Wayne Ingersoll was unwavering.  “I’ve been a member of the Clay County Commission for a while now and I really love the job.  It allows me to serve the people of this area, where I grew up, see what I can do to make their lives better.  But you know, if someone said to me, ‘Wayne, if you had to do it all over again and have to choose -- grow up, go to Moorhead State for college and join the Owls fraternity, then get elected  – or grow up, go to Moorhead State and still get elected a commissioner, but never having joined the Owls – which would you pick, the Owls or the Commission?’  If someone said I had to make that choice, I’d pick the Owls, hands down.  From them I learned confidence and above all camaraderie.”

Dean Mollerud, now an instructor of Education at MSUM, feels much the same way.  A year younger than Ingersoll when he joined the Owls in the 1960s, Mollerud notes that “when I came to school I felt kind of lost.  It was a smaller college then, but it was big to me.  When I joined the Owls, I belonged in a group of guys who became best friends and I knew I could count on them, and they knew they could count on me. I was somebody.  I had confidence.  That’s stayed with me since, in my teaching and everything else.”

The Owls were born in 1901, when James D. Mason, a student in his thirties, agreed to a kind of “mystic society” in which the male students – far outnumbered by the women at the teachers college in those days – could have their own getaway men’s club.  Mason aimed to create something similar to the ‘skull and bones’-type fraternity that was a feature of ivy league schools. “I organized an initiation, some rituals with ‘mystical numbers,’ and we met at the old Kurtz mansion,” Mason later recalled.  The “mansion” was the Victorian home of the late Thomas Kurtz, Moorhead’s first banker and Moorhead Normal School’s first resident director.  The attic of the large, empty house was inhabited by night owls, and there were always rumors of Kurtz’s ghost walking the grounds.  So the building became the perfect place for the early “secret ceremonies of this, the first fraternal organization of the school.  Edwin Reed, the college’s head of English, helped to create the Owls’ rituals, and wrote many of the sings featured in the fraternity’s 50th Anniversary commemoration book.  Reed, Mason recalled, had been part of a couple of societies and knew the kinds of ceremonies that they held.

The Owls grew slowly until by the 1930s they were the largest fraternity on campus. “We were approached many times to merge our group with a large national organization like TKS or Sigma Alpha Epsilon,” a 1940s Owl remembered, “but we were happy to stay the local group closely tied to Moorhead State and the town.  With the post-World War II boom in higher education, all the on campus fraternities and sororities grew larger; by the mid ‘50s, there were forty or more Owls each year.

Both Ingersoll and Mollerud were members in the 1960s.  “We certainly had our share of parties and beer busts,” Ingersoll notes.  Each spring we would schedule our own event to coincide with the annual “Governor’s Ball and Music Festival.  The location was kept a secret while the officers planned it, but it would slowly get around so by the time of the party, almost all the students knew where it would be.”  Mollerud well remembers those parties.  “Most of the time it was at a gravel pit or a farmer’s field.  Moorhead State alums who were Owls would happily let us use a place they owned and they always came too.  I think in about 1968 we must have had three hundred people at a sandpit near Downer – they just brought in a truck filled with beer.”  Karen Kivi, long-serving Moorhead State librarian who lived next door to the House where many Owls rented rooms, recalled watching the Owls make floats for homecoming.  “They’d be clutching beers while stuffing tissue paper into a chicken-wire frame, tying on ribbons where needed.  By early morning most were gone, but a pretty good looking float would be there on the lawn.”

Every homecoming, the Owls paired up with Gamma Phi Mu sorority to work on the weekend dance.  “Our homecoming queen and our own “Owls queen” was almost always a Gamma Phi.”  But the real, full-time queen of the Owls after the 1950s was “Ma Jackson,” (photo, left) the woman who rented rooms in her house to many Owls.  Mollerud thinks of her as family -- “Ma was half-mother, half-drill sergeant to all of us.  If we had a problem, she’d help solve it.  We were like her own sons.  But, on Friday nights, when we’d play cards with her, heaven help you if you thought you could drink more than her!”

The Owls had a serious side too.  “We had a meeting room in MacLean’s basement,” Ingersoll noted.  “We’d plan a fund-raiser for a charity, collect money for a scholarship.  I learned a lot about planning that way and got some leadership skills that have served me well since.” 

By the 1990s, higher costs of college, and the need to work more hours off-campus, were cutting into memberships of all the Greek societies at Moorhead State.  The Owls were no exception.  Membership declined until in the mid-2000s the fraternity ceased to exist.  “We held a full dress reunion in 2001,” Ingersoll states wistfully, “and it was a great turnout.  Soc Glasrud, probably our oldest living member came and shared stories.  Others came from all points of the compass, and Moorhead put out the red carpet and welcomed us all back.  But sadly it didn’t get the group going again.  The students now have new social media in their phones and computers and mostly they’re just too busy trying to pay the bills.”

But the memory of the Owls lives on.  “Some of us still get together each year,” says Mollerud.  “It made us who we are,” says Ingersoll. “To me,” a member said, “Owldom is the definitive word for brotherhood. Each member takes pride in the organization, but it is a pride earned, not borrowed.”  Some fraternities and sororities – mostly professional, a few social  – are still at MSUM.