Normal, with the World at War


A


rlene 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. Te band they heard was Alvino Rey and the


King Sisters, one of the hotest 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 siting at the switchboard he op-


erated 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.


Te Japanese had atacked the Ameri- can naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Te other shoe had dropped. More than two years aſter Germany’s invasion of Poland, the United States was entering World War II. “It was a peaceful day up until


then,” says Urquhart. Tings would not be peaceful again for a long time. “Te next day, my friend and I


tore up to Selfridge Field to see the guys we had been dancing with,” Al- len recalls. “Tey were already gone. Tat’s how fast it went.” “We went over to Ypsi right away


14 Eastern | SUMMER 2011


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).


WWII changed everything—and everyone—at Michigan State Normal College by Jeff Mortimer


quick, and things were buzzing,” says Zemper. “Te 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 Michi- gan University in 1959.


Photo on opposite page, Guadalcanal Landing, August 1942 © Bettmann/Corbis


Courtesy, Eastern Michigan University Archives


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