By R. Kurt Osenlund, BucksLocalNews.com
Glenn Hall didn’t know it at the time, but while he was serving with the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II, he was being groomed for a career in education that would lead him all the way to the highest ranks at Bucks County Community College (BCCC). A Doylestown resident, Hall is now retired, living quietly with his longtime wife, Gloria. But ask a great many people how he’s known in Bucks, and they’ll tell you he saw a lengthy stint as BCCC’s Dean of Academic Affairs. His experience in the Navy lent itself to his experiences as both a teacher and an administrator, making him, among other things, a savvy judge of character.
Hall was born in 1925 in York County’s Windsor Township to parents Charles and Rosetta. Raised, primarily, by his uncle and his uncle’s wife, Hall grew up in Windsor and attended Red Lion High School. He graduated in 1943, and went on to attend summer and fall semesters at Lebanon Valley College. Then, his plans were interrupted.
“I turned 18 in December,” Hall says, “and Uncle Sam said, ‘Welcome.’”
Hall was drafted into the Navy in February 1944. In March, he went to boot camp at New York’s Sampson Naval Base. Soon after he was assigned to hospital corpsman school in Bainbridge, Md., and then to a hospital in Bainbridge, where he tackled “everyday nursing duties.” Bored with that work, he urged a Chief Petty Officer to put him on a ship, and got his wish when the USS Granville (APA-171) needed men. Hall took a train across the country to Astoria, Ore. and joined “a new ship and a new crew.”
After some spirited escapades (such as tending to the sore throat of Irish tenor Dennis Day, who was on board the Granville as part of a traveling singing group), Hall and his shipmates left Astoria to undergo various training exercises. In January 1945, the crew left the U.S. for Pearl Harbor, then traveled all over the Pacific.
“Our primary job was to carry troops and their equipment,” Hall says. “We’d unload them to go into battle, and if there were casualties, we would wait, bring them back to the ship and take them to bases to be treated.”
Hall says he always felt grateful that he wasn’t one of the men climbing down the nets to meet the enemy in combat. Another thing he felt was loneliness, despite the company of his shipmates.
“You don’t know what distance is, or what loneliness is, until you’re in the South Pacific,” he says. “There’s the occasional small island, but it’s mainly thousands of miles without any land or anything. The Pacific is so vast.”
Hall says his ship sometimes took troops to Okinawa, and during one such run, in August 1945, after the war had technically ended, the USS Granville was credited for shooting down a remaining kamikaze and aiding in the destruction of another. In addition, the ship took on a lot of wounded soldiers from the battleship New Mexico, which suffered a kamikaze attack.
According to Hall, he served as a “dirty nurse,” working in the sick bay and an adjoining operating room, collecting instruments and cleaning up messes from surgeries. He continued in that position for some time after the war, as his ship continued to travel the South Pacific and recover soldiers. He was discharged in June 1946 as a Pharmacist’s Mate Third Class, and soon after, he returned home.
He went back to Lebanon Valley College, completing his bachelor’s degree in social sciences. He then went to grad school at George Washington University, where he studied history. In the early ‘50s he got a job teaching in York County, where he met Gloria, a nurse. The couple married in 1952.
Hall began frequenting Penn State for summer sessions, earning credits toward a doctorate. He was offered a graduate assistantship, whereby he’d conduct small sessions with students under the supervision of a professor. Shortly thereafter he got a job teaching at a junior college in Florida, and moved there with Gloria. While in Florida, he made good on a Fulbright grant he received to teach in Europe, and from 1961 to 1962, with Gloria in tow, he lived and worked in the Netherlands.
He returned to Florida, taught two more years at the junior college, then saw an ad at an educator’s meeting in Miami for teaching jobs at the newly-forming BCCC. Hall sent in his application, went for an interview with the school’s freshly-appointed president, and became BCCC’s first faculty member. He says it was difficult, the process of getting a new college off the ground, but the rewards far outweighed the hurdles. Hall was teaching what he loved – history. He soon became the department chair, then the division chair, and by 1972, he was the Dean of Academic Affairs. He kept his position until 1987, at which time he returned to the faculty before retiring in 1989.
And as for those special skills Hall applied to his professional life? Gloria says her husband was constantly involved with hiring and interview processes at BCCC, essentially from its start. He would interface with individuals on a regular basis, be they students, colleagues or employees. Hall says that, all along, he’s had a keen knack for reading people, and he has the Navy to thank for that.
“One thing I know is that the Navy increased my sense of being able to perceive phoniness,” Hall says. “There were always hustlers in the Navy, and I developed, very quickly, an ability to detect phoniness.”
And that’s no bull.
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