He Didn’t Need an Overcoat - Carlton Wilson

WILSON, CONGER

Posted By: Joanne Breen (email)
Date: 9/9/2023 at 16:08:58

He Didn’t Need an Overcoat

Carlton C. Wilson didn’t look much like the common or movie version of The Public Benefactor. He didn’t act the part, and he certainly didn’t talk it. Carlton didn’t talk much.

Hundreds of people who have lived in Washington for five, ten fifteen years didn’t know Mr. Wilson by sight. Yet, to those whose business kept them in the vicinity of the northeast corner of the square, he was a familiar sight, an old man, short, square-cut, hurrying from his office just west of the YMCA to the bank, and back again – always without a coat.

Although he was eighty-nine years old when he died last week, Carlton (Tug) Wilson was almost a complete stranger to overcoats. He might wear a hat, if the weather was bitter cold, but no coat. Another lawyer, who had known Mr. Wilson for fifty years, said the only time he saw him wear an overcoat was when he was pallbearer at a funeral and wore a coat at graveside. It was ten below zero that day.

His wife, Julia, says Carlton didn’t need coats because he was so unusually warm-blooded. We can believe that: he was so warm hearted.

In his will, filed this week, he left more than seventy thousand dollars in charitable bequests to the community and its people.

The Wilson name is an old one in Washington history; an honored and respected one. It will now be a glorious name, never to be forgotten in the community which so many Wilsons have served in so many ways.

-- Thanks to an old man who never wore an overcoat.

-- Who didn’t need an overcoat because his heart was so warm.

Source: Washington Evening Journal, November 30, 1967

Transcribed by Deborah Johnson Wagner