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a.
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Note: years old.
His father continued to raise him at their yellow brick home in Lexington, Illinois, but his twin sisters Doris and Dorothy (Dec. 22, 1910) were split up between relatives' homes near-by. His father Delmar and his uncle Frank had a sawmill on the property, which was their family business. When Route 66 was planned around central Illinois bypassing Lexington and going through Bloomington to the south, the Rockwell Brothers secured the contract to lay the wooden forms for the new highway to be poured when it was just a concrete land in the 1930's.
Virgil enjoyed working with cutting and shaping wood. After he retired from being a long-distance trucker in the 1970's, he began creating wooden jewelry boxes with exquisite brass locks which he gave to all of his family and friends.
He loved words, fancy and long ones. He read many newspapers and liked to discuss world events. He could quote long poems to his son Tom when they took truck trips together. He especially enjoyed reciting "The Cremation of Sam McGee". After his mother died, there was no one to encourage him to finish high school, so his potential for these works of literature was his own initiative.
A smoker all of his life, he died of lung cancer in Arizona in 1987, where he lived with his second wife Mary Wiemer.
Note: BIOGRAPHY: Virgil's mother died of tuberculosis when he was 10
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