In addition to the two basic sizes, the Navy had northern, southern, and tropical designs. The northern design came with two five-panel wooden end plates, or bulkheads. Each had a central door, two shatterproof windows, and a louvered air vent. This design saw service from Greenland to the Mediterranean. The southern design had bug screens on both ends, while the tropical design had screened bulkheads, a raised roof for ventilation, and extra vent flaps along the lower sides.

The Quonset 20 could house twenty-five men in moderate comfort, but it was often used for other purposes, everything from mess hall to repair garage to field office. The 40 was mostly used for storage, although some served as field hospitals, recreation centers, shops, and industrial buildings. The standard 20 was shipped knocked down in twelve large wooden crates and weighed about 7,000 pounds. Surprisingly, the Quonset 20 took up less shipping space than a twenty-five-man barracks tent with wooden flooring.

An estimated 170,000 Quonset huts were built around the world during World War 11. The ones in battle zones were often banked with five or more feet of earth to protect soldiers against bomb explosions. Even naked, though, Quonsets were tough. In an Iceland harbor late in 1941, a gale "crumpled PBY's on the beach like paper hats and ripped the covering completely off many of the British Nissen huts" but "left the Quonset huts practically undamaged," according to the admittedly biased testimony of a Fuller company brochure. 

Most of the huts were painted with an olive drab camouflage finish, and from 1943 until the fall of 1944, the 20 came with four-foot over-hangs at each end that protected its bulkheads from driving rain and sunlight. In Panama the U.S. Marines ran tests that found that on very hot days Quonset huts were about four degrees cooler than conventional housing.

After the war a number of Navy-surplus Quonset huts found their way into civilian life, and Stran-Steel continued to manufacture new ones. The federal Public Housing Authority promoted Quonset

huts to ease the severe postwar housing shortage. New York City set them up in Brooklyn's Canarsie Beach Park and planned to erect other small Quonset suburbs nearby.

Many entrepreneurs, including a number of former Seabees, became Quonset-hut dealers and distributors. The most famous of these was Waldvogel Brothers in New York City. In 1946 you could buy a Quonset 20 for $1,048 and a 40 for $3,436 plus shipping, after which you needed only to find a suitable lot in an area with permissive zoning laws. Stran-Steel advertised its huts as single-family houses, with little entryways and dormers attached. But despite the housing shortage, Quonset huts never became popular as homes. Not only did they remind veterans too much of service life, but the Quonset 20, with a mere 960 square feet of floor space - a good part of it unusable because of the sloping sides - was too small for a family.  (Stran-Steel advertised Quonset houses as small as 20 by 36 feet.)  By contrast, the 40, at 4,000 square feet, looked and felt like a small airplane hangar.

The huts did work well for other post-war uses. Stran-Steel issued a press release in late 1946 listing 257 adaptations. Universities and colleges proved to be the firm's best customers. Michigan State College, for example, set up seventy-five Quonset huts to house veterans studying under the GI Bill, and Quonsets remain on a number of campuses to this day. A Quonset-hut department store went up in Dryden, New York, and an Elephant Hut became a grocery market in Greenville, Michigan. Quonset movie houses sprang up from San Andreas, California, to Millville, Pennsylvania. Farmers found that two-story 40s made excellent hay barns, while smaller models could easily be converted into milking sheds. Many churches, chapels, repair shops, and small businesses likewise discovered Quonsets, often hiding the buildings' round shoulders behind false fronts.

A few Quonsets went respectable. The architect, Philip Harmer, chose a large one as the basis for the Altona Meadows/Laverton Uniting Church in suburban Melbourne, Australia. The Daniel House, a residence in Knoxville, Tennessee, de

signed by James W Fitzgibbon, "siamesed" two Quonset huts, one slightly above the other on a hillside. In 1947 the French architect, Pierre Chareau, who had designed the Maison de Verre (a public housing project) in Paris, built a Quonset studio on Long Island for the artist, Robert Motherwell. Another architect, Bruce Goff, who had served in a Navy construction battalion, built a modernistic chapel out of three Quonset huts at Camp parks, California, in 1945. And the Newell Beatty family built a handsome and practical two-bedroom house out of a Quonset 20 in Berkeley, California, in 1946.

In March 1946 a veteran and his bride proudly show off their new Quonset home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms, and bathroom are shoehorned into 720 slope-sided square feet. The hut cost $1,000, and conversion expenses added $1,700 to the price.

You can probably still see a few fifty-year-old Quonset huts in your community, just as you may occasionally see an old military jeep on the highway. Some old soldiers do indeed never die.

Two teenage boys were counterfeiting money. One friend said to the other, "Where can we spend these fake $35 bills."  His friend said, "Let's take them to Charlie's Liquor Store. He's a dense old man."  When they got to Charlie's, they handed him one of the bogus bills and asked him, "Can you change a $35 bill?"  Charlie put it in his cash register and told them "Not a problem."  The boys eyes lit up! When they got outside, they noticed Charlie had given them five $7 bills.

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