People

: Ohngemach, Louise

: Ola Garrett

: Ola L. Booco

: Olaf "Ole" Ulin

: Olaf Sundal; He was born in Sundal, Norway to Andrew and Annie Sundal. There, members of his family were tenant farmers who belonged to the Lutheran Church. His family came to the United States in 1904, when Olaf was seven years old. They settled first in Minnesota but came eventually to Illinois, where Olaf grew up. According to Olaf’s son, David Sundal, Andrew Sundal was in the grocery business in Illinois, although the 1910 US Census shows him working as a carpenter in La Salle. Olaf went to Pleasant View Lutheran College in Ottawa, Illinois. After fighting in World War I, he returned to La Salle. He worked in his father’s grocery business and introduced the idea of “rolling groceries,” or grocery delivery via Model T to locations around the countryside. He then attended the Chicago Evangelistic Institute, a Methodist-connected seminary recently begun in response to perceived failings of mainline Methodist churches in the United States. He then became a clergyman in a Nazarene Church in Freeport, Illinois, a new faith that was populated (at least in Freeport) mostly by people who had left the old Methodist Church. He also sold Webster’s dictionaries on the side, but in two years, had a church with a full congregation. Many in the church wanted “a hellfire and brimstone preacher,” and so he elected to go elsewhere. He moved to Grand Junction in August 1930, where he began preaching at the First Church of the Nazarene. He was offered the position by people at the local church, and though the man in charge of the larger Nazarene district did not approve, Sundal secured the position. He was described by David Sundal as a dynamo of a person with great speaking and organizing skills, and he soon had the church filled with people in what had been a struggling congregation. He preached for 39 years while living in Grand Junction. He was an expert fisherman, and decided to stay in Grand Junction, rather than return to Illinois, because of the outdoors in Mesa County. He made good friends with the fellow clergymen from other churches.