Harold Stueve, 88; Farmer Founded Alta Dena Dairy With 2 Brothers in 1945

Harold Stueve, the last of three brothers who in 1945 founded Alta Dena Dairy and soon introduced the drive-through dairies that endure on the Southern California landscape, has died. He was 88.

Stueve died Sunday of complications from colon cancer at his Diamond Bar home, said a daughter, Nancy Keefe.

With 61 cows and a milk wagon, Stueve and his older brothers started Alta Dena in Monrovia, building it into one of the world’s largest dairies by the 1960s. When the family sold a majority of the company in 1989, it was bringing in more than $125 million a year. At the time, more than 70 family members worked there.

Competitive pressures and age -- he was 71 -- forced the sale of the processing operations in the City of Industry to Zausner Foods, an American subsidiary of Bongrain S.A. of France, Stueve had said.

A decade later, the company was taken over by Dean Foods, and for years Stueve kept watch on his former dairy through an annual lunch with Alta Dena’s current general manager, Steve Schaffer.

“He left a legacy of manufacturing excellence and true product quality that remains to this day,” Schaffer told The Times.

The trademark drive-throughs debuted in 1951, three years after In-N-Out Burger opened its first drive-through window. The company called the stores “cash and carries,” an idea that “really took off,” Stueve told The Times in 1989.

“My dad saw that in California, cars were becoming more and more important,” Keefe said. “He thought it would be a good service to give people a place to get their basics without having to get out of their cars.”

Today, 82 independently owned Alta Dena drive-throughs remain open.

In 1985, Alta Dena became one of the first dairies to print photographs of missing children on milk cartons.

Stueve -- pronounced Stoo-vee -- was the third of 18 children of a Missouri farming family. He followed his brothers west in 1939, going to work at Foothill Dairy in Azusa.

By the time his eldest brother, Elmer, returned from serving in the Army during World War II, Harold and another brother, Edgar, had formed the nucleus of Alta Dena.

Elmer concentrated on maintenance and construction while his brothers took care of animal husbandry and the business. (Elmer died at 78 in 1992 and Edgar at 86 in 2002.)

The company would grow into a unique milk giant. In addition to pasteurized milk, it sold raw milk -- an unheard-of practice for a large dairy -- and insisted on producing milk from its own cows instead of marketing and packaging milk from other sources.

Stueve spoke softly and had the plain and honest features of a farmer, which camouflaged an intense side that helped him wrangle with officials.

Over the years, the dairy operation had to fight off several challenges from health authorities who blamed Alta Dena for outbreaks of salmonella among its customers.

The legal battles forced the Steuves to sell most of their several hundred acres of Chino farmland in the late 1990s.

Yet the production and sale of raw milk remained her father’s “single greatest passion” because he thought it was better, his daughter said. “He felt pasteurization killed off some of the helpful enzymes and altered proteins.”

Harold J.J. Stueve was born Dec. 16, 1917, in Frohna, Mo., to Henry and Lydia Stueve. His mother died when he was 2 and his father remarried.

He met his first wife, Vernice Evans, through the Lutheran Church, which remained a large part of his life. They raised four children in Monrovia before she died of cancer in 1967 after 25 years of marriage.

A longtime member of the Monrovia City Council, Stueve also served as mayor in the 1960s before moving to Chino and then to Diamond Bar.

While attending a meeting in Long Beach, Stueve met Ruth Porter and courted her and her three children by bringing coolers filled with dairy goods to their home in San Diego. The couple married in 1968.

In addition to his wife, and Nancy Keefe of San Diego, Stueve is survived by another daughter, Donna Clarke of La Verne; sons Lloyd of Oakdale, Calif; Cleason of Covina; and David of Riverside; 17 grandchildren; 14 great-grandchildren; and 11 brothers and sisters.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday at Mount Calvary Lutheran Church, 23300 E. Golden Springs Drive, Diamond Bar.