21 Nov National D-Day Memorial Foundation Remembers Lucille Hoback Boggess
With great sadness, the National D-Day Memorial Foundation marks the passing of Lucille Hoback Boggess. Boggess was an instrumental advocate for building the National D-Day Memorial. She served on the board of directors (later as board emerita), assisted in fundraising efforts to ensure the Memorial’s long-term success, took part in numerous documentaries on D-Day, and engaged in countless media interviews over the years.
“Lucille’s tireless efforts to transform her family’s personal tragedy of D-Day, the loss of her beloved brothers Bedford and Raymond Hoback, into a long-lasting legacy of remembrance has resonated with hundreds of thousands of visitors since the Memorial’s opening in 2001,” stated April Cheek-Messier, president of the National D-Day Memorial Foundation. “She never tired of speaking about the significance of D-Day and the profound loss many families endured. Lucille’s story made D-Day deeply personal. A visitor could not help but leave the Memorial feeling the weight of grief her family endured while having a better understanding of why D-Day mattered, then and now.”
In 2023, Boggess and her family gifted the Bible carried by Raymond Hoback, found by a soldier on Omaha Beach on June 7, 1944, to the Foundation for inclusion in the Memorial’s permanent artifact collection. In the decades following D-Day, the story of Raymond Hoback and his recovered Bible would become known internationally. For the account in Alex Kershaw’s bestselling history The Bedford Boys, Lucille told the author, “My mother always treasured the Bible so much. She said that next to her son, she would have wanted to have his Bible.”
The story inspired Death on Shore, one of the evocative sculptures at the National D-Day Memorial. The piece features an unnamed soldier at the water’s edge, a lost Bible beside him as he breathes his last breath. Boggess loaned Raymond’s Bible to sculptor Jim Brothers, to use as the model for the Bible in the sculpture.
Boggess was as equally passionate about public service as she was about history and education. She was a resolute voice in the community, blazing trails by becoming Bedford’s first female constitutional officer when she was elected Commissioner of Revenue in 1968 and later the first woman to serve on the Bedford County Board of Supervisors in 1991. Learn more about the life and legacy of Lucille Hoback Boggess.