Any man who has served in the armed forces for ninety days can attend for a year any approved school or college, and if he was less than twenty-five years of age at induction he is entitled to these benefits for a period equal to his military service after September 16, 1940, for a maximum of four years. The Government pays all bills for tuition and fees up to $500 a year.

It is a splendid bill, a wonderful bill, with only one conspicuous drawback. The guys aren’t buying it. They say “education” means “books,” any way you slice it, and that’s for somebody else.    [“The G.I.’s Reject Education,” Stanley Frank, August 18, 1945]

He was right—partially, and only briefly.

As of February 1, 1945, only 12,844 discharged veterans throughout the country, in a total of 1,500,000, were attending schools under the G. I. Bill. Less than 1 per cent.

Frank had interviewed G.I.s at two veterans hospitals and found them anxious to get home and back to work as quickly as possible. Only 10% showed interest in further education. Most of these soon dropped out of the program.

Boiling down the figures, about 2 per cent of the amputees and neurosurgical cases—those who need it most—indicate an intention of having a go at serious, brain-building learning.

"Although painfully reminiscent of the military barracks they so recently occupied, these double-decker beds in Illinois' Old Gymnasium Annex increased by 300 the number of unmarried ex-servicement the university could accommodate. Beds of any sort are rare than gold at most schools."

We are, perhaps expecting too much of the tired, bewildered, embittered soldier, disassociated as he has been from civilian life, in asking him to plan his career. In normal times, most people have modest ambitions and are content to drift with the tide, evading responsibility if they can.

Though the college-benefit program had been in effect for a short time, some Post editor already saw the education benefit as a giant waste of taxpayer’s money.

Yet, by early the next year, there were signs of a general shift in Americans’ attitude toward education. Civilian adults, like the returning veterans, wanted to make up for the opportunities they’d lost during the war, and the Depression before it. Early in 1946, the Post reported “facilities of the country’s adult-education program are creaking under the load as [Americans] enroll by the hundreds of thousands.”

If, citizens have reasoned, a university can help practicing physicians, engineers, and so on, keep up to date, why can’t it tackle things that have ordinary folks stopped in their tracks?

A Gallup poll last spring indicated that 34 per cent of the adult population—25,000,000 folks—had the impulse to take advantage of part-time educational facilities after the war.   [“Look Who’s Going To School Now!” Harold Titus, Feb. 9, 1946]

And just one year after the Post reported G.I.’s rejected education, it ran “Crisis at the Colleges.”

"'Illiniville,' where these scarce prefabricated houses take care of 275 student veterans with their families. A total of 1200 applied."

Heads of American colleges … are confronted with a reality that has always been a democratic dream: the opportunity to raise the educational attainments of a solid chunk of a whole generation. Because of the Government subsidy to servicemen, the opportunity is here; men who could never come to college under ordinary circumstances are enrolling or knocking at the doors.

[However] the colleges do not have the facilities, the housing, the instructors, or classrooms to handle [the opportunity]. The primary, the immediate, the all-important, problem is housing.

Thousands of eligible veterans were turned away last September because the colleges had no place to quarter them; thousands more were turned away in February at the beginning of the second semester. And yet the enrollment of veterans rose immensely because the colleges did find some place, some way, to house some of them.

Here was the situation at Illinois during the second half of the school year. Total undergraduate enrollment at Urbana … was 12,780. This is more students than ever attended there before. … Total veteran undergraduate enrollment was 5509.

There were veterans living in basements, veterans in garrets, veterans in made-over garages and abandoned filling stations. There were 300 sleeping in double-decker beds in the gaunt building known as the Old Gymnasium Annex.

Gone is the campus where every prospect pleases… Cruelest blows to academic serenity are the clotheslines behind the trailers and prefabricated houses. Along with the leaves of the traditional whispering maples there are, diapers and children’s underpants blowing in the wind.

By the time the program ended in 1956, it had helped 2.2 million Americans attend college and another 6.6 million receive training.

It would be hard to over-estimate the effect on this country made by this wave of America’s college-educated G.I.s. It enabled these men to lead the changing industries of the post-war world. It also produced a higher expectation for education in the American public; a 10th-grade education became less socially acceptable in the growing middle class.

The G.I.-Bill generation passed its faith in education on to the next generation, which passed on to their children. It is still an article of faith to many Americans today despite the low employment rate of college graduates.

A Hasty Prediction For the G.I. Bill The Saturday Evening Post

It was twenty-two years ago that I stopped off between trains to watch a high school basketball game at Plymouth, Indiana, and wound up—when the regutar official failed to show up—being pressed into service as referee. Since then, averaging fifty games a year from crossroads high schoots through Big Ten games and seven Indiana state-final tournaments, I’ve blown my whistle about 30,000 times and run about 3000 miles on hardwood floors. But I still haven’t seen everything. There’s no limit to the things that can happen in a basketball game.

There was the lowly last-minute sub who dashed in determined to save the day, only to find, when he peeled off his sweat pants, that he had neglected to put on his playing trunks. Once an overwrought boy rushed up to me and insisted in all seriousness that the other team was using seven men. And I’ll never forget the time our own dean, acting as timekeeper, thrust his gun under the table to end a game, and blew a hole through his new hat.

Before one 1934 state tournament battle, a coach asked the other official and myself to keep a sharp eye on the opposing team. “They have a trick of knocking the ball out of a man’s hands as he gets ready to put it in play from out of bounds,” he said, “to give themselves time to cover up.”

If so, a technical foul should be called. Not being given to pre-game statements of policy, however, we just told the coach to wait and see.

Right off the bat, the ball went out of bounds. Sure enough, a player brought it up to the side line to throw it in, and swipe! the ball was batted from his hands. Dutifully, we blew our whistle and slapped on a technical foul. There was juat one detail that wasn’t according to the scenario. The boy who committed the foul was on the team of the coach who had done all the squawking before the game.

Hoosier Hysteria in 1942 The Saturday Evening Post

Butler University has played in the NCAA tournament several times, but this is the first time they have advanced to the Final Four. To get this far, they defeated—against general expectations—top-seeded Syracuse and Kansas State. Now Butler (with an enrollment of 4,500 students) faces Michigan State (with an enrollment of 45,000).

The situation has reminded many fans of another Indiana basketball miracle: the 1954 Milan-Muncie Central game that inspired the movie Hoosiers. Several points underscore the parallels: the Milan-Muncie Central game was played at Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse, and Bobby Plump, the Milan guard whose last-second basket lifted his team to victory in that game, is a Butler alum.

In 1987 Post writer Hank Nuwer interviewed Plump for an article on Hoosiers and the events that led to its creation. The former guard thought it “an enjoyable movie,” having seen it four times despite its loose grasp of the events.

“The final 18 seconds were the only thing factual in the movie … From the time the ball was inbounds after the final time-out, the movie was accurate.”

March, 1987, The Saturday Evening Post

“Hoosiermania”

by Hank Nuwer

Back in 1954, Milan High, a tiny southeastern Indiana school with 161 students, survived a 751-team tourney to meet the Muncie Central Bearcats in the state basketball finals. Such an improbable matchup between a backwater school and a powerful giant could happen in only a few states, such as Indiana; nearly all other states place schools in divisions according to enrollment size. And, as you might expect, some Goliath from Indianapolis, Marion, or Muncie has invariably claimed the Hoosier basketball title every year—every year, that is, except 1954, when a youngster named Bobby Plump zinged a last-second jump shot that made Milan a household name in Indiana.

Milan’s team was led by four boys from Pierceville, population 45. The quartet—Bobby Plump, Glenn Butte, Gene White, and Robert Schroder— were tough farm kids, unintimidated by physical contact. All were short, even by 1950s standards: the tallest was White, at 5 ’11. ” The boys were dirt poor but proud. Plump, for example, came from a home that lacked electricity, telephones, and plumbing. They were also painfully shy everywhere but on the basketball court. Because there was nothing else to do in Pierceville but work and shoot buckets, the boys learned to hang hook shots about the time they learned to wield a pitchfork. When the time came, they teamed up with feisty Ray Craft of Milan to give Milan High the best squad it ever had or ever would have.

Hoosiers, the feel-good movie that’s spread Hoosier hysteria around the country, is the brainchild of two Indiana natives and inveterate basketball fans, David Anspaugh and Angelo Pizzo. The movie, they say, was inspired by the famous Milan-Central game, although the script departs widely from the real Milan story. In the movie. Hickory’s coach, Norman Dale (played by Gene Hackman), is a middle-aged man given a chance to redeem himself for punching a player years earlier. Milan’s coach, Marvin Wood, on the other hand, was a quiet man, a relative babe of 24 who had inherited the team from a volatile but successful Milan character named Snort Grinstead. Wood instituted a slow, ball-control game at Milan called “cat and mouse”—an affront to fans long used to Grinstead’s run-and-shoot offense.

After coaching Milan all the way through the tournament field, Coach Wood angered fans of his underdog Indians by freezing the ball late in the final game as the Muncie Central Bearcats led by two points, 28-26. Plump actually stood near center court with the ball tucked safely away like a football and held the ball for four minutes and 13 seconds while 15,000 fans grumbled and squirmed. But Wood’s gamble paid off. When the score was tied at 30, the coach called a time-out. The ball went in-bounds to Plump, who exchanged passes with Craft and then dribbled down the lane while the crowd counted down the remaining seconds. Seeing an opening. Plump went high in the air and lofted the ball over the fingertips of Muncie’s James Barnes. The ball seemed to take forever to reach the basket, but when it did, the ending was made for Hollywood- Milan 32, Muncie 30.

Wood—now the women’s basketball coach at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana—says he devised the ball-holding strategy by accident in an earlier game. “We played a local team that was big and strong on a large floor in a small gym building,” Wood recalls. “We didn’t want anyone to get hurt, so I said, ‘Hold the ball.’” The scheme worked so well that Wood called the play again in the championship game to rest his winded team.

Coach Wood—who held down a night watchman’s job to supplement the $4,000 he was paid to both coach and teach—had more than just a handful of boys turn out for the team, as Coach Dale does in Hoosiers. On the contrary. Wood’s problem was finding a tactful way to cut some of the untalented players who swarmed into the gym his first day of practice. Of 73 boys in the school, 58 showed up for tryouts.

Despite the discrepancies, members of the real Milan team have enjoyed the movie based upon their heroics, as well as the recent national attention lavished upon them. Plump calls Hoosiers “an enjoyable movie.” He’s seen it four times already, and he won’t deny he may go again. “I think I know all of the roles in the movie,” he says. “You have a good feeling during it—especially when you leave the theater.” But he stresses that key elements in Hoosiers—such as the drunken scene with Shooter (played by Dennis Hopper), the romance between Coach Dale and Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey), and the reluctance of the team’s star to play—are all figments of a Hollywood imagination. “The final 18 seconds were the only thing factual in the movie about the Milan- Central game, and Angelo Pizzo told me he tried to make that [scene] as true as possible,” Plump says. “From the time the ball was in bounds after the final time-out, the movie was accurate.”

Bob Plump celebrates the basketball shot heard from Milan, Indiana, to Hollywood by cutting down the net. (Photo courtesy of W. M. Krider/Lawenceburg, Jr.)

The movie has brought back memories for Plump, now an Indianapolis insurance executive, yet much of that night 33 years ago remains a blank. He simply cannot remember what he was thinking during those crucial final seconds.”I don’t know,” he says, adding, tongue-in-cheek, “I guess we were a bunch of dummies out there that didn’t have any thoughts.” Later, he theorizes that the Milan players were too busy concentrating on their jobs to worry. Roger Schroder, a Milan player who spent much of the afternoon on the bench, had a good view of the four Indian players flooding one side of the court to give Plump a chance to go one-on-one against Barnes of Muncie. “What I saw happen was just what was planned during the time-out,” Schroder says. “I looked at the clock, and it went from three down to two and one. It was all over and the impossible had occurred.” Milan had won.

As a result of that win, nine of ten poor boys from Milan received college scholarships. Plump admits he never could have dreamed of attending Butler University, an expensive private school, had he starred on a lesser team.

The Milan players insist the movie hasn’t changed their lives, but they also say they can’t wait for the team’s annual reunion in late spring to tease Ray Craft, the only Milan player to have a bit part in Hoosiers. (He welcomes the Hickory team to the site of the final game.) “We will talk about Craft’s delivery of lines,” Gene White says. “We’ll help him improve his acting for his next movie.”

Hoosier Hoops: Butler Among the Big Dogs The Saturday Evening Post

The first intercollegiate football game—played November 6, 1869, in which Rutgers beat Princeton, 6 to 4—bears little resemblance to a modern version of the game.

This “prehistoric” football was a hybrid of existing sports that combined the rules of soccer and rugby in a more physical, more dangerous game.

Today, we can debate whether modern football is too violent for college students, but there is little question about the 19th century version. Then, it was a harsh, brutal sport which became so hazardous that, during the 1905 season, 18 college players died from injuries sustained on the football field.

President Roosevelt considered outlawing the sport that year. Instead, he ordered colleges to impose rules to make the game less lethal. Since then, football has changed continually. As talk show host Cenk Uygur observes, “There is no tradition of football, outside of change. The game has changed countless number of times. The shape of the ball has changed; the number of people who play has changed; the tackling and blocking rules have changed; the forward pass itself is a change to the rules; and how many yards you needed for a first down changed.

Trivia tickler: How many yards did you need for a first down when the game first started? None, you just had to keep possession; teams were known to sit on the ball for a whole half.

[To read “How Teddy Roosevelt Ended Unfettered Football and Saved the Game,” click here.]

In 1945 James Hopper wrote for the Post about the game he played when he was quarterback for the University of California in 1899. Reading his account, you realize how much more the words “contact sport” could mean.

“I was already playing long before 1899; therefore am I able to describe for you the flying wedge, a play still vaguely famous in men’s minds.

"We Really Played Football in the Gay Nineties"
by James Hopper
November, 1945

“Unlimbering this heavy gun, we left the ball on the ground in charge of the quarterback and strolled back some thirty yards to get a good start, the joke on the defensive team being that it couldn’t stir as long as the ball remained on the ground and wasn’t put in play. Leisurely we formed ourselves into a solid v-shaped wedge and got going, gradually picking up momentum till we were rumbling along like a juggernaut. At the last, last moment, our quarterback whisked the ball back to us, thus freeing our opponents just as we mightily crashed into them. It was a cute play.

“But what is really interesting about the wedge, of which exaggerated stories have been told, is the fact that it could be stopped. Sure, you could stop it! All you had to do was sling yourself very exactly at its precise apex. It then went up in the air and shattered like a house of cards. At least that is what you were told had happened when you woke up twenty minutes later.

“There being no forward pass, and hence no fear of a forward pass, the team on the defense lined up tight, its line a solid wall, its backs close up. When you lowered your head- and bucked that, you bucked a fortification. You had help, though. The help was not so much ahead, in the form of blocking, as it is today; it came from behind. As you bucked, your whole team massed at your tail and enthusiastically shoved you through. Through you went like a straw driven through a fence by a Middle West cyclone.

“Once through, even then it wasn’t as it is today. You couldn’t call the thing off by touching one knee to the ground as the modern back does. Touching the ground with the knee didn’t count. Also the ethics of the period demanded that you continue. Even asprawl you went on, clawing the earth for a possible half inch, spinning like a firecracker, twisting like a worm, crawling like a snake, while the fellows on the other side piled up on you one by one, and your own fellows, trying to help, piled up on you one by one, so that when the referee, a skeptical fellow, at last became convinced that your progress was truly halted and blew his whistle, you were established beneath a mountain of pigskin stalwarts with arms and legs sticking out like the guns of a battleship.

“Under there you lay very quiet, knowing that this was the only kind of rest you got in this game, holding your breath because there was no breath to breathe, tucking your hands under you to escape the prowlings of still ambitious cleats, and holding the ball tight in your armpit, for always, at that time, some sly sucker would be trying to steal it from you.

“In my last game we had in our equipment a maneuver that deserves special description. We called it the Kangaroo and it was built about our fullback, a rangy customer named Pete, who was fast and springy. As the center snapped the ball to me, Pete would already be on his way toward the line at a deceptively careless trot whose every step, as a matter of fact, had been carefully calculated. I handed him the hall as be reached a certain spot, also accurately predetermined, and he then leaped up into the air. This was all he had to do—leap up into the air. For at the same moment, I grabbed the seat of his pants, and gave a mighty upward heave while the two halfbacks grabbed each a thigh and gave a mighty upward heave. High through the sky Pete went sailing, to alight well behind the enemy line.

“The only inconvenience about this play was that, landing on the other side, Pete landed entirely alone. Before our protective intentions could get to him, he usually had been well worked over already by an irritated foe who questioned the honesty of this sudden arrival out of the air.”

Read the full article. It’s a fascinating and hilarious account of life on the scrimmage line before modern-day regulations made football both less lethal and more interesting.

My, How the Rules Have Changed The Saturday Evening Post

The stimulus package, which was passed earlier this year, set aside $32 billion in higher-education funding, which will benefit 800,000 students. Even so, parents are naturally concerned that their earnings aren’t rising nearly as fast as the cost of educating their children.

Ben Franklin would try to reassure today’s parents with the value of learning. “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

Franklin remained a skeptical pragmatist all his life, but he grew dreamy-eyed whenever he talked of learning. He prized education above all things, even above hard work and justice. The minimal schooling he received as a child—only two years of elementary education—left him hungry for more. However, the needs of his family forced him to start work early in life.

Everything else Ben Franklin learned he grabbed between jobs. He read continuously. As a young man, he lived on inexpensive vegetables so he could afford to buy more books. His lifetime of study led him beyond the range of his educated peers into fields of scientific and philosophic speculation. His pursuit of learning eventually earned him honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale, an honorary Master’s degree from William and Mary College, and honorary doctorate degrees from the University of St. Andrews and Oxford University.

Yet he never considered himself an intellectual. If anything, he believed he hadn’t learned enough, and that his thick head prevented him from being truly intelligent. Too much of his education, he believed, was obtained the hard way. He was referring to himself, as much as anyone, when he observed:

“Experience keeps a dear [overpriced] school, but fools will learn in no other.”

The High Cost of Learning The Saturday Evening Post

Pat

Smyrna, Georgia

No Talking in the Library! The Saturday Evening Post

I’ve had years of practice writing papers of varied length and on assorted subjects, so the task, in my mind, was not daunting. However, my brother, 10 years my junior, viewed the assignment as a mountain of which he could not see the peak, nor imagine arriving on top! I knew he could use my help, and it would give us a chance to spend time together, mutually beneficial! When I accepted his request of assistance, his shoulders relaxed, I saw a smile, and the tension subsided. He didn’t require the amount of help I was prepared to give, but just having me sit next to him and support him seemed to lend self-confidence and spirit to his ability.

I received the final draft for revision with a note attached stating that he could not have accomplished what he’d done without me. He went on to write that it might not have been a “big deal” or challenge for me, but for him it was huge. I informed him that I did not deserve the credit, as he was the author. I sat next to him and fine-tuned a few spelling and grammatical errors, and I was happy to have the opportunity to spend time with him.

Have you ever done something for someone that you didn’t think was a big deal, but it meant the world to them?

Have you tutored or mentored anyone and felt your reward in watching their success?

If you had a project you needed help completing, do you have a special friend or relative you would turn to for support?

Family Ties The Saturday Evening Post