When Bill Brown Jr. completed a 65-mile ultra-marathon distance run from Rutgers–Camden to Rutgers–New Brunswick to raise awareness of student-veteran issues in 2008, his father, Bill Brown Sr., who had run the Boston Marathon a week before, ran right beside him for about half of the distance.
Brown Sr., a 1981 Rutgers–Camden accounting graduate who attended the university after serving in the Air Force, had been an advocate for student-veterans on campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When his son, Brown Jr.—a Navy Seal who served three overseas deployments, including one in Iraq—enrolled at Rutgers–Camden after eight years of service, he followed in his father’s footsteps. “My dad had a huge impact on me as far as going to Rutgers and starting up a veterans group,” Brown Jr. said.
Brown Jr., who earned a political science degree in 2011 and a Rutgers Law degree in 2014, was instrumental in founding the Veterans for Education group on campus, which had significant influence in reviving services for veterans attending all three Rutgers campuses. Now an attorney with McCarter & English in Newark, Brown Jr., who lived most of his life in Burlington County, recently moved to Bloomfield, New Jersey.
Brown Sr., who grew up in Willingboro and lived in New Jersey until retiring from a career as fiscal resource manage for the state and later a fraud examiner for the city of Philadelphia, now lives in Lewes, Delaware. He remains involved with Rutgers veterans, serving as president of the Veteran Alumni of Rutgers University.
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