David Scheil ’25 has been working for the past two years on a project detailing the lives of St. Olaf baseball team members who fought in World War II. The project titled “The War Years: St. Olaf Baseball During World War Two” is currently displayed as a digital exhibit. However, Scheil hopes to soon produce a physical display which will include artifacts such as gloves, jerseys, and balls from the time period, as well as reproductions of letters between 1915-58 Dean of Women Gertrude Hilleboe and the players featured in the project.
In an interview with The Olaf Messenger, Scheil spoke about his initial spark of inspiration for the project. It all started his freshman year working in sports information in the athletics department archiving records of baseball games into a digital database going back to the founding of the College.
“I got to the years of World War II, and I was expecting to see a drop off in the games we played,” Scheil said. “I’m thinking to myself: all of the guys are 18-to-22-year-olds, so they’re the perfect draft age, and they’re all obviously healthy enough to play baseball, so they’re prime candidates to get drafted. [Then] I got to the war years, and we didn’t have any dropoff in games. We played full seasons.”
That surprising statistic stuck with Scheil, inspiring a project that detailed life on-and-off-campus during World War II focusing on the lives of four players: Roy Thorson ’37, Orval Amdahl ’41, Ralph Nitz ’40, and Paul Swensen ’41.
As a member of the baseball team and a history and English double major, the project was very personal for Scheil.
“Throughout this project, I was imagining with myself and my baseball friends something like Pearl Harbor happening, and then [we went] down to the Army enlistment office that very day. It’s hard to conceptualize what it would have been like,” Scheil said.
Scheil spoke about how this research has changed his connection with the College and with history: “You don’t think of these big world events as having as big of a ripple effect as they do. The fact that there were guys who participated in D-Day, or witnessed the atomic bomb drop, or witnessed concentration camps, and they had classes in Holland Hall. They stood in Boe Chapel.”
Scheil was not the only one who gained a deeper connection with history. In his research process, Scheil interviewed several surviving family members of the soldiers he researched for the project, including former St. Olaf physics professor David Nitz.
“We found his dad’s name on a transcript for the Nuremberg trials,” Scheil said. “The dates lined up, and it would’ve made some amount of sense that he was there at the time; and his son, David, that was the first that he had heard of it.” While the records didn’t go into much detail about Nitz’s involvement in the trials, the discovery in itself was meaningful for both of them.
Scheil hopes that students who read his project will have a better sense of their connection to history and the ways that history has been shaped by the St. Olaf community, both past and present.
“This entire project has been the best part of my college experience, or close to it. This is why I became a history major: to have an original idea, then be able to pursue it, and to leverage all the amazing resources we have at St. Olaf to produce something really cool.”
