GI Bill improved campus life for ‘poorest student’

Chuck Adams, along with millions of other vets, have benefited.

Chuck Adams, 89, who served in the military from 1942 to 1946, used the GI Bill to get a college degree after his service. Adams is in his front yard of his Centerville home watching birds after working in the garden. Staff photo by Ron Alvey

Ron Alvey Chuck Adams, 89, who served in the military from 1942 to 1946, used the GI Bill to get a college degree after his service. Adams is in his front yard of his Centerville home watching birds after working in the garden. Staff photo by Ron Alvey

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By Margo Rutledge Kissell, Staff Writer Updated 11:11 PM Sunday, June 21, 2009

Chuck Adams arrived in the Philippines on Aug. 1, 1945, a week before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

After Japan’s eventual surrender, which brought World War II to an end, Adams’ Army unit began processing freed allied prisoners of war.

A few months later, the staff sergeant boarded a transport with 10,000 other GIs and headed home.

Because of the GI Bill signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 22, 1944, millions who would have flooded the job market chose education instead.

By the spring of 1946, Adams was back on the Ohio State University campus, where he had enrolled in 1939 with little money.

“I think I was the poorest student ever to enroll,” recalled Adams, 89, who now lives at St. Leonard retirement community in Centerville with his wife, Virginia.

Before the war, college life had been a real struggle for Adams, the son of a former West Virginia coal miner who could neither read nor write. The man wanted his son to join him at a brick plant where he shoveled coal into kilns. But Adams had other aspirations. Encouraged by his mother, he set off for OSU with money he had saved. Once on campus, he got by working two jobs and sleeping in the cellar of a home near campus. At times, he was so broke that for lunch he picked apples from trees on the west end of campus.

The GI Bill changed that.

After the war, campus life became “easy and pleasant,” thanks to the monthly checks that began arriving.

“The GI Bill lifted me from poverty and provided me security and confidence to pursue my education in a good environment,” Adams said.

A wave of veterans hit campus

In the peak year of 1947, about half of the two million students on university or college campuses were veterans.

“The presence of GIs was extraordinary,” said Glenn Altschuler, professor of American Studies at Cornell University and co-author of the new book, “The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans.”

Many campuses were forced to build temporary quarters for the veterans and, in many cases, their wives, because so many were married.

The University of Dayton saw its postwar enrollment rise. There were 1,720 veterans attending classes there in 1946. “Throughout the next four years the enrollment continued to climb to over 4,000 students and the ratio of men to women rose to 7-to-1 at the end of the decade,” a 2000 Voice of UD article reported.

By the time the benefits from the original GI Bill ended on July 25, 1956, 7.8 million of 16 million World War II veterans had participated in an education or training program, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

And although benefits for veterans of the Korean and Vietnam wars were not as generous as for World War II veterans, some veterans of those wars said the GI Bill still helped them.

David Petreman of Bellbrook, a professor at Wright State University, said he benefited from the GI Bill after serving a year in the Vietnam War. He completed his master’s degree and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa.

Those benefits “really did help me jump-start a career that has turned out to be very successful,” said Petreman, who teaches Spanish as well as classes on Latin American literature and culture at WSU.

Help buying a home

Like many veterans, Jim Boehmer and his wife in Kettering used a GI Bill loan to buy their home.

“With the GI Bill, buying a house was just like paying rent, in that we did not have to put up a down payment,” he said. “We got married in June of 1974, moved into our house right away, and we are still in the same house 35 years later.”

Dorothy Tuzzi of Washington Twp. said both she and her husband benefited after their service in the Air Force.

The couple bought their first home in West Carrollton in 1970 on the GI Bill. They moved to California so he could go back to school, and later bought a home in Oakwood after they returned to the area in 1974.

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