Dorothy Davenhill Hirsch ’52, who attended Reed after the war as one of a handful of female veterans, joined the Women’s Army Corps (the WACs) while working for the Soil Conservation Service in Portland. She served as a lieutenant at Camp San Luis Obispo, never getting overseas. But the experience has remained vivid for her: “I joined the army first of all to know the experience, and because we were all thoroughly patriotic,” she recalled. “Nobody was—there were people who did not wish to serve. But most everybody was, when I say enthusiastic, [they] felt obliged to enter into this war because it was a very important thing in our lives.”

Through it all, academic life went on. Deferment programs such as the Army Specialized Training Program and its navy counterparts allowed more than half-a-million college students to accelerate their studies and enter officer training, coming out as so-called “90-day wonders,” freshly minted junior officers whose status was sometimes viewed with derision by veteran enlisted men and noncommissioned officers.

These were popular options for many Reed students, and one offshoot—the Army Air Corps Pre-Meteorology program (AMP)—brought uniformed soldiers to campus for an intense stretch of scientific training, a move that helped provide financial support for the school during the lean war years (find online articles about the AMP program at www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/fall2007/).

Cartoon, 1943–44 AMP yearbook

Some Reed graduates went to war as quickly as they could. Many didn’t come back. Glenn Ditto ’41, who opposed U.S. involvement before Pearl Harbor, was one of the early casualties, as was Navy torpedo bomber pilot Ricky Scholz, whose father, Richard F. Scholz, was president of Reed from 1921 to 1924.

Hendrickson’s recollection of “working like hell to finish my thesis” strikes a timeless chord among Reedies. But the fact that he left specific instructions to the team of cleaning ladies not to disturb the papers strewn around the Winch dorm room he shared with Jack Dudman ’42 (who later became a math professor and dean of students)—even though the two of them were about to depart for military training—offers a glimpse of college life during war.

“The men just vanished,” recalled Sally Hovey Wriggins ’44. A rough estimate has 40 percent of the male student body leaving the campus by late 1942 to early 1943. Departing faculty included Noble, who took leave to chair the regional War Labor Board in Seattle. He joined the State Department in 1946. Munk left in 1941 to be director of training for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, returning to Reed after the war.

By May 1942, meanwhile, Reed’s small number of Japanese American students were gone, many interned with their families under Executive Order 9066. Hattie Kawahara Colton ’43, Midori Imai Oller ’42, Ruth Nishino Penfold ’43, and Gus Tanaka ’45 were among the 110,000 ethnic Japanese dispatched to harsh, isolated camps in the inland West. While there were protests in the Quest, and visits from professors and friends at the Portland Assembly Center, a converted stockyard that served as a transit point before internal exile, none returned to Reed after their uprooting.

Students sew up sandbags on Canyon Day, 1942–43.

“I had Japanese friends and I thought the whole business of taking the Japanese to camps was a terrible violation of everything we stood for,” Wriggins said.

Another wartime departure was far more welcome: the unpopular President Dexter Keezer left for Washington, D.C., in 1942 to become deputy administrator of the Office of Price Administration. Chemistry professor Arthur Scott stepped in as acting president, and along with physics professor A.A. Knowlton, they brought the war to campus in a patriotic and pragmatic move, securing the college a role in the Army Air Corps Pre-Meteorology program. The AMP was an accelerated academic endeavor that brought uniformed troops to the campus, saw the Woodstock Safeway converted to a barracks, and kept the college running nearly around the clock. The program also provided a financial boost that allowed the college to keep functioning.

“The faculty was down to bare bones,” M. Jeanne Hansen Gordner ’46 said in an interview. But the need to move male students through allowed little respite.