Hagen Autobiography 4

Arnold J. Hagen was born on March 14, 1906, in Grant County, Minnesota, to a father who had immigrated from Norway and a mother who was a first-generation American. In 1907, his family relocated from Minnesota to a farmstead near Cottonwood Late in northwestern North Dakota. He attended high school in Elbow Lake, Minnesota, and received his bachelor's degree from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He served as a teacher and superintendent for various communities in the Upper Midwest before entering the Army during World War II. Following the war, he returned home, married, and started a family. He reentered the profession of education, eventually earning a Doctor of Education degree from the University of Oregon in 1955. He thereafter joined the education faculty at Pacific Lutheran College. He died on October 20, 1985, in Tacoma, Washington. Hagen's autobiography From There to Here: My Life consists of 401 pages of text, plus supporting documentation. The portion of the text covering the pre-war period of his life is written in traditional autobiographical narrative. The section covering the war-years, on the other hand, is for the most part transcribed directly from Hagen's personal diary and written in the present tense. The final portion, covering his life after the war, combines both forms of prose, although autobiographical narrative becomes predominant, particularly towards the end. For the sake of convenience, the manuscript has been divided among five folders. Folder 1 narrates the author's birth, early life, and college years. Folder 2 contains the story of his years after college, during which time he worked as a teacher and a school superintendent. At the outbreak of World War II, he entered the U.S. Army Air Force as an enlisted man, and kept a detailed diary of his experience. He offers vivid impressions of life in the Army, first in the United States, and later, after he was sent overseas, of England. The beginning of Folder 3 continues the account of life as an American soldier in Britain. By this time, Hagen was serving in the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), in which capacity he was temporarily attached to the intelligence service of the Polish government-in-exile. During the Normandy invasion, he traveled to France with a unit of the CIC. Folder 4 picks up with the author serving in France, and he remained with the advancing Allied armies all the way into Germany. Following VE Day, Hagen was seconded to the first Allied taskforce bound for newly liberated Norway. Shortly following the end of the war, Hagen returned to the United States, received his discharge from the Army, and married. Folder 5 covers his life in the post-war period as a husband and father, how he returned to teaching, earned his doctorate, and finally went to work as a college professor. He rounds out his narrative with accounts of the trips he took with his family (including a rather extensive tour of Europe), as well as biographies of his children and their accomplishments in life. The copy of this manuscript in the possession of the Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections is a print-out of an electronic version made available on-line by the Hagen family. Readers wishing to access the electronic copy and/or print a copy of their own can do so by visiting http://www.goosegardens.com/Arnold.html. The autobiography was printed out in August 2006 (Acc.#2006-2854).