Welcome To The
Rudolph Daniel Lindquist
Reunions Rotunda
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Origins of a Legend
No one would have as much impact on University School's personae as did it's first director, Rudy Lindquist -- the tall Swede who came to Columbus to make history. Who was this man who demanded to be paid as much as the President of Ohio State, and who then proceeded to throw out the work of a dozen committees and model the new University School on the model developed at UC Berkeley?
Coming To America
After a long and miserable ocean voyage from Sweden, California’s Golden Gate must have been a welcome sight for Scandinavian missionaries seeking to transplant themselves into the great American West. Thousands of immigrants arrived at San Francisco’s Embarcadero during the California Gold Rush to seek fame and fortune in the High Sierra. One of those who arrived at the Golden Gate in the decades following the Civil War was John Nils Lindquist, a missionary minister in the Swedish Mission Covenant Church. Lindquist settled in the oak shaded flat lands across the Bay from San Francisco, in a thriving community called Oakland. There young Lindquist married one of his flock, Miss Albertina Johnson. Little might Lindquist have known the important role a youthful university only a few miles from his church would play in the life of his firstborn, a son he named Rudolph Daniel Lindquist, who arrived on November 27th, 1888. Rudy was only the first of Pastor Lindquist’s ten children.
Dora, Rudy and daughter Dorothy
The Californian
Young Rudolph grew up in several communities in northern California and Washington state, as his father moved from town to town to minister to the needs of the faithful. While still a teenager, the Lindquist family moved abruptly from the mild climate of northern California to central Minnesota. There, in the oppressive heat and debilitating cold of the Great American Plains, Rudy attended high school in the small community of Cannon Falls. He graduated from Cannon Falls High School in the class of 1907.
That fall, Rudy began two years of teaching at a school in nearby Dunnell, Minnesota. In 1909, Lindquist took his budding teaching skills to Walden College, in McPherson, Kansas. Lindquist liked teaching enough to make it his career. In 1911, he moved back to California where he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley—not far from where he was born in nearby Oakland.
To support himself, Rudy Lindquist taught English to newly arriving foreigners as part of a YMCA program in San Francisco. While at California, Lindquist was elected to Phi Delta Kappa. In 1915, Rudolph Lindquist graduated from Berkeley and returned to a career in teaching by accepting appointment as an English and German teacher in the Elko, Nevada, school—where he also coached athletics.
Although the University School was, by necessity, the combined creation of many great minds and egos, Rudolph Lindquist was destined to leave an indelible stamp on the School that forever framed its culture and character.