At Ohio University, effects of World War II radiated throughout the decade known as the Fabulous Forties.
Mary-Elizabeth Lasher Myers, a 1942 graduate, spent Dec. 6, 1941, dancing the night away at the Berry Hotel, where the Sigma Pi fraternity was having a dance.
The next morning, Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, Lasher Myers - the first female editor of The Post - received a phone call that relayed the news of the Pearl Harbor attacks.
At the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house, the Delts organized a recruitment table. At the center of the table was a wooden stork with a diaper-bottomed baby hanging from its beak and a sign around its neck asking, Who in the hell's exemption is this?
This was a game sort of thing
Lasher Myers said. To me that represented the kind of humor that saw so many of our young men through all of those miserable four years of war.
When the United States war effort was at its strongest, women outnumbered men at OU five to one.
During the war the poor ladies had no men around
said Bill Benson, an OU alumnus who was a freshman in 1940. His studies were put on hiatus when he left for the armed services in June of 1941.
Students were not the only people called to duty. OU President Herman Gerlach James was granted leave - and eventually resigned - to give his full efforts to the war.
Resident enrollment at OU dropped from 3,133 students in 1941 to just 1,306 in 1943. Women on campus aided the war effort by knitting for the Red Cross and counting their ration cards. And the cannons that once stood on College Green were melted down for metal.
In 1945, John Calhoun Baker, formerly an associate dean at Harvard University, was appointed OU president. But he was not the only man coming to campus. War had ended, and the GI Bill, newly signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was paying for veterans' educations.
Veteran enrollment rose from 219 to 1,103 in the two semesters of the 1945-46 school year.
James Drumwright Jr., a veteran of D-Day, enrolled as an architecture major.
He said the female students were glad to have the men back on campus.
They would invite you to their apartments
but all they wanted to do was sit and talk and listen to Frank Sinatra
he said.
The instant rise in enrollment filled all university residences. Men lived in the gymnasium, the stadium, the city Armory and even in neighboring towns, commuting to campus by bus.
Athens residents opened their doors to 2,000 students. Branch campuses in Portsmouth, Chillicothe and Zanesville reopened to deal with the influx.
The federal government issued OU a grant to raise 12 acres of land above flood level in the area that is now East Green. In just a few months, 23 temporary buildings were constructed, enough to house 740 men.
The area soon became known as Hog's Island.
They were down there in the mud
Drumwright said.
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