LOOKING FORWARD—A statue of Richard Pederson, above, will be dedicated during the Scandinavian Festival at CLU on Saturday. At left, Pederson surveys the land that would one day be the home of California Lutheran University. He donated his ranch to the college in 1957 after hearing Orville Dahl, the school’s founding president, talk about his idea to build a college on the property.
When artist Paul Lucchesi saw a black-and-white photo of Richard Pederson surveying his Thousand Oaks ranch, he was moved to re-create the likeness with clay.
Pederson donated the 130-acre ranch that his family had farmed since the late 1800s to California Lutheran College in 1957. The campus buildings were built on the land, and classes started in 1961.
“I figured a person of his caliber should be celebrated,” Lucchesi said. “I just think of him as being a farmer, the salt of the earth, and giving his land—that metaphor, ‘planting the seeds of opportunity.’”
Lucchesi’s work in 2009 was recently cast in bronze and now stands next to the Soiland Humanities Center, near the flagpoles on Memorial Parkway at CLU. University President Chris Kimball will dedicate the statue at 11:30 a.m. Sat., April 18 during CLU’s Scandinavian Festival.
Pederson gave away his ranch after Orville Dahl, founding president of what was then California Lutheran College, told the farmer “his dream for the land,” said Pederson’s niece, Janet Pederson Reeling, a resident of Bishop, Calif.
Pederson first consulted with his family, including his mother, Karn, and siblings Peder, Lawrence and Anna, who each owned other portions of the land that were later sold.
“They’d been searching and searching for land for a campus,” said Reeling, Lawrence’s only child. “We had a family meeting and he said what he would like to do with his land. We all agreed it would be a wonderful gift.”
Pederson did not attend college and may not have finished high school, his niece said. But he valued education.
“He was a very literate person,” she said. “He would sit and read ‘War and Peace’ and listen to The Bell Telephone Hour on his radio and watch TV all at the same time.”
He always loved to play jokes on people, she said, once hiding her new Ford coupe in an orange grove (it took Reeling 40 minutes to find it) and another time mailing her his mother’s old vacuum cleaner as a wedding gift (she later received a generous monetary gift).
“I adored him,” Reeling said. “We were a very close family. We always had fun.”
The family also worked hard.
Pederson’s parents, Norwegian immigrants Lars and Karn Pederson, paid $3 an acre for their land in 1890.
The couple had saved money and went in with four other Norwegian couples to buy the land where CLU now sits, drawing lots from a hat to decide how to divide the property for sale, Reeling said.
The Pedersons dug wells by hand; grew alfalfa, hay and tomatoes; tended orange and walnut groves; and raised chickens and black Angus cattle.
“They built their shacks and started out with very meager belongings,” Reeling said. “I’m very proud of them and how they struggled. They did everything they could to make a living, and then they saved their money and bought out their neighbors.”
The family moved to Santa Barbara after Lars Pederson died at age 36, later returning to the Conejo Valley in 1913. They lived in a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog kit house, now the home of CLU’s music department.
Richard Pederson served in the U.S. Army in England during World War I. His brother Peder farmed his land while he was away.
“When he first came home and an airplane would fly over the ranch he would break out in a sweat remembering the war,” Reeling said.
Richard Pederson, who did not have children, married the widow of a friend he served with in the Army after donating his land to CLU.
“He was very active in the building of the college,” Reeling said, adding that the Pederson brothers advised Dahl how to construct buildings on the land they knew well. “They said, ‘You have to put a lot of steel in the cement to hold it together because of the shifting adobe soil.’ They helped them to understand the land, the wind and what happened in that area. We all contributed whatever we could to the development of the college.”
Fitting tribute
Lucchesi, a resident of West Virginia, created his clay sculpture of Pederson during a onemonth artist residency at CLU. But it sat in storage until last spring, when university groups paid for Lucchesi to return to CLU to create a wax mold and prepare it for casting in bronze, said Karin Grennan, media relations manager at CLU.
“The statue is a very good likeness of him,” said Reeling, who will attend the dedication ceremony with two of her sons. “He was standing there, leaning on a shovel, which he always did when he was irrigating. But he also served as a regent for the college, and he loved to dress up in a suit and tie. He was a neatlooking businessman as well.”
Lucchesi spent six weeks molding the sculpture in the middle of the Kwan Fong Gallery on campus. He said that creating the statue of Pederson was his own desire.
“I could have done anything,” the sculptor said. “The common man is not portrayed enough in art and society. Even more important are the people being educated (on his land).”
FRUITFUL— Richard Pederson works on his ranch. A member of one of Thousand Oaks’ founding families, Pederson donated his land to California Lutheran College in 1957 so the campus, now California Lutheran University, could be built.