Basketball and Baseball
Oscar “Sunny” A. Olson, Jr. was born in Max, North Dakota, and grew up in Braham, Minn. A 1935 graduate of the Braham High School, he played four years of high school basketball and four years of baseball.
Olson earned three letters in basketball and two in baseball at Carleton. He was an All-Midwest Conference selection in basketball for all three years, and was named honorary captain of the 1938-39 All-Conference team. That year, he scored 274 points in 22 games, shattering the Carleton single-season scoring record by 83 points. He also won the Midwest Conference scoring title, with 105 points in eight games, even though some of his competitors played as many as eleven Conference games. He scored a total of 519 points in three years. The teams he played on won 31 and lost 22, while competing against such powers as Minnesota, Iowa, Northwestern, Kansas and Marquette. He was named winner of the Matteson award in 1939.
At the close of his senior season, “Sonny” Olson was named by Chuck Taylor to the Converse Rubber Company All-American basketball team, the third Carleton man to receive the national honors on the hard court (Dick Arney ’33 and Wayne Sparks ’37 were the others). Olson graduated in 1939 with a major in economics.