83-year-old bugler still serving country with horn

By Bill Lohmann/Medial General News Service
Published: May 25, 2008

At 83, Russell F. Wilson is more than three decades removed from his days as a Navy commander, but he’s still serving his country.
With his horn.
Wilson pulls his trusty trumpet — technically a long-model cornet — from its well-worn case several dozen times a year to sound taps at military funerals, wreath-layings and memorial services. He will play at today’s Memorial Day ceremony at 10 a.m. at the Virginia War Memorial.
“It’s an honor for me,” said Wilson, who lives in South Richmond with his wife, Halma.
Wilson participates with a local group — the Memorial Rifles of American Legion Post 84 — and the national Bugles Across America. Both provide buglers free of charge for military-related events. More than a dozen central Virginians are listed on the BAA roster as available volunteers.
Wilson has played for ceremonies at the war memorial for years, said Jon C. Hatfield, executive director of the Virginia War Memorial Foundation.
“Russ Wilson provides a great service for the war memorial and his fellow veterans,” Hatfield said.
Wilson has played horn since his high school days. He even played in the famed Ohio State University marching band for the year he attended school there.
In the Navy, he played in a drum and bugle corps and later at the U.S. Naval Academy, which he attended after his service in World War II.
He also served in Vietnam, working on the staff of Gen. William C. Westmoreland, and later as commander of a ship.
In more recent years, he’s played around Richmond in what he described with a smile as “a senior-citizens dance band.”
But blowing taps, he said, “is almost my only exercise in music now except now and then at church.”
Taps, which dates back to the Civil War, is a short, simple tune — unless you’re playing it at a somber occasion.
“It’s only 24 notes,” said Wilson, who moved to Richmond 35 years ago and worked for the Virginia Department of Corrections. “But you don’t want to screw it up.”
Tommy South is another local trumpeter with a Memorial Day assignment: he will sound taps at a ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.
South, like Wilson, is a volunteer with Bugles Across America. Also like Wilson, he’s been playing the horn since high school. He put down the trumpet for about 20 years and picked it up again a few years ago. Volunteering as a bugler has come even more recently.
“I was looking for some sort of useful outlet for it other than just my own amusement,” said South, 61, an adjunct religion professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and minister of Glen Allen Community Church. “I never served in the military . . . but I thought this would be a great way to honor these people.”
South recalled sounding taps at a funeral of a Vietnam veteran whose daughter approached him afterward and thanked him, saying how appropriate it was to have a live bugler rather than a recording played.
Said South, “That really made me think this is the right thing to do.”
Bill Lohmann is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.