Ohio Stadium kitchen for dorms, 1934
In exchange for reduced fees -- $3 a year for housing and $2.50 a week for food -- students committed to six hours of work each week in the dorm. This ran the gamut from washing dishes and serving meals in the West Tower?s third-floor dining hall, to reporting and producing the residential newspaper. Accommodations were spartan. Thirty army bunks filled each residential floor; lacking lockers, bureaus, closets or chairs, students hung their clothes from ropes suspended from the overhead radiators. After dinner each night, the dining hall was cleaned and converted to a study hall. Demand remained strong through the 1930s; successive outbursts of construction in 1938 and 1939, once again supported by the WPA, expanded capacity to 400 men.
Significant change came gradually to the Stadium Dorms in the post-war period. Between 1959 and 1961 the large open barracks were converted to enclosed rooms, housing up to four men. Women remained scarce in the Stadium Dorms, their appearances limited to occasional visits to the 1966 West Berg recreation room for dancing and refreshments. In part, men of the dorms were loath to accept women, fearing for their own free lunch. When the question of going co-ed was put to residents and defeated in winter quarter 1974, the SSD president explained: "We've had to keep reassuring people they're not going to get screwed." The atmosphere, though a far cry from the first Stadium Dorms, was still considered "wild" and "primitive," an unfit female habitat. Nevertheless, during the 1974-75 school year, expectant mother Jayne Irwin lived under A-deck with her husband William, the Stadium Dorms' resident director. On the last day of January, 1975, women were voted into the Stadium Scholarship Dorms, instantly doubling women's scholarship housing. By 1982, the dorm's female population nearly approached parity, at 209 men to 149 women.
Entire article on the stadium:
http://library.osu.edu/projects/stadium/otheruses2.html
