The Tacoma Tidende Publishing Company was founded in 1890 by Dirk Blaauw with support from the local Scandinavian business community. The first issue of the Tidende newspaper was published July 4, 1890. Blaauw sought to compete with Seattle's Washington Posten and to expand readership beyond the City of Tacoma. The paper began advertising itself as "The most widely circulating organ of the Scandinavians in the states of Washington and Oregon, in Alaska and in British Columbia" and expanded its news coverage and beyond Washington. In 1897, Dirk Blaauw sold the paper to John Blaauw, who was working as a representative for the paper in Portland, Oregon. He quickly expanded the number of pages, subscribers, and advertisers and piloted unique cooperative programs with other Scandinavian language publications in the Midwest. While the paper had always been known as the Tacoma Tidende, the title page began reflecting this by 1900. Blaauw began directly competing with the Washington Posten by marketing the newspaper and expanding subscribers in Seattle and Ballard. The Tacoma Tidende positioned itself as the more conservative of the Puget Sound Scandinavian newspapers by voicing its support for temperance and other political and social issues. Blaauw left the newspaper in 1911 and Rudolf Blom Anderson, who had previously worked for the Washington Posten, followed as Publisher and Editor. In 1920, John Soley purchased the newspaper and began to refocus the paper on local news within the Scandinavian community. The paper's name was changed to Vestkysten (The West Coast), which had been the title of a short-lived local publication, in 1925. In 1931, Soley sold Vestkysten to The Western Viking.
The Daughters of Norway Grand Lodge was founded as the "Daughters of Norway of the Pacific Coast" (DNPC) on February 20, 1908. It was created by the three independent lodges that existed in Washington State at the time, including Valkyrien Lodge #1 of Seattle (1905-), Embla Lodge #2 of Tacoma (1907-), and Freya Lodge #3 of Spokane (1907-1923) to hold conventions and conduct administrative business. At the 1930 convention, membership was opened to women married to men of Norwegian ancestry, and a proposal to allow translation of installation ceremonies into English in cases where the candidate did not understand Norwegian was passed. In 1936, the first issue of the Daughters of Norway's Døtre av Norge was published, transitioning from Norwegian to English during the 1950s. The DNPC officially changed its name to the Daughters of Norway in 1956, which correspondes with when the organization stopped providing death benefits to older members, making the group strictly cultural and social. The Grand Lodge is still active, hosting conventions and publishing issues of Døtre av Norge as of 2024.
Robert Ericksen, Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies Emeritus and Professor of History at PLU, earned his Ph.D. in history at the London School of Economics. He is the author or editor of five books and more than forty articles or book chapters. All of his work has dealt with two major institutions in Germany during the Nazi period: churches and universities. He retired in 2016.
His first book, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (Yale University Press, 1985), was translated into German, Dutch, and Japanese. In 2005 it was made into a documentary film of the same name, produced by Vitalvisuals.com and shown on PBS to a market of 43 million households. Ericksen co-edited with Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Fortress Press, 1999). His most recent book, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press) appeared in 2012. He is now under contract with Cambridge University Press to complete Christians in Nazi Germany, which will appear in their Short History Series.
Ericksen has been a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Lutheran Academy of Scholars at Harvard University; he has received research awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others; he is a founding member on the board of editors of a German journal, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, and of an online journal, Contemporary Church History Quarterly; and he serves as Chair of the Committee on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In 2004 Ericksen delivered the biennial Kaplan Holocaust Lectures at the University of Cape Town, which led to his recent book, Complicity in the Holocaust. In April 2013 he delivered the Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture at the University of Vermont. In August 2012 he spoke on “Pastors and Professors: Assessing Complicity and Unfolding Complexity” at the University of Cape Town conference on “Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations.” The nine talks at the conference are soon to appear as a volume on Holocaust historiography. He has spoken on several occasions on the Holocaust, including the November 2007 Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture, published by the Museum as “Christian Complicity? Changing Views on German Churches and the Holocaust.”
Holger Jurgensen and Gunhild Felland Jurgensen's son Erling Jurgensen attended Pacific Lutheran College in the 1930s. Nicknamed "Snooky," Erling was the starting football fullback and team captain in 1938. He graduated from PLC in 1939. While attending PLC, he met fellow student Aagot Judy Gerde. The two were married and had two daughters, Nancy Carol Jurgensen and Janet Jurgensen. Both graduated from Pacific Lutheran University, Nancy in 1966 and Janet in 1969.