Wahl, Rosalie E. (Rosalie Erwin), 1924-

Rosalie Wahl was born as Sara Rosalie Erwin on August 27, 1924 in Gordon, Kansas, the third daughter of four children born to Claude William and Gertrude (Patterson) Erwin. Growing up in the Depression era, Wahl experienced tremendous personal hardship. Her mother died when Wahl was three years old and she, with her sisters and brother, moved to live with her maternal grandparents on a farm near Birch Creek, Kansas. Four years later, Wahl's grandfather and brother were killed by a train after she opened a gate that led from the farm to the creek across a set of railroad tracks. She spent the remainder of her childhood on that same farm in Birch Creek and was raised by her grandmother with help from her mother's sister, Sara Patterson.

In 1942 Wahl entered the University of Kansas intending to pursue a journalism degree. The following summer she returned to Birch Creek to teach. Her fiancé, an air force serviceman, died the next winter in a training accident. Wahl describes herself at this time as torn between choosing a life of poetry and mysticism or following a path of social and political activism. 1 Determined to pursue a field where she could help people, Wahl went back to the University where she edited the campus newspaper and became involved with the campus YWCA where she helped form a women's interracial residential cooperative. During this time Wahl became a Quaker. In 1946 she graduated with a degree in sociology and though she had planned to go to California to work with migrants she instead married Roswell Wahl, a family friend and mechanical engineer.

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