Moneymaking Is Art Form for Art Major : Millionaires: Jobs were sparse so Brenda Lynn tried mortgage banking. ‘I was good at it--and I loved it.’

Brenda Lynn was an art major with an English minor when she attended Los Angeles Valley College in the San Fernando Valley in the 1960s. So how did she wind up, at 43, a millionaire mortgage banker in Orange County?

“There weren’t a lot of jobs in my field, and a friend of mine suggested I apply for a job in mortgage banking,” she said. “I found out I was good at it--and I loved it.”

Lynn, executive vice president of Plaza Home Mortgage Corp. in Santa Ana, is the only woman among 26 business executives in Orange County in 1992 who hit the $1-million mark in salary, bonuses and granted stock options. She’s 14th, at $1,436,000, which is nearly double the pay of her own company’s chief executive officer, John T. French, who made $775,000.

As the lone woman on this elite list, Lynn said she is proud of how far she’s come in mortgage banking.

“When I give a speech, young women come up to me and tell me they see me as a role model,” she said. “I like that, being a role model.”

But Lynn said she did not endure the struggles that some women have had to get to the top in male-dominated companies.

“In my business, I can honestly say gender doesn’t matter; all that counts is who can get the job done,” she said. “I’ve never felt threatened as a woman. And here (at Plaza) we have a number of women top executives.”

Lynn, who has a 13-year-old daughter, runs the company’s loan production division. She works out of the Santa Ana office half the week and at Plaza’s Woodland Hills office the rest of her time. She runs between homes in Irvine and Calabasas.

In the ‘80s, she was with Rocky Mountain Capital Corp., a subsidiary of Rocky Mountain Savings & Loan in Wyoming, then moved to the Canoga Park office of HomeFed Mortgage Corp. as executive vice president for wholesale and retail loan origination. She’s been with Plaza since it was formed in 1986.

“It’s a tough business, and competitive,” she said. “But we’ve got a great team. I particularly love seeing other people in the company grow and do well. It’s just a great job.”