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University Daily Kansan
Tuesday, Dec. 8, 1964
Oread Hall's Closing Will Signal End of an Era
By Susan Hartley
The end of Oread Hall marks the end of an era at KU.
Oread Hall was erected in 1946 as the first residence hall for men on the campus. Prior to this time, scholarship halls, or co-operative living houses as they called them then, were in existence, but Oread was the first of the general residence halls, temporary as it was.
The barracks, which were to become Oread Hall, were moved here from the Parsons, Tex., Ordnance Works in 1946.
"THE GOVERNMENT gave the actual barracks to us, and paid for their transportation to KU." Tom Yoe, director of the News Bureau, said. "But KU had to pay to erect them.
"Luckily, the Veterans' Administration was paying the colleges and universities what was known as a
One of a Series
"compensatory fee," to help them absorb and educate the vast numbers of World War II veterans who were flooding the campuses at the end of the war." Yoe said.
"These VA funds gave KU the money to erect the hall," he said.
OREAD HALL is an H-shaped structure, which offers single rooms to male students. It is two story, gray, with $7 \frac{1}{2}$ by 11 feet rooms. A sign saying "Oread Hilton" is displayed on the front of the building.
It has a capacity of 162 students, but at the present, it houses only 53 men. No food is served and the men have to walk up the hill to Joseph R. Pearson Hall to eat their meals.
The first residents of the hall moved in at Christmas time in 1946. They came mainly from university supervised housing at Sunflower Village, located 13 miles east of Lawrence.
From that time until the opening of Joseph R. Pearson Hall in 1959, the hall was filled to capacity.
IN 1959, with the addition of the new housing facilities of JRP, the University attempted to close down Oread Hall, but found this impossible due to the rise in numbers of men students requiring University housing.
Since that time, it has been used to house the overflow students which the larger, more modern halls did not have the space to house.
Many times it was open only during the fall semester, for by the beginning of the second semester, enough students usually move out of the larger halls to allow all of the Oread residents to move in in their place.
This is the situation which exists now.
"Oread would be closed next semester whether the University planned to tear it down or not," Jerry Crisdin, a counselor at Oread, said.
"EVERYONE HERE expects to move out, so they are not too unhappy about the news of the loss of Oread Hall." Crisdin said.
"Besides, it has been rumored for about 10 years that it's going to be torn down, and nobody really believes it now." Crisdin said.
"There are some fellas here who would like to keep Oread open," Larry Smith, Longview, Tex., freshman and hall president, said. "I suppose I would too. It's pretty great here, but it's just one of those things."
"Oread Hall has served a real fine purpose," Ernest Pulliam, housing manager and dorm superviser, said. "The closer the time comes to tear it down, the more we hate to see it go.
"BEFORE, WHENEVER we had students come to KU for a conference needing housing, or we had an overflow of students from the large residence halls, or students had to stay here over vacations, we could also say we could put them in Oread." Pulliam said.
"Oread is a real home place," he said. "If we had new furniture in it, I'd say let's keep it. But it is getting rather shoddy and won't last much longer.
"I hope someday a big new dorm will be built there," Fullam said.
there a while, you can't get them out.
"It's a funny thing," he said. "The boys don't want to go down to Oread in the first place, but after they are
"FOR INSTANCE, there has been a letter up on the bulletin board down there announcing five vacancies in the regular housing for several weeks." Pulliam said. "But no one has made a move to move into them."
"If a guy liked privacy, it was the best to be had," Tom Yoe said. "However, the privacy was theoretical only, for the single rooms could keep the body out, but not the noise."
"OREAD HALL and its forerunner, the Sunflower Village, did a real service for KU." Yoe said.
"It also offered the student a very economical place to live, and he had no trouble finding a place to park close to campus." Yoe said.
"Right after the war, veterans flooded the universities, which had not anticipated the rush, so had not prepared for it." Yoe said.
"On many large campuses such as Kansas State and Missouri University, tarpaper shacks and trailer villages had to be thrown together in a hurry to house all the students, and student families which had suddenly appeared on the scene," he said.
"Although Sunflower was 13 miles away from Lawrence, the students got much better quarters there for their money than were available at other schools," he said.
"FORTUNATELY, MONEY was available to do what had to be done," Yoe said, "and with the erection of Oread, and later McCook Hall, which was located in the rooms beneath the stadium. KU was able to cope with the problem.
"KU did not receive any money from the state to erect housing facilities until Joseph R. Pearson Hall was built in 1959." Yoe said.
"So all of the new dormitories had to be financed by private gifts or by bond issues. This is how Carruth-O'Leary Hall and Gertrude Sellards Pearson Hall were built in the early '50's." he said.
"Under the present situation where KU must get appropriations from the Kansas Legislature while it is in session, I don't know if we could have coped with the situation which existed from 1946 to 1948," he said.
"NOBODY EXPECTED the tremendous jump in enrollment in 1946-
47, and a great many emergency measures had to be taken." Yoe said. "At that time, if we had the money, and the Regents OK'd it, we could do it.
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