The can-do Quonset
McCarthy, Abigail
"It's a compromise, senator---Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we're prochoice...Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays we're prolife.'" The Thomas nomination was opposed by a number of interest...
...After all, he was not nominated because he was the most qualified person in America, as George Bush would have us believe...
...This nation has no greater need at the moment than that a party of moderation step forward to take the lead on the choice/abortion question...
...northern Europe during the war...
...Anything less they consider a violation of liberties as sacred as freedom of speech, press, and religion...
...When will we muster the will, form the coalitions of industry and labor and government, and find the land to replicate a housing miracle like the Quonset and house the homeless as I was once housed...
...If there were no abortion issue dividing the country, Thomas would have been confirmed by a lopsided majority, and Anita Hill would never have been forced into the national limelight...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy THE CAN-DO QUONSET HOUSING IN A HURRY discovered this year that I am a Quonset person--someone who at one time lived in a Quonset hut, the nation's answer fifty years ago to the need for housing in a hurry...
...they are both idealistic...
...and in both states the heterodox will find it nearly impossible to win political office...
...One bedroom was good-sized...
...We were quite pleased with the resulting small living room furnished with our inherited chintz-covered sofa and easy chair, and the dining-library space with its mahogany drop leaf table and small accompanying chairs...
...The Quonset hut, for those readers too young to know and those who may have forgotten, was an arched, rounded structure with straight walls only at the two ends...
...So the College of St...
...They were also able to get them to the places they were needed: Africa, the South Pacific, Newfoundland, the Philippines, 8 November 1991:633 "I know a house is out of the question, but how about just a little patio with maybe a couple of lawn chairs...
...Unlike the Quonset it had windows and a door in the side walls...
...They see abortion as a violation of the most fundamental of all human rights, namely, the right to life...
...We learned to warm up that shower with hot water before stepping into it...
...The cow will jump over the moon before these two extreme parties will compromise...
...Up till now the third has had little or no representation...
...634: Commonweal...
...Thomas in St...
...He was named because he was a prolifer who has two attributes likely to get him through an essentially prochoice Senate: (a) he is an African-American, which made it difficult for Deep South Democrats to vote against him...
...Quonset persons were so dubbed by Christopher Reynolds, a Los Angeles Times writer who thought that the fiftieth anniversary of the Quonset should be celebrated somehow...
...There are still Quonset huts in use everywhere across the country...
...But the most intense opposition came from the prochoice lobby...
...It is the abortion/choice issue that made the nomination process such an emotionally charged affair...
...Everywhere the nation will lose its balance and swing dangerously in the direction of single-issue politics...
...However, architectural historian David Gephard, who teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is quoted as saying "it is a fascinating tale...
...We were young and very glad to have housing in a city where there were precious few apartments or houses available to young people on small salaries...
...What was it like living there...
...But plainly it will not fade away...
...He hopes to find a graduate student interested enough to pursue it...
...We tackled the insufficiencies with enthusiasm...
...We enjoyed our neighbors, had people to dinner and sherry parties, and a lot of drop-in visitors from the campus and from the neighboring college where I was still teaching...
...If you enjoyed the Hill-Thomas bloodletting, then you are in for a real treat once Roe is overturned and the abortion question moves front and center in all fifty states...
...We were among the first to move in...
...they are both absolutists...
...It was then that I became a Quonset person...
...They are both sincere...
...In summer we sweltered...
...Prolife extremists are equally radical in their views, though with the signs changed...
...In winter we woke to walls studded with frost on the nail holes...
...When we balanced the space heater with a hutch-like cupboard turned to face the kitchen we had added wall space and divided the living space from the kitchen...
...The alternatives are clear: either the silent majority will assert itself under the leadership of moderates and find an abortion compromise...
...The first two have their dedicated and eloquent advocates...
...I don't remember pinging and popping but I do remember the groaning of steel in cold winter nights...
...Cities and counties throughout the land are struggling with the problem of the homeless--not only of derelicts but of families living in temporary shelters, in the streets, and in cars...
...Our hut, although usually referred to as a Quonset, had straight walls and a pitched roof and was prefabricated of corrugated steel panels bolted together as in the Quonset...
...For that matter, absent the abortion issue there would have been no Thomas nomination...
...You ain't seen nothin' yet...
...The arch was, according to Quonset enthusiasts, a positive feature which enabled the hut to withstand high winds and earthquakes...
...In moderate states there will be virtually no moderation, as the two parties attempt to tear one another apart...
...In this great controversy there are three sets of rights to be considered: the right of the woman to choose, the right of the unborn to live, and the right of the nation to live in peace...
...By 1946 Quonsets were being shipped all over the United States in answer to a second need, housing for thousands of returning veterans and their families...
...We were told that our huts had been barracks for Army officers...
...These were older students, many of them married...
...But the hut did begin to seem crowded when our first daughter was born and we had to find places for all the paraphernalia that comes with a baby--bassinet (later a crib), bathinette (the changing table of that era), highchair, play pen, etc., etc...
...There was a short hall to the bedrooms...
...Up till now the silent majority, with mixed feelings on abortion, has stood quietly aside and watched prochoice and prolife extremists battle it out, meanwhile hoping that the whole issue would somehow fade away...
...And indeed it should have been if only to remind us that this country was once able to answer a pressing need for shelter (for its soldiers here and abroad) by designing a "portable, durable, adaptable" building within three months in 1941, according to Reynolds...
...Actually ours were not true Quonsets...
...Next to it was a space for a water heater and a clothes closet...
...On the contrary, it will grow bigger than ever once it enters the post-Roe era...
...and (b) he is no legal scholar and therefore (unlike Robert Bork) has left no paper trail of embarrassing legal theories...
...or the United States will become the scene of a long and nasty battle, where ignorant armies clash by night...
...National Building Museum curator David Chase has called it "a fabulous example of American ingenuity and can-do spirit and productive power...
...They needed housing as did the new faculty members added to accommodate them...
...Not at all bad...
...Then, too, although the "Tom-Town" huts had been insulated for their previous purpose in places like Newfoundland and northern Europe, the insulation didn't seem quite adequate for subzero Minnesota winters and continental summers...
...Reynolds lists churches, banks, theaters, offices, barns, schools, homes, bowling alleys...
...They can no more compromise than could the slaveholders and the abolitionists, ffthe expanded abortion controversy is reduced to a battle between these two parties, American society will be torn to pieces...
...The full story of the Quonset as an architectural and building phenomenon is left untold, although Rhode Island has added a batch of seventeen first-generation Quonsets to the National Register of historic places and two models are kept intact at the Naval Construction Battalion Museum in Port Hueneme, California...
...Paul, Minnesota, found room on campus for a "village" of three streets of the army-issue prefabricated corrugated-steel housing units, each with two two-bedroom-andbath apartments...
...A Californian still living in a hut, still a Quonset person, is quoted as saying that when the weather changes, "the hut tends to ping and pop a lot, like a motor when it's cooling down...
...At any rate, this will be the scenario if the abortion struggle remains in the hands of the two parties currently in the field...
...I think having lived there qualifies me as a Quonset person...
...As a former Quonset person I think the most important part of Quonset history is its evidence of what this nation can achieve in the field of housing if we organize our resources...
...It's a compromise, senator---Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we're prochoice...Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays we're prolife.'" The Thomas nomination was opposed by a number of interest groups, including the leadership of many prominent black organizations (e.g., the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, the National Baptists...
...Like the Quonset it was set on a concrete slab and had Masonite walls...
...At first our hut seemed pleasantly adequate for two people and our large springer spaniel...
...in very conservative states there will be competition among extreme expressions of the prolife faith...
...Prochoice extremists are satisfied with nothing other than abortion-ondemand...
...Within the next five years the Navy alone--(the Army used them, too)-made or bought 160,000 Quonsets...
...Offit there was a small bath with a cubical steel shower stall...
...Increasingly the best will lack all conviction and the worst will be full of passionate intensity...
...The first room was a largish living room-kitchen with a big oil space heater to one side...
...It was also architecturally pleasing for those who valued modernism...
...Reynolds notes that an architect built a Quonset church in California and that artist Robert Motherwell commissioned a steel and glass Quonset for himself on Long Island...
...In very liberal states candidates will vie with one another to see who can give the most extreme expression of the prochoice faith...
...The other, smaller, we made a study-cum-guest room with a sleep sofa, a desk, and some bookcases...
...The college where my husband was to teach was flooded, like colleges and universities nationwide, with retuming veterans taking advantage of the GI Bill...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 19
