This story is part of a series on the 100th anniversary of Fordham’s historic Rose Hill Gym.
Like many universities, Fordham suspended its sports programs in 1943. “The war, lack of students, and the advent of the Army [have]curtailed all extra-curricular activities,” the 1944 Maroon yearbook staff wrote.
In June 1943, the gym and much of campus were given over to the U.S. War Department, which selected Fordham to host two units of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). For nearly a year, Fordham Jesuits and lay professors taught upward of 800 troops pre-engineering and languages. The goal of the program was to meet the wartime need for technically trained junior officers and soldiers. The troops in training slept in the gym, and at the program’s height, cafeteria workers were dishing out more than 2,750 meals from 4 a.m. to midnight every day.
Many of the undergraduate students who remained on campus—including basketball star Bob Mullens—were members of Fordham’s ROTC program and would soon leave Rose Hill for active duty. The ASTP troops were a much-needed infusion of life and revenue for Fordham, which had seen a precipitous decline in enrollment, from 8,100 in October 1940 to 3,086 four years later.
With “most of the athletes gone” to enlist in the military by their senior year, the 1944 Maroon editors decided to revisit earlier victories, including the basketball team’s “drive for national fame” in 1943, when Mullens led the Rams to their first National Invitation Tournament berth and became the third Fordham basketball player to earn All-America honors. That “last court team to don the Maroon colors until peace [is] restored … proved to be on par with the ‘greats’ of the past,” they wrote.
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