At Colby, a microcosm of middle-class America of the time, lives would quietly change as the country settled into a Cold War mindset that lasted for decades. One irony is that the military détente of the Cold War developed not long after the world was relieved of the burden of World War II, "the war to end all wars." At Colby, World War II veterans paying tuition with GI Bill benefits lived in "barracks" erected below Roberts Union, where the woodsmen's team now practices. "There were baldheads around there then," recalled Jack Deering '55, a retired salesman living in Falmouth, Maine. "We had guys thirty, thirty-two, with kids, living in the barracks and selling sandwiches at night. For them, this was the trip out of the mills."
Staff Sgt. Frederick Pupier issues clothing to Cadet Sgt. Lee M. Larson '55, who then signs out his stripes. Uniforms were issued to all first-year male students.
In the glow of post-World War II prosperity, working-class kids set out to become middle-class college graduates. But before many had even earned diplomas, the newly perceived threat of the Soviets and Chinese emerged. As the opposing ideologies squared off, anti-communist fervor grew at home. If Americans didn't know precisely what was going on in Korea, they did know why it was happening. North Korea was communist and communists were a threat to the American way of life. "The only television coverage I can remember was when we used to be glued to the McCarthy hearings," said Karl Dornish '54. "There was one snowy [TV] set in the Zete living room. . . . There was very little TV coverage of the war."
But colleges like Colby didn't need battlefront reports from Korea to bring the war home. At mid-year, in January 1951, a front-page story in the Echo reported that 23 students had withdrawn to enlist in the military. Most had been drafted, just a month before President Truman signed a bill providing deferments to most college students. "I got to take three of my exams and couldn't take the other two," said Peter Pierce '56, who enlisted in the Navy. "When you take a course and you get all the way up to the final and you don't get credit for the course, that's a little annoying." But Pierce, who would go on to become an educator and founder of a Maine aquaculture company, didn't protest very loudly. "Everybody else in my family served in World War II. I wouldn't find much sympathy if I complained."
The sense of duty that pervaded the World War II-era Colby campus lingered during the Korean War and allowed for changes at Colby and other campuses that would be unheard of during the Vietnam War a dozen years later. "I don't think anybody protested in those days," Pierce said. "Nobody in our group did. I didn't know anyone at Colby who did."
Harry Wiley '51, a crew chief for an Army artillery unit in Korea, remembers that there were no demonstrations, no one angry at the country for going to war. "I've often said one of the reasons the war was forgotten was because people who fought the war were very quiet about it. It was almost like, ‘This is my job. I'm an American. I'm a citizen. If my country calls me to go to war, I go to war.'"
Not so during the Vietnam era. Sid Farr '55, who returned to Colby as a development officer from 1960 through 1995, recalls the Vietnam years as "the saddest time. A lot of people felt guilty, angry, all kinds of things. You didn't have that feeling when I was in school. There was an awareness but there wasn't that tragic sadness."
In fact, the two eras couldn't have been more different.
