Sigurd's Childhood and Youth

(continued)

Sigurd (shown above in the top row, third from left) entered Northland College in the fall of 1916, one of 45 freshmen. He was active in the YMCA, the glee club, and the quartet. He played football, but lost his varsity letter when he skipped practice and a game to go to the Fish Creek slough and watch migrating flocks of scaup pour out of a November storm.

The United States had entered World War I before Sigurd started his second and final year at Northland College in the fall of 1917. At 18 he was three years too young for the draft, but his older brother Kenneth enlisted in December. Sigurd, meanwhile, was assistant manager of the school newspaper, played second-string forward on the basketball team, and remained active in the YMCA and the glee club. Most notably, he got the starring role in the college production of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. The photo at left shows him in his role as Torvald Helmer, standing next to Helmer's wife, Nora, played by Kathryn Darke. The play, perceived by many at the time as an attack on marriage and religion, portrayed a world in which most people traded their individuality for rote formulas of thought and behavior. It may well have played a role in the crisis of faith Sigurd experienced a year later, a crisis that led to his rejection of the Baptist dogma taught to him by his parents. (For more details, see The Land Beyond the Rim: Sigurd Olson's Wilderness Theology.)

Sigurd left Northland College, Ashland, and his youth behind him in the fall of 1918, when he entered the University of Wisconsin for his final two years of college.