Waldemar Ager correspondence, 1919 March 3-1938 March 19

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Waldemar Ager was born in Frederikstad, Norway in 1869 and grew up in Gressvik--just across the river Glåma. The street on which he lived there is today named Waldemar Agers Vei in his honor and memory.

In 1885, at the age of sixteen, he emigrated to America with his mother and two siblings to join the father in Chicago—who had gone to America earlier. Ager learned the printer's trade as an apprentice typesetter for Norden, one of Chicago's large Norwegian-language papers at the time. He also became an active member of a Norwegian temperance lodge there and began writing short pieces for its little monthly paper. He would remain a dedicated avholdsmann—alcohol prohibitionist—for the rest of his life--perhaps because of his father, who had drinking problems.

Ager moved to Eau Claire in 1892 when he was 23 years old. He had been offered a job here as a typesetter and fledgling journalist for a new Norwegian temperance paper called Reform. Upon the death of its editor in 1903, Ager succeeded to that position and eventually became owner of the paper; he would be associated with the paper for the rest of his life.

It was here in Eau Claire that he met a young immigrant woman from Trømso, Gurolle Blestren, whom he married. They were to raise nine children in the home he purchased on Chestnut Street--which still stands.

Reform became the main pulpit from which Ager pleaded his idealistic causes, urged his political opinions on his readers, and worked to raise the ethnic consciousness of his countrymen and women in the new land—as well as their moral and cultural level.

Not surprisingly, the paper died when Ager did, in 1941, when its readership had declined to a few hundred old survivors of the Norwegian-American heyday that was now past.

NAHA houses the Waldemar Theodore Ager papers, 1874-1943.