children were raised in the Lutheran church; Andersen was confirmed at Our Savior's Lutheran Church in Muskegon. In 1925, his mother contracted a cold that developed into pneumonia. She died at home on March 3, 1925, with Andersen at her bedside. Within a year, his father also died, of a heart attack. Andersen graduated from high school in 1926 and became a member of the first class of the newly established Muskegon Junior College. Upon graduating two years later, he received the first diploma awarded by the school. While in college, he held a sales job with J. J. Fagan and Company, a real estate firm, and worked as a stringer for the Muskegon Chronicle, while starting a newspaper for the junior college. Not long after, he and his brothers started a company, Muskegon Realty, which also sold casualty insurance for the Mercury Insurance Company. "I matured fast in those years. I was selling homes and farms. I was selling insurance. I was editing a college newspaper and stringing for a daily newspaper. I was studying and learning about things I had never known existed. It was almost an incredible time." Andersen graduated from junior college in 1928. For the next year, he worked as a salesman for the Sheldon Company, working out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. "A year in Minneapolis left me convinced that I wanted something more. I wanted to enroll at the University of Minnesota. I usually approach a new venture with specific objectives. In aiming for the University of Minnesota, I had three: I wanted to get a degree for reasons of job protection. I did not want somebody to push ahead of me because he had a degree and I did not. Another object was to meet a woman whom I might marry. I was beginning to long for a home life and a family. I was lonely. I discovered that being a traveling salesman, on the road all the time, was no way to meet the kind of women I wanted to meet. My third objective was to have a good time! I had been a fairly successful salesman and quite frugal with my earnings....So, having fun, finding a girl, getting a degree—those were my objectives. If I was able to learn anything along the way, that would be purely incidental!" Andersen graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1931. H. B. Fuller Company By