April 8th, 2019: Sharp Dresser

[Diaphone Jim]

There was a style of barracks that the US Army built by the thousands at dozens of bases all over the country and overseas, so this may have happened many times or never.
These buildings were typically two stories with lines of bunks down each wall and a few separate rooms for non-coms, etc., housing maybe 20 to 80 men.
Here is a good example:
http://brucerichards.com/army/barracks.htm
The latrines (bathrooms) varied, with the requisite urinal of course, but often with two rows (four or five each) of regular toilets side-by-side and knee to knee; took some getting used to.
The pics don't show the big, square, open shower room with 15 or more shower heads along the walls.
One wall of the sink room (shown) was common to the shower room, the other to the toilet room.
You can see the soap dishes above the sinks, but not the little slots that were above each one for the disposal of used razor blades. In the days of blue blades and such, two were often needed for a good shave, producing quite a few day after day.
The whole works was on slab with a crawl space with exposed piping and drains. The shower drains would often clog with high usage and whatever else sloughed off the young soldiers, making a sort of lake.
The story goes that one day in one of those many barracks, the weight of the water made the shower floor collapse, dumping perhaps a score of soapy, naked men (in an understandable panic to escape) onto the pile of many years worth of old razor blades.

That is why the bathtub in Bruce's post bothered me.