Rodger Vautile Holmen was born on June 9, 1908, and raised in Hatton, North Dakota. He attended Mayville State Teacher’s College in Mayville, North Dakota, and Bemidji College in Bemidji, Minnesota. A gifted teacher, his students ranged from schoolchildren in rural North Dakota to undergraduates at Mayville State University. Meanwhile, he furthered his own education, attending graduate courses at the College of Puget Sound, Washington College of Education, and Auerswald’s Business College, ultimately completing his master’s degree at the University of Washington. He taught at the Lakeland Village School in Washington until he entered military service.

Holmen was inducted into the US Army in March 1942 and was commissioned into the Coast Artillery Corps that November. He served as an instructor at Camp Davis in Holly Ridge, North Carolina. Later, he became the director of a specialized training school at Camp Stewart in Georgia, where he was also assigned to an antiaircraft unit. His unit was shipped to Casablanca in March 1944. Following tours of duty in North Africa and Italy, his unit entered occupied Austria, under the administration of General Mark W. Clark, commanding general of the US Forces Austria (USFA). While there, Captain Holmen served both as an assistant MFA officer and public relations officer assigned to a military government detachment in Upper Austria in the latter half of 1945.

After returning to Washington, Holmen resumed a successful career in education, which spanned an impressive thirty-seven years. He worked as a principal at the Lakeland Village School before teaching in Ephrata and Renton, Washington.

Rodger Holmen died on August 24, 1971.