Dave Brynestad and Alan Bain

     In most colleges and universities across the United States of America, there are Fraternities or Sororities: they are student organizations that provide a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood within the confines of a group of people with similar interests and values. Concordia didn’t have sororities or fraternities but they had societies that were co-ed and “welcomed anyone who was willing to participate.” (1) The society Dave Brynestad and Alan Bain were in was called Aqui, and “was an outdoor society” (2). It included a group of people with the similar interests of outdoor kinds of recreation and the group usually went on bike and canoe trips. The first societies at Concordia started in the 1930s. (3) In the early stages of societies at Concordia, they were literary societies dealing with only academic issues. But as the societies progressed they dealt more with social issues and less with academics. (4)

            The societies at Concordia College were a way to get involved with a group of people even if you didn’t participate in athletics or music, which are the two main groups in the population of the students of Concordia. The majority of the societies at Concordia were “Co-ed”, which means involving men and women, but some of the societies were involved in a brother-sister society relationship, that was the case with Aqui and Outdoor Leadership Institute. (5) They had a majority of their values matched up with Aqui; they were both outdoor societies as well. The theoretic part was described by Alan Bain: “we’re going to take a bunch of people outside and do stuff that is outside of their element.”(6) Societies were similar to the modern day fraternities and societies; they would go out into the communities and pick up garbage (7) among other service projects. Societies at Concordia would differ from fraternities of that time because in fraternities or sororities “students often reside on campus, in dormitories, and fraternity houses that are regulated by college authorities” (8) and the societies at Concordia, including Aqui, most often did not live in a house together. One of the more intriguing parts about Aqui were the trips that they’d take, like rock climbing or even just biking to local parks such as Maple and Buffalo River State Parks. (9) An interesting trip that the gentlemen described was a trip to Yellowstone National Park in which the group’s trailer holding all of their skis and supplies broke down and they had to get it fixed in Billings, Montana. (10) Once they got to Yellowstone they stayed in tee pees in spaces they dug out of the snow. Another story involved the group starting from the centrum on Concordia’s campus biking all the way to Duluth staying in houses and churches along the way that would take a big group of “cold and wet kids” after a day of biking. (11) All the activities they did involved being outside for the majority of the trip. 

Works Cited

(1)  (2) (5) (6) (7) (9) (10)(11) Brynestad, Dave (donor) Bain, Alan (donor), “Dave Brynestad and Alan Bain, Oral History Interview, 2014,” Concordia Memory Project, accessed December 11, 2014, http://concordiamemoryproject.omeka.net/admin/items/show/721.

(3) (4) Carrol Engelhardt, On Firm Foundation Grounded: The first Century of Concordia College (Moorhead: Concordia College, 1991: Digital Horizons), 138.

(8) Walter L. Wallace. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, Special Issue on Universities as Organizations (Mar., 1967), Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, Article DOI: 10.2307/2391080, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2391080, P.644