Michigan State Normal College 1941 Cross Country team. Front Row (l-r): Paul Hansen, George Cole, Duane Zemper (Captain), Robert Archer, Warren Johnson. Back Row: Coach Lloyd W. Olds, Robert Allen, Vern Krebsbach, Edward Sigety, George Yellin and the team manager (name unknown).
Arlene Allen (BS47) and a friend of hers had been out dancing in Detroit the previous night with some airmen from Selfridge Field, north of the city. The band they heard was Alvino Rey and the King Sisters, one of the hottest tickets on the circuit.
Duane Zemper (BS42) had also been in Detroit that Saturday evening, cruising up and down John R Street with his roommate at Michigan State Normal College (MSNC). “We couldn’t find anything going on, so we went back to Wayne, where his folks lived, and stayed there overnight,” he says.
Bob Urquhart (BA43) was sitting at the switchboard he operated in Munson Residence Hall to help pay his way through school, listening to symphony music on the house mother’s radio.
And then the broadcast, their lives, and the lives of their fellow students and everyone else at MSNC, were shockingly interrupted.
It was Sunday, December 7, 1941. The Japanese had attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The other shoe had dropped. More than two years after Germany’s invasion of Poland, the United States was entering World War II.
“It was a peaceful day up until then,” says Urquhart. Things would not be peaceful again for a long time.
“The next day, my friend and I tore up to Selfridge Field to see the guys we had been dancing with,” Allen recalls. “They were already gone. That’s how fast it went.”
“We went over to Ypsi right away quick, and things were buzzing,” says Zemper. “The men’s lounge on the second floor of the Union was just packed with people. All the guys were saying, ‘We’ll go over there and knock those Japs into the ocean in a month.’ It took four years.”
MSNC had been founded as Michigan State Normal School in 1849, basically serving as a vocational school to train teachers to work in the state’s rapidly expanding public school system. Its development mirrored the state’s, and in 1899, having become the first teachers’ college in Michigan to offer a four-year curriculum, it was renamed Michigan State Normal College. As academic units in other disciplines were added, it became Eastern Michigan College in 1956 and Eastern Michigan University in 1959.
Having enjoyed steady growth in both size and reputation throughout its history, the Normal (as it was familiarly known), along with the rest of the country, now faced a crisis of unprecedented proportions—one that eventually threatened its very existence.
Several civilian defense classes for students were started in January 1942. Women were offered instruction in sewing and knitting, with the Red Cross supplying the yarn, while both men and women could take courses in first aid and home nursing.
“My friends were leaving all the time,” says Urquhart. “When we entered the war, a lot of men disappeared. As far as activities went, there were dances and things like that, but it was rather subdued.”
Enlistments, the draft and civilian defense work took a toll on enrollment, which fell from 1,900 in the spring of 1941 to 700 two years later, a drop of 63%. Athletic teams scrambled to fill their rosters. “That was one of the reasons I played football,” says Urquhart. “I was a second- or third-string tackle, even though I never had any high school football experience because I had a paper route.”
Zemper really was an athlete, and a good one: an All-American in track and field, he had qualified for the 1940 U.S. Olympic team, but the games were cancelled because of the war. While waiting for his service assignment after graduating in the spring of 1942, he went back to Flint, his hometown, to work as a metallurgist in an aluminum foundry that made bomber engines.
“I had always sworn I would never go back to Flint,” he says, “but they needed an engineer there, so I did.”
Fear of an attack on the mainland was widespread for the rest of the war. Two students in each class were designated and trained by the College as air raid marshals. Signs all over campus directed students to the nearest shelter.
Geography proved to be a double-edged sword for Normal. Its location in the middle of the country made it less vulnerable to attack than coastal areas, but the nation’s principal location for manufacturing bombers was a gargantuan plant built for that purpose in nearby Willow Run. Half of the 18,000 B-24 Liberator aircraft produced during the war were made there, in what was at the time the largest space in the world under one roof.
Employment at the plant peaked at 42,351 in June 1943. Housing so many workers was an enormous problem, one that Henry Ford, who built the factory, had apparently—and oddly—failed to consider. Resistance was high to erecting housing that would become a “ghost town” after the war, and the conditions under which many workers were forced to live—including thousands sleeping on the factory floor—became a national disgrace.
The Willow Run Bomber Plant near Ypsilanti was the largest factory in the world under a single roof in the 1940s. The plant’s 42,000 workers produced more than 8,600 B-24 bombers for the war effort. At its peak, the plant produced one bomber every hour. Following the war, Michigan State Normal College (now EMU) temporarily housed a large influx of students in the plant’s former housing quarters.
Normal President John Munson had already agreed in January 1943 to accept 600 soldiers for an officer training program that would use some of the school’s suddenly excess capacity in both faculty and housing. Before they could arrive, however, the War Productions Board decided that housing Willow Run workers was a higher priority. It sought to use the College for that purpose for the duration of the war, which would mean closing the College to students.
It’s hard to say how serious the threat was, but when they ran it up the flagpole, nobody—at least in Michigan—saluted. For one thing, closing the College was an awfully high price to pay for housing a mere 2,000 of the plant’s 40,000-plus workers, and critics pointed out that good teachers and an educated citizenry were as much a part of the arsenal of democracy as bombers.
At the urging of President Munson, hundreds of alumni wrote letters protesting the plan. With characteristic bluntness, Munson informed the Army that “anyone with practical experience in building will know it will be more economical and expeditious to erect quarters properly planned and conveniently located to the Bomber Plant than it would be to [remodel] the College buildings.”
Calling MSNC “one of the finest and oldest teacher training institutions in the nation,” Dr. John A. Hannah, president of Michigan State College, opined that “to close it would be to cripple it for years.”
Governor Harry Kelly was quick to find a seat on the bandwagon, too. “Those bombers are going to be kept going,” he said, “but not at the sacrifice of something as precious as the Normal College.”
This was no mere flight of rhetorical fancy. Normal was literally precious; as an ad hoc committee formed to defend the school pointed out, the College represented a $6 million investment on the part of the state, more than that of any other teacher training institution in Michigan.
The danger passed as quickly as it had materialized when Congress appropriated $50 million to build barracks for the plant workers. The only response the College eventually made to the housing crisis was to require that all students live either in residence halls or in their permanent homes rather than occupy private lodgings in the Willow Run neighborhood.
Even without opening its doors to war workers, Normal did its share. A total of 1,034 of its students and 23 faculty members—four of whom were women—served their country in the conflict.
Michigan State Normal College students after the war, circa 1947-1949.
Leroy Grindle, former captain of the track team and a 1940 graduate, was the first with MSNC ties to give his life for his country; he was the navigator of a bomber that crashed during training near Pendleton, Ore., on Jan. 22, 1942, killing all eight aboard. Before the war ended in 1945, 62 others had perished, including Lawrence McKenny, son of former MSNC president Charles McKenny, and Robert Allen, Arlene Allen’s younger brother and only sibling.
Allen joined the Women’s Army Corps, the women’s branch of the Army, shortly thereafter. “Because my brother was gone, I felt I had to do something,” she says.
But the vast majority survived, and so did the College. Thanks to the G.I. Bill of 1944, which subsidized college and vocational education for returning veterans, enrollment in 1946 was more than triple what it had been three years earlier, and had swollen to nearly 3,000 by the time MSNC celebrated its centennial in 1949.
Now the talk was of shortages, not surpluses. Among other things, the College was ill prepared to accommodate three times as many students as it had room for. In an ironic twist that would embarrass most fiction writers, the Normal and the University of Michigan contracted with the Army to house students in the now-empty barracks built for Willow Run employees.
They called it Willow Village.
AUTHOR NOTE: The author would like to express his gratitude to EMU student Stephen Lund, whose paper, “Michigan State Normal College at War,” was of great assistance in writing this article. Lund’s paper was presented as part of EMU’s 2010 Undergraduate Symposium.