Transfer to the University of Minnesota

In the spring of 1955, the Evening Telegram noted that Lauren Ekroth — “well-known to Superior State College Theater audiences” — had stepped into the role of Duke Senior in the SSC Players’ production of As You Like It. He was home in Superior between quarters, watching Pacey Beers’s rehearsals, when the director pointed at him to fill a vacancy in the cast. He learned the part over a weekend. The notice supplied the key fact: “Ekroth, who attended SSC for two years and scored a hit in the role of the Witch Boy in ‘Dark of the Moon’ last spring, is now at the University of Minnesota studying dramatics.”

After two years at Superior State College, he had transferred to the University of Minnesota, one of the country’s strongest theater programs. His field of study was dramatics — not speech or communication, but the performing arts. The transfer was a step up in institutional scale and academic ambition: from a regional state college to a Big Ten university whose theater faculty included nationally recognized figures. Even after the transfer, his relationship with Beers was close enough that a weekend visit home turned into a Shakespeare performance.

By December 1956, the picture had shifted again. A short social notice in the Evening Telegram listed the holiday visitors expected at the Elton Ekroth home at 915 Belknap Street: Lauren, returning from graduate school at the University of Minnesota, and his sister Cynthia, now working as an X-ray technician at Mercy Hospital in San Diego with her Navy fiancé. Lauren had almost certainly completed his undergraduate degree at Minnesota in the spring of 1956 and begun graduate work that fall — at age 21, moving quickly through the academic pipeline. His father Elton was still alive at that Christmas; he would die before September 1957. The holiday gathering at Belknap Street in December 1956 was very likely the last time the full family assembled with him.