Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [39]
Much of the charged atmosphere of the time made these years at GSCW indelible in the memories of alumnae from the early forties. Influencing all of their moods was the sensation of a nation now fully mobilized for war on two fronts. Students returning that fall remembered well the evening of December 7, 1941, when they had filed into Russell Auditorium for the annual choral singing of Handel’s Messiah, having just heard news of the bombing attack on Pearl Harbor, resulting the next day in a declaration of war against Japan. “Girls were crying, although we didn’t fully realize why we were crying,” says Louise Simmons Allen of the class of ’44. “The next day I listened carefully to President Roosevelt’s ‘day of infamy’ speech on the radio. Our boyfriends were in the service and writing back about new experiences. The war was always with us.”
From the start of the fall semester of 1942, the women at GSCW gathered regularly in a large room set aside in Porter Hall to roll surgical dressings for the Red Cross, and pack khaki gift kits for soldiers. Many consumer goods popular with students were rationed, including radios, phonograph records, even rolled cigarettes. Bicycles were in vogue, as few of their male dates, or even family members, could spare rationed gasoline for pleasure driving. “Sugar was scarce, but they had Ribbon Cane syrup, and fig preserves, on the table every meal,” recalls one dormitory resident, Virginia Wood Alexander, of “meatless” and “breadless” suppers in Atkinson Dining Hall. Reacting to the shock of a number of unexpected American defeats early in the conflict, one student confessed in the college paper, the Colonnade: “This war is making us think.”
The young women were also beginning the academic year at a college that had its academic accreditation suddenly pulled the previous December by an irate Governor Eugene Talmadge, not to be restored, retroactively, until January 1943. GSCW was that most unusual of institutions for middle Georgia in 1942: a progressive college, with a faculty of about sixty men and women, including a number of bright lights with PhDs from the University of Chicago and Columbia, some even transplanted Northerners. Embodying its contradictions was its longtime president, Dr. Guy H. Wells. A gruff, cigar-chomping, stout, and jowly gentleman who mangled his grammar and lacked polish, he was also a liberal on race. As early as a talk in Chapel in 1932, he was “calling attention to the prejudice against the negro.” Governor Talmadge was punishing Wells with de-accreditation for his “foreign ideas” in forming a campus “Race Committee.”
With all these challenges, the women who blithely nicknamed themselves “Jessies,” eliding the GSC initials, operated on a cusp between the “Woman Power” called for in the homeland during the Second World War, and the more traditional giddiness of coeds away at college. Especially for women from farm communities, the four-block strip of downtown Milledgeville had its draws: Culver Kidd Drug Store, with its lunch counter specializing in hot dogs and ham-and-cheese sandwiches, a favorite spot to meet cadets from Georgia Military College; Benson’s Bakery; E. Bell’s Beauty Shop, which O’Connor turned into “Palace Beauty Salon” for a college composition exercise; the Darling and Peggie Hale dress shops; and two movie theaters, the Campus and the Co-ed, charging fifteen cents for students, with separate entrances for blacks to segregated balconies.
Known as “Georgia State College for Wallflowers,” because of the reduced number of available cadets and town boys, college house rules still chafed: signing out to go to the movies; ten o’clock curfew; a limit of two dates per week, one in a public parlor, with a chaperone. If Dr. Wells was liberal on