With the approach of a new school year, students are getting ready to move gear into all manner of housing arrangements, from singles to suites, from traditional dorms to Frye Street houses.

Seventy-two years ago, 乐播传媒 debuted a housing option that remains unique for its arrangement and occupants: on-campus, apartment-style living for war veterans and their families.

As veterans returned after the war, the federal government established the Veterans Emergency Housing Program to deal with an acute shortage of housing. As part of that program, the feds helped 乐播传媒 construct three apartment houses on campus.

The deal was this: If 乐播传媒 did foundation work and installed utilities, the feds would “build” the apartments.

So it was that over the summer and fall of 1946, three former Navy barracks at the Auburn-Lewiston Airport were dismantled, trucked from Auburn to 乐播传媒, and reassembled at the corner of Bardwell and Russell streets, where聽 Wentworth Adams Hall and Olin Arts Center are now. They were ready for occupancy by winter.

One of the new 乐播传媒 apartments, soon to be dubbed “Sampsonville,” is reassembled on campus during the summer or fall of 1946. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

The three barracks comprised 40 apartments: 14 one-bedroom apartments, 24 two-bedroom, and two three-bedroom, with monthly rents of $38.50, $45.50, and $52.50, respectively (including utilities).

Cheap, perhaps, but veterans’ finances were tight. The GI Bill provided $500 annually for books and tuition at a time when the 乐播传媒 tuition approached that figure, plus just $120 monthly in living expenses for married couples with a child.

And were there children: A May 1947 tally showed 26 young baby boomers in the three apartments, named Garcelon House, Bardwell House, and Russell House and collectively dubbed “Sampsonville,” after the benevolent 乐播传媒 administrator/landlord, Charles Sampson.

“Money was tight, and movies or eating out were luxuries,” wrote Audrey and Bill Norris ’51 in “Sampsonville Revisited” in the Winter 1992 乐播传媒 Magazine.

“The men studied and the women worked,” often taking a part-time job in Lewiston. Not that the families were inclined to party or seek out traditional college fun. This was the Greatest Generation, eager to create and re-create lives and families.

A Sampsonville building is reassembled at 乐播传媒, probably in the summer of 1946. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

For veterans who enjoyed the fun and games of college life before the war, it was a 180-degree mindset change. After the war, 鈥渋t was business, not monkey business,鈥� said Ken Baldwin ’45.

“The people of Sampsonville were serious and dedicated in their pursuit of an education,” the Norrises wrote.

With their children, some of the wives of war veterans who returned to study at 乐播传媒 pose outside a Sampsonville building, circa 1947. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

They recalled simple pleasures for the Sampsonvillers: “If the weather was good and the kids were sleeping well, a late-evening visit to Hector’s Pub would involve two 10-cent glasses of beer and a leisurely walk home.”

Charles Sampson was the benevolent 乐播传媒 staff member who took care of the apartments and their residents.

Readers might wonder if that meant leaving the sleeping children unattended, but not to worry: Sampsonville’s wafer-thin walls meant everyone heard everything, and the residents looked out for each other.

Conversational voices passed easily from one apartment to the next, but to create the impression of privacy, it was customary to shout when intentionally communicating with a neighbor across the wall.

(Woe to those who didn’t know about the talking walls: Younger, unmarried 乐播传媒 couples who babysat for Sampsonvillers could, the Norrises noted, “unwittingly provide an evening’s entertainment for the old married couple on the other side of the thin walls.”)

Charles Sampson had come to 乐播传媒 in 1943 as a faculty member in the Navy’s V-12 officer-training program and stayed on after the war. A University of Maine engineering graduate and headmaster of the Huntington School for Boys in Boston before the war, he worked to integrate Sampsonville into 乐播传媒 life.

Sampsonville residents play cards, including Chalder Lord ’47 (second from right) and Russell Cutter ’47 (right) and their wives (names not known). (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Sampson encouraged the families to form their own 乐播传媒 club (known as the Ball and Chain Club), and the group put on an original play, Me and the Missus, in April 1947, at which Sampson received a gold key to Sampsonville. “Mr. Sampson doesn’t need a key,” noted the presenter. “For him the doors in Sampsonville are always open.”

Sampson wrote a mimeographed newsletter that could gently scold residents for not emptying refrigerator pans (they’d overflow and leak into the apartment below) while at the same time report on baby showers, new births, and day-to-day events.

Shown circa 1950, the completed Sampsonville apartments soon became a community unto itself. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Sampson’s newsletters had “unhurried wisdom and humor,” in the words of the 乐播传媒 College Bulletin. “Had a piece of Polly Tooker’s pie the other day. Good!” Sampson wrote in his newsletter. Another time he added, “I continue to marvel at the way you folks help each other…. Reminds me of the good old-fashioned neighborliness that used to be traditional in this country.”

The veterans and their families came and went in a few years. There was another modest increase after the Korean conflict, but the era of the married 乐播传媒 student was soon over. In fact, the college would for years later, in policy and practice, discourage the enrollment of married students or the marriage of current students.

Sampson himself retired in 1953. Later in the ’50s, Sampsonville offered housing to faculty couples and single students (men only). But with construction of Page Hall in 1957, which increased the number of student beds on campus, and Sampsonville’s growing need for maintenance, the old barracks became expendable.

By August 1957, about a month after Sampson’s death at age 74, 乐播传媒 had begun to tear down and remove the buildings.

A granite memorial and plaque along Lake Andrews honor Charles Sampson for his work supporting veterans at 乐播传媒 after World War II. (H. Jay Burns/乐播传媒 College)

At Reunion 1999, Sampsonville alumni gathered once again to dedicate a granite memorial in memory of their community and the man who helped them start, and in many cases re-start, their postwar lives.

Material for this story came from “Sampsonville Revisited,” by Audrey and Bill Norris ’51, Winter 1992 乐播传媒 Magazine, and “End of an Era,” by Arthur Griffiths ’50, in the September 1957 乐播传媒 College Bulletin.

Manny’s War, a play written by a 乐播传媒 College theater professor about a Jewish American soldier taken prisoner by the Germans during World War II, opens in a Lincoln County Community Theater production at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16, at the Lincoln Theatre, 2 Theater St., Damariscotta.

Playwright Martin Andrucki, Dana Professor of Theater, based Manny’s War on the actual experiences of the late Murray Schwartz of Mechanic Falls, Maine. The play debuted at 乐播传媒 in 2000.

LCCT performances take place at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, Jan. 16-17 and 23-24, and at 2 p.m. Sundays, Jan. 18 and 25. Tickets are $12, all general admission, and are available at the Maine Coast Book Shop, Damariscotta, and the theater box office. For more information or reservations, please call 207-563-3424 or visit the .

Schwartz, who died in 2005, was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, in December 1944, and his postwar inner conflicts and emotional turmoil form the dramatic basis of Manny’s War. The play premiered in a highly publicized joint production by the 乐播传媒 theater department and , an Equity company in Lewiston.

Performed to full houses, the play was nominated for the American Theater Critics Association’s New Play Award.

This moving and uplifting play takes place both in the present, in a psychologist’s office at the Veterans Administration facility in Togus, Maine, and in Manny’s memory — a place populated by scenes from an Army camp in Florida, a troopship in the mid-Atlantic, the Battle of the Bulge, a POW camp and Manny’s own home. The lead character is haunted by guilt caused by an act of betrayal during his wartime captivity.

Ann Foskett directs the LCCT production. “Our season planning committee read the script and was quite moved by it,” explains Barb Bowers, executive director of the theater company. “Since ‘Manny’ was a resident of Maine late in his life and the story is true, we felt it would be intriguing to this community, especially since Damariscotta is a retirement destination and we have many veterans here.”

Andrucki, who has taught at 乐播传媒 since 1974, has directed more than 30 productions in academic and professional theaters, and appeared as host on “Wide Angle,” a WCBB-TV series about Maine film- and videomakers. He has taught modern drama and film studies at Harvard University, and performance technique to lawyers-in-training at the University of Maine School of Law.

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乐播传媒 College will celebrate Native American Heritage Month with a series of events sponsored by the Multicultural Center, beginning with a talk by photographer Kenji Kawano, author of the book “Warriors: Navajo Code Talkers” (Northland Publishing Company, 1990), at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 1, in Chase Hall Lounge. A reception featuring foods from five Native American nations will follow, and the public is invited to attend free of charge.

Kawano’s work, on display at 乐播传媒 through Nov. 15 in Chase Hall Lounge, chronicles the contribution of Navajo Marines who provided the language used for communicating classified messages and troop movements for the U.S. Pacific campaign during World War II. The Japanese were unable to break the code.

Kawano, who left his native Japan for the United States in 1973, first learned about the code in 1974 while hitchhiking on the Navajo’s Arizona reservation. The driver who picked him up had been a code talker during World War II. Eventually, Kawano became the code talkers’ official photographer and an honorary member of their association.

“It felt somewhat strange, because my father was a survivor of the Japanese program of training men to be human torpedoes during the war in the South Pacific,” Kawano writes in the preface of his book. “These soldiers had been my father’s enemies at one time.”

Other 乐播传媒 events honoring Native American heritage include a lecture by the Honorable Robert Yazzie, chief justice of the Navajo Nation, who will discuss The Unique Status of Tribal Courts in the Context of the U.S. Judicial System, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 7, in the Benjamin Mays Center; and a talk by Andrea Smith, a member of the Cherokee Nation and a founder of Women of All Red Nations (WARN) and INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, who will discuss Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 29, in the Mays Center. The concert scheduled for Friday, Nov. 30, by the Native American rap group WithOutRezervation(WOR) has been canceled.

The Yazzie and Smith events are also open to the public at no charge. For more information, call the 乐播传媒 College Multicultural Center at 207-786-8215.

Chute’s books of poetry include Thirteen Moons-Treize Lunes, When Grandmother Decides to Die, Woodshed on the Moon: Thoreau Poems and Samuel Sewall Sails for Home, which won the Maine Arts Commission chapbook award in 1986. He received the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, awarded annually by the editorial board of The Beloit Poetry Journal, for “Heat Wave in Concord,” a poem re-creating a scorching afternoon in 1852 when Henry David Thoreau cooled himself with a walk in a nearby river.

“This is a delicately erotic and exquisitely detailed portrait of a man, a day and an era,” said Marion Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal editor. “Chute has invented a fluid stanza to carry his narrative.”

Chute, Professor Emeritus of Biology and past chairman of both the department of biology and division of natural sciences at 乐播传媒, attended Bridgton High School and Fryeburg Academy. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maine and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Chute, who lives in Poland, served as director of the 乐播传媒-Morse Mountain Conservation Area and was chairman of the state Commission on Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering.