Recollections Contributed to the NCSU Libraries in 2005

After learning about the NCSU Libraries' exhibit, a number of former GI Bill beneficiaries, family members and friends shared their own recollections of returning to civilian and college life after World War II or Korea. Because their accounts contribute to the historical record, the Libraries requested the correspondents' permission to add their letters to the NC State Alumni Collection in the University Archives of the Special Collections Research Center. Here are a few excerpts.

Joseph H. Marion (Class of 1950) of Yuma, Arizona.


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Credit:Agromeck, 1950.

Excerpts from a letter dated June 30, 2005

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Enid Waring Marion with daugther Lynn, born 1947.
Credit: Courtesy of Joseph H. Marion.

"I was one of those GI Joes, 1948-1950. If most of us hadn't already been married, NC State College would have been no place to find a girlfriend at that time. I never had a class that wasn't overcrowded and all male. However, the good education I got has served me well in my Agronomy career."

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Lynn Marion in her stroller.
Credit: Courtesy of Joseph H. Marion.

"We lived across from the Raleigh-Durham Airport in one of the three family apartments located in what had been the Army dispensary. Four or five more [NC State] students' families also lived around there, as well as a forestry professor, using the other military buildings. We carpooled to the campus."

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Credit: Courtesy of Joseph H. Marion.

"Our building was heated by hot water from a large furnace that gobbled up about five cords of wood each winter to keep the building warm enough for the babies. Weekends were devoted to logging the surrounding forest for that fuel supply. Those logs generated three kinds of heat: warming the GI loggers as they worked at the cutting and loading and stacking, warming the wives as they toted the logs in from the wood pile and stoked the furnace, and then the warmth for all, in the burning of the logs."

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Credit: Courtesy of Joseph H. Marion.

"We also maintained a large community garden and the women used the Depression era cannery in Morrisville to preserve the surplus. At graduation our wives were awarded the Degree of Goodwife, a kind gesture made for their cooperation in contending with postwar shortages and housing difficulties with good humor. A copy of my wife?s certificate is enclosed if you care to add it to the GI Bill memorabilia."

 

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