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SERGEANT VERTON R.
ROCKAFELLOW was born in Rush County, Indiana in 1921. His family moved to the east
coast in 1930. His father, also named Verton Rockafellow, was a World
War I Army veteran, who had enlisted in the Marine Corps after Pearl
Harbor. The elder Rockafellow, a sales manager for Pennsauken's Parks
Dairy in civilian
life, was honorably discharged from the Marine Corps. The Rockafellow
family lived at 2224 42nd Street in Pennsauken NJ at the time of the
1930 census; they later moved to 5759 Rogers Avenue in Pennsauken.
Verton R. Rockafellow
graduated from Pennsauken Junior
High School and attended Merchantville (NJ) High School where he was a member of the football
team in 1937. By this time the Rockafellow family was operating Parks
Dairy, and Verton Rockafellow worked there before he enlisted in the United States
Army at Philadelphia on March 24, 1942, going overseas in August of that year.
Verton Rockafellow was stationed in England
in the summer of 1943, when his brother Alfred
A. Rockafellow, was rescued after his plane had been shot down off
Sicily. While he was overseas, his father
was elected commander of American Legion Post 125 in Pennsauken NJ,
on September 29, 1943. Alfred Rockafellow went on to complete 55
missions as a member of a B-25 bomber crew.
Verton R. Rockafellow was killed in action in Normandy
on June 12, 1944. His death was reported in the September 19, 1944 edition
of the Camden Courier-Post. Brought home aboard the USAT Eric G.
Gibson to New Jersey in January of 1948, he was buried near his home
in Pennsauken shortly thereafter.
Verton Rockafellow's
brother Allen later married Lavinia Farquhar Gerke, widow of Second
Lieutenant Wright E. Gerke, who also
had been killed in action during World War II.
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