Before he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Eugene Joseph Rowe briefly worked in the screw machine division of the Radio Corporation of America plant in Camden, New Jersey.

A week or so after the Dec. 7, 1941 attack his former co-workers on the swing shift were discussing Rowe and the war during their lunch break. One suggested they salute the American flag in the factory and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. According to a June 1943 article in the Courier-Post newspaper, it became a nightly ritual during the war.

Mr. Rowe was a seaman first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed.

He was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 17, 1920 to Agnes Galanaugh Rowe, a homemaker, and Eugene Bond Rowe, a salesman and Army veteran of World War I. As a boy, Eugene Joseph sold newspapers for seven years.

He told the Navy that he completed 10th grade at Collingswood (New Jersey) Junior High in 1937. A tribute to him in the 1942 Collingswood High School  yearbook said he would have been a member of the class of 1940.

He served in the 7th Division of the 4th District of the New Jersey Naval Reserve. He also completed a stint in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era federal jobs program. It employed single men 18 to 25 to plant trees, build roads and trails and make other improvements to public land, forests and parks. The men lived at camps across the country and were provided a bed and three meals a day. Of their $30 monthly pay, $25 was sent to their families. Eugene was in Co. 291 at Banks, Idaho.

Back home, he lived in the Bettlewood section of Haddon Township and is honored there on a World War II memorial marker outside of Jennings Elementary School.

Mr. Rowe and another former Collingswood student, Walter Hamilton Simon, enlisted in the same place and on the same day — Oct. 16, 1940. Mr. Simon graduated from high school in 1937. It isn’t clear whether the two men knew each other before they joined the Navy. Mr. Simon was also killed on the Arizona.

Sources: The Courier-Post of Camden, New Jersey; Navy enlistment records and muster rolls; Collingswood High School yearbooks; Census. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.