Ted Olson spent his childhood on a Laramie River ranch with his Norwegian-born parents, brother, and sisters. As a journalist and diplomat, he traveled around the world, but his heart remained on the ranch. He captured those years in his acclaimed 1972 book, Ranch on the Laramie.

Olson was a true "big man on campus" -- editor and business manager of the weekly Wyoming Studen, student body president, and SAE fraternity member. Shortly after he graduated, he instructed journalism in the English department.

He worked on the old Casper Herald, the New York Herald Tribue, and edited the Laramie Republican-Boomerang for nearly a decade. He wrote for newspapers in Denver and San Francisco. In 1928, the Yale Series of Younger POets published his work. Olson's poems also appear in two other collections.

He left the Herald Tribune in WWII to become the U.S. State Dewpartment's London coordinator of information. As a respected diplomat, he headed the U.S. information service in Norway, and held important posts in the Middle and Far East, Latin America, Athens, and Reykjavik, where he was Counselor of Embassy.

Olson was a 1974 UW Distinguished Alumnus. He and his wife, Louise (a former UW faculty member), retired to Washington, D.C., where he died in 1981.