Waldemar Ager

[2] Ager personally helped form hundreds of total abstinence societies and Good Templar lodges across the Upper Midwest.

Ager's prohibitionist beliefs and his fledgling newspaper career crossed paths for the first time when he became involved with a Norwegian temperance lodge in Chicago in the late 1880s.

In addition to his long newspaper career, Ager penned six novels and numerous collections of short stories.

A humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain, Ager specialized in character sketches, and dramatizing the tragicomic plight of the Norwegian immigrant.

Some of his more important works, translated into English, are Christ before Pilate, On The Way to The Melting Pot, Sons of The Old Country, and I Sit Alone.

[5] Ager was also a popular orator, traveling the stump circuit for much of his career, speaking wherever Norwegian-Americans gathered.

Ager and Blestren married and raised nine children in a home that still stands near Half Moon Lake in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.