RM3c Sherley Rolland Sampson

Sherley Rolland Sampson was born Feb. 22, 1917. His father, Ernest Sampson, was a lineman for the Great Northern Railway, and his mother, Inez Butterfield Sampson, a homemaker. They lived at Crookston, a town of about 7,000 in northwest Minnesota.

The son married Fern Vivian Hole in June 1940 and worked as a radio repairman until he enlisted in the Navy that December. Their son was born in July 1941. Mr. Sampson was a radioman and petty officer third class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed five months later in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

He was the second of Ernest and Inez’s children to die. The mother had watched helplessly from shore in 1933 as their daughter, Mary Lou, 9 or 10, drowned when the boat she was in capsized on Red Lake River near their home. 

The third and last of their offspring, Russell, 22, died in February 1943 in an Army Air Corps plane crash in Texas. He was a tech sergeant.

Sources: Minneapolis Star-Tribune; Albert Lea (Minnesota) Evening Tribune; Crookston (Minnesota) Daily Times; The Forum of Fargo, North Dakota; Census; Navy muster roll; Minnesota birth and marriage index; Texas death index. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.