Cal Lutheran Gave Its 1st Employee Quite an Education

She promised her father in the 1920s that she would go to college one day. But more than three decades would pass before Ethel Beyer ended up on a college campus.

And she wasn’t a student. She was the first employee of what is now known as Cal Lutheran University. And she helped shape the college in Thousand Oaks’ rolling hills--greeting new students, transporting textbooks in the rumble seat of her Studebaker and fixing chicken dinners for the Board of Regents.

“I think I wore out more shoes than I wore out in my life, because we were in the ranch house, and all the activity was going on down at the far end of the campus where the old chicken coops were.”

Running back and forth from ranch house to chicken coops was just the beginning for Beyer, who served as assistant to the new college’s president. She would get lunches for guests and clean up afterward, buy Christmas presents for the children of faculty members and staff--even making curtains for the kitchen was part of starting up California Lutheran College.

Beyer first came to California in 1924, after passing through the Panama Canal with her father when she was 16 years old.

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“I stood on deck the whole day and got a beautiful sunburn, but it was so exciting, so exciting.”

Though her father wanted her to go to college, they compromised when they saw an advertisement to work part time, earn tuition and go to business school. Within two weeks, Beyer had a job with an independent oil company in Los Angeles and worked there for 27 years.

Soon after retiring from the oil company in 1952, Ethel became restless, feeling she was too young to be “quitting.” A talk with her pastor led her to Orville Dahl, first president of the yet to be built California Lutheran College.

“He asked me to write to Dr. Dahl, who had been called, so to speak, to come from Minneapolis out to California to establish a college. I wrote to him, and he wrote back, and made an appointment. He came to talk to me and he asked me to work with him, and that impressed me--to work with him, not for him.”

Even though Beyer had been in California long enough to know about pipe dreams, she accepted the challenge of starting a new college. After the property for Cal Lutheran was donated by Richard Pederson in 1957, Beyer moved with her mother from Van Nuys to Thousand Oaks. Her father had died in 1943.

Her first year working at the developing campus proved challenging.

“We came in January 1958, and in February we had rains like California hadn’t seen in a long, long time. A couple of times I had to stop on the highway . . . because the rain was so heavy you could hardly see.”

Packing books into the rumble seat of her Studebaker--”tomato soup red with Navajo white top”--was never mentioned in the job description. But because the post office didn’t have a truck, it was up to her to go to the Camarillo railroad station and pick them up.

Starting up Cal Lutheran was clearly a rustic, hands-on endeavor, and that attracted pioneering faculty members and students to the campus.

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“It wasn’t Los Angeles, by any means, and when we first came out here, there were about 25 houses in Thousand Oaks and three of them were on campus. Moorpark was just a two-lane road, and fields of grain or weeds, whatever you want to call them. It was very rural, and I would think that had something to do with the people wanting to be in something fresh and new, and not city. Even then UCLA and USC were big institutions, and this was going to be different.”

This school undoubtedly was different: Dahl went to an auction and returned with a soda fountain complete with fixtures, booths, seats and marble counter top to provide a place for the students to eat. He even enlisted the chef and owner of the Redwood Lodge in the town nearby to come over and cook the meals. And walnut groves on the college’s land were harvested for gifts or to supplement the college’s tuition fees.

Beyer remembers the many changes the campus has gone through, from gatherings under a big tent with stagecoach and hay wagon rides, to master plans, chapels and architecture. But most of all, she remembers the people.

“One of our very first professors, Dr. Walter Magnuson, was in chemistry. . . . This one week it looked like we weren’t going to get any paychecks because there just wasn’t that much money coming in . . . and so we thought, well, this week we’d go without pay. This Dr. Magnuson came in and left a check for $2,500, and that just amazed me, because at that time, in 1958, that was a lot of money.”

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Beyer watched and worked as financing came in and building began. She had the satisfaction of welcoming the first class in 1961, and she felt the sadness of saying goodbye to Dahl when he retired in 1962.

At 65, facing mandatory retirement, Beyer left the faculty secretary’s office, but before she could have her retirement party she was back working in President Mark Matthews’ office. After having a heart attack, Beyer almost retired again. Then came an offer from Dennis Gillette to come and work with him in the business office four half days a week.

From the beginning, Beyer knew the people who were dedicated to building a Lutheran college were special.

“When I was invited to come and be a part of the university, I felt very humble about it, because I had not been to college myself, and had not been a graduate, which is no credit to me, I guess, but I just felt very humbled about having been asked to be part of it.

“And I still feel humble about it.”

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Four years ago, a group of Thousand Oaks residents launched an oral history project to preserve the memories of the Conejo Valley’s earliest settlers. With support from the Thousand Oaks Library Foundation, dozens of residents were interviewed and their remembrances transcribed and filed at the library. Tina Carlson, who heads the project, has pared down some of the interviews, and provided them to The Times to publish in connection with Conejo Valley Days. Today, through the voice of Ethel Beyer, 88, she tells about the early days of Cal Lutheran University.