Notable Norwegians: Waldermar Ager

with David Moe Waldermar Ager was born in Frederikstad in 1869 and grew up in Gressvik. At the age of 16, he emigrated to America with his mother and two siblings to join his father in Chicago. He learned the printer’s trade working as an apprentice typesetter for one of Chicago’s large Norwegian-American newspapers, Norden. In 1892, at the age of 23, he moved to Eau Claire, Wis., where he was offered a job as a typesetter and journalist for a new Norwegian temperance paper called Reform. When the editor died in 1903, Ager became editor and eventually owner of the paper for the rest of his life. It was in Eau Claire that he met and married a young woman from Tromsø, Gurolle Blestren, and they had nine children, who were reared in a home on Chestnut Street, a home that