housing that would become a “ghost town” aſter the war, and the conditions under which many workers were forced to live—including thousands sleeping on the factory floor—be- came a national disgrace. Normal President John Munson had already agreed in Janu-
ary 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.
A
t the urging of President Munson, hundreds of alumni wrote leters 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 band-
wagon, too. “Tose bombers are going to be kept going,” he said, “but not at the sacrifice of something as precious as the Normal College.” Tis was no mere flight of rhetorical fancy. Normal was
literally precious; as an ad hoc commitee 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. Te danger passed as quickly as it had materialized when
Congress appropriated $50 million to build barracks for the plant workers. Te 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 oc- cupy 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.
Allen, Arlene Allen’s younger brother and only sibling. Allen joined the Women’s Army Corps, the women’s branch
of the Army, shortly thereaſter. “Because my brother was gone, I felt I had to do something,” she says. But the vast majority survived, and so did the College.
Tanks 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 Uni- versity of Michigan contracted with the Army to house students in the now-empty barracks built for Willow Run employees. Tey called it Willow Village. 3
NOTE: Te 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.
Eastern | SUMMER 2011 17
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
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