My University BY CHUCK HAGA, ’76, ’78
Then and now, under foot or in my mind, always a special place. My memory places, the places I recall with affection and pride, range from my boyhood home in Valley City, North Dakota, to the Grand Forks hospital room where I watched my little grandson hold his just-born baby sister. Prompted to sing to her, he sang a bit of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” I remember standing at my grandmother’s grave in southwestern Norway, telling her about the son who left for America at 18 and never was able to return. She knew she likely would never see him again, a cousin told me. For three days before my father left, she moved her cot next to his. The places in my heart include a favorite camping spot among the pines in northern Minnesota, a rise overlooking the Missouri River in western North Dakota where I can imagine Lewis and Clark passing by, and a field in West Africa where I visited a Peace Corps-serving friend, also a UND graduate, and helped her plant trees to hold back the Sahara Desert. Those places, and my University.
56 YEARS AGO I remember as if it was yesterday that first day I set foot on campus as a student, 56 years ago. I had been there twice before, once as a high school senior and once as a junior high student tagging along with my big brother Jerry, who introduced me to his
fraternity brothers at Tau Kappa Epsilon (the building stands, but with new Greek letters out front). It was a Sunday morning, and a few of the lads sat in the living room, talking and drinking coffee and reading the Sunday papers. (I want to say the Kingston Trio sang from a stereo that morning, but I may be imagining more than remembering that.) It seemed a time of important transition. It seemed so adult, so inviting, so promising. Then in September 1967, I walked across campus, a freshman wearing a new sweater, trying to look collegiate as I shuffled through leaves fallen from old oaks, elms and maples. I remember it was sunny and warm and there were so many of us, and I wondered: Was I worthy? Did I belong?
MY MEMORY PLACES Of the places of my life, places that shaped me and earned my affection, my University stands out. The word itself brings to mind something solid and enduring, changing but preserving, too, a place of honor and tradition but also a place of experiment, surprise and discovery, where questioning is encouraged and dissent is tolerated. So much has changed on campus since I first arrived in the fall of 1967, excited and scared, wondering whether I had the stuff to succeed here. Especially in the past couple of years, with construction of the new Memorial Union and other major projects,
Top: Merrifield Hall in fall 1971; Middle: Tau Kappa Epsilon; Bottom right: Chuck Haga and Mike Jacobs, editor and managing editor of the Dakota Student, 1970
