson said. “They wished they had brought him home, but at the time, they just couldn’t.”
A promise fulfilled
In June, Ted Wilson finally made the journey.
It was something he had wanted to do for years.
“It’s always been a desire to go because nobody had ever been,” he said.
Standing beside the white marble cross bearing his uncle’s name, Ted experienced emotions he had carried for a lifetime.
“A little emotional and proud, too,” he said. “It’s just a mixture of being proud and being a little emotional about him not ever having anybody to visit his grave and pay their respects.
“It’s also an honor to be able to do it.”
The brother they never forgot
After the war, Raymond’s brothers often gathered beneath the shade trees around the family home.
No matter what they were talking about, Kat Wilson said, the conversation always found its way back to Raymond.
“They loved to play music together,” Ted said.
Raymond played guitar with his brothers Harvey and Jack.
“Daddy said he baked the best cakes around,” Kat said with a smile.
There were funny stories, too.
One night, while dreaming, Raymond kicked so hard he knocked one of the metal posts out of his bed.
The family never repaired it.
For years afterward, children and grandchildren slept in what everyone simply called “Raymond’s bed,” the missing post serving as a quiet reminder that someone was missing from the family, too.
His photograph hung on the living room wall for decades, watching over a family that never stopped talking about him.
Remembering Raymond
Today, Staff Sgt. Raymond Luther Wilson rests nearly 5,000 miles from the Buncombe County hillside where he grew up.
He was a Beacon Manufacturing worker, a guitar player, a baker, a brother and a soldier.
He was 23 years old when he gave his life for his country.
But to the Wilson family, he has never been just another name carved into a monument or another white cross in a military cemetery.
He is the young man who waved goodbye to his mother as he walked down the hill.
The brother who unknowingly passed Jimmy on the ocean, each aboard a different ship headed in opposite directions.
The uncle whose grave waited more than eight decades for a member of his family to finally stand beside it.
More than 80 years have passed since Raymond Wilson called back to his mother one last time.
Nannie Wilson never turned around.
She wanted to remember her son exactly as he was.
Thanks to the stories passed from one generation to the next, so has the rest of the family.
