World Events
Introduction
Both the Depression and World War II changed life on Millersville’s campus. Women who attended Millersville during the Depression felt very fortunate to be in college and many described the innovative ways they made ends meet during this time. With few men on campus during World War II, football games and dances were not held. Armstrong workers were housed on campus during this time, causing some tension with women in the dorms. When veterans returned to campus, the learning environment was enriched by war experiences shared in and outside the classroom.
The Depression
“We had to march in the city of Lancaster. We were taken there in the back of a truck. All the freshman had to march in the Roosevelt Parade, through the city of Lancaster. NRA they called it (National Recovery Act). And we had a big celebration and that parade and then we [went] back to Millersville again.”
Amanda Gockley Baum, Class of 1941
“So everybody was almost . . . I guess you could say poor. But we didn’t harp on it, as I recall. I guess the fact that I was in college helped me get through it . . . I was rather young to start teaching and this is one thing that affected everybody. Positions in schools were practically nil. If you located a job, you were very fortunate . . . I had applications in . . . different places, but I was acquainted with the man in the county office and I heard through them that there was a vacancy in a rural school in Clay Township close to Ephrata and that there was going to be a school board meeting a certain Saturday. So I got up bright and early and I went over and I found out who a couple of the school board members were and I found one in a barn and one out in the field. I presented myself to them and I went to the school board meeting . . had not submitted an application. So here you were in this schoolroom. Every seat had somebody in that wanted this job . . . 30 desks in there, regular school desks. [The] school board was up front in a circle with a coal bucket in the middle for spitting.”
Ethel Moore Broske, Class of 1930/1939
“We paid $18 every nine weeks for tuition and $10 a semester for an activities fee, so that added up to $92 a year, plus your books. You paid for your own books, which were not all that expensive at that time. So I went back in 1974 for a library certification and it cost me $120 I think for each course. It cost me more for one course than it cost me for the whole year when I went there . . . I mean you could get a loaf of bread for 10 cents . . . And people didn’t make the salaries that they make now . . . Of course this was a time when we were just coming out of the the Depression . . . ‘29 was the crash and then this is ‘40, . . . it was a recuperating period.”
Kathryn Dambach Eshelman, Class of 1942
World War II
“We got into the war in ‘41 and I graduated in ‘42. So the USO and various recruiting organizations also would come to the campus . . . There were no nylons and of course, cigarettes.. they couldn’t get cigarettes. And food and gasoline was rationed. That started . . . well, I know my first year of teaching after I graduated, we had to take turns driving, the teachers, because you had to share, you had to be careful about the gasoline. You were allowed only so much. And sugar was restricted, it was rationed. And various other groceries. Sugar and meats.”
Kathryn Dambach Eshleman, Class of 1942
“. . . it was a war year, everything was restricted. Oh, I know what I wanted to tell you. Because all the men left, that left the dorms pretty empty and of course Millersville was hurting financially. There were a lot of women who came from the coal regions to work in the plants at Armstrong and other places. So they had housing in the men’s dorms for those people. And we kind of were on the outs with them. I mean we kind of looked down our noses at them because they were wild and, you know, they didn’t have to behave the way we did. They could go out and drink or whatever they wanted to do, you know, because they were women on their own.”
Ozetta Groff Hirschmann, Class of 1945
“Well, the war was the main thing. And see . . . I went through in 3 years and I got out in February of ‘45 and I enlisted in the Marine Corps and I was gone . . . I got a leave to come home for three days for graduation . . . Roosevelt died when I was in boot camp, so that was a big thing at that time."
Ozetta Groff Hirschmann, Class of 1945
“. . . the ending of the war . . . I was working part time… and it just seemed like life stopped then and you just went down town because the war was over and everybody was running around . . . so full of joy because of the war being over.”
Mary Elizabeth Barbara Rohrabaugh, Class of 1947
“I was there with the first graduates of the first class of the GI Bill. It was a really great group because we had the cream of the crop in sports, High school classes . . . A good number [of returning vets] were married and if they weren’t married, they were very seriously dating or looking. . .they weren’t just there to have fun. . . They weren’t messing around; they had been to the war. It was a very grim war and sometimes when some of guys were out to study they would go up to the mezzanine to study together and in a few cases they would tell me what it was like to be in the war, how they suffered and what they went through. I felt honored that they chose to communicate that with me . . . When I went to Millersville and . . .[one of the] student teachers, one of my favorites was one of the first to die. That was tough. The war was very, very present with us then.”
Barbara Keener Shenk, Class of 1949/1979
“So . . . the classes, when the boys came back from the service, were very interesting. And the teachers . . . you could tell . . . they were very glad to have all these young men in their class. And they did bring a new dimension because they did talk about their experiences and it was really...it became fun."
Lois Kienzy Breitegan, Class of 1949
Korea
“There were some that were in my class that just didn’t come back that last year and they knew that they had gone into service. In fact, there was one that went into service and he died from a heat stroke two weeks after he went into service . . .His picture is in the yearbook. That really was a shock to us because he was always very active in music things and he had a beautiful tenor voice.”
Marie Shirk Kephart, Class of 1953
“I think when we were young, we didn’t worry as much...weren’t concerned about what was going on in the world . . . We had our television in ‘51, so that was the beginning of finding out what was going on in the world. So of course . . . we knew about the Korean War because some of the fellows were drafted.”
Marie Shirk Kephart, Class of 1953
Civil Rights
“I remember going to rallies for equality and then the most marvelous opportunity I had was going to Franklin & Marshall and hearing in person Martin Luther King . . .When I went in, I thought . . . oh I’m going to hear some radical. Wow. He spoke for well over an hour. He had no notes. The words flowed from his mouth like a golden stream and when he was finished, we gave him a standing ovation. He was the best speaker I ever heard.”
Doris Keller Hosler, Class of 1959, Faculty, Library
Three Mile Island
“[A time] that comes to my mind right away would be TMI . . . The threat of nuclear contamination. The whole area just closed down. I was one of the few people left. It felt like every day was Sunday afternoon, it was so quiet on the roads and in the towns. A lot of faculty and students, as I recall, they cancelled classes because so many people had left town because of the scare. At that time, they had this idea that if you were outside of a 10-mile radius of TMI, you’d be safe, like some iron curtain is going to drop down . . . with the TMI, my office was on the third floor of the art building. There was a great big tree out front, outside of the window, a big maple tree. After the secretary came around and said, everybody close the windows, close the windows, close the windows, there’s been this scare at TMI. That’s what they did. I looked out of the window and on a big branch of one of the trees was this squirrel embracing this branch, with his four legs just hanging there, and there it was just lying on the branch, and you think, my goodness, what’s happening! I’ve seen squirrels do that since then. He was just there enjoying the sun. But the timing was such that after you get this big scary call and there’s that squirrel draped over a branch, which I had never seen before, it just sort of reinforced the way we felt at the time.”
Jane L. Reinhard, Faculty, Art