I n 1940 Mr. Wilson built the 2-story brick, colonial building located at 301 McKenzie Avenue. This facility was the home of Wilson Funeral Home from 1940 until it was sold to Bay County for a Courthouse Annex in 1963. One of the most memorable funerals to be held in the McKenzie Avenue address was that of the 'King of the Gypsies' who died on November 1, 1948, and was interred in Meridian, Mississippi. The newspaper gave the account, "The special guard of tribesmen stationed according to custom at Wilson's Funeral Home yesterday permitted over 3,000 local residents to view the flower banked bier." The building had a basement which Mr. Wilson used to stockpile metal caskets at the onset of World War II. Mr. Wilson had a seamless copper deposit casket for someone of prominence who might die during the war. Mr. Wilson himself was interred in the casket in 1956. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was placed in an identical casket at the time of his death in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945.