Several weeks after D-Day, a package arrived at the Hoback's home. It contained Raymond's Bible. Lucille now treasures it. For decades it sat prominently in the family room, never to be moved. It is inscribed "Raymond S. Hoback, from mother, Xmas, 1938."
Her parents never got over their loss. She remembers her mother, in her dying days, waking from nightmares screaming, "Where are my boys?"
April Cheek-Messier, a local resident who is president of the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, says the sadness that lingered in town for many years has been replaced by "immense patriotism."
On the 75th anniversary, Lucille Hoback Boggess still feels the loss: "You wonder what they would have done with their lives, how Bedford would be different if all those boys had come hone," she says. "You never forget. I miss them every day."
GreGen
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