"Los Angeles Lutheran University". The land was donated by the Harry Culver Company, Dickinson & Gillespie, film director King Vidor, and Joseph Mesmer. Architects planned a Mediterranean-style campus with a 200-foot (61 m) campanile on the mesa's edge. The ground-breaking was scheduled for the summer of 1928, but according to a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times, the 1929 stock market crash postponed the scheduled construction indefinitely. This site is now the current location of Loyola Marymount University.
The first official steps in creating a college took place at the first annual convention of the new South Pacific District of the American Lutheran Church (ALC) in 1951. A resolution passed which urged congregations to contribute an amount of money to the project, equal to twenty percent of their offering to the national synodical budget. The convention also established the Higher Education Committee, whose purpose was to study the details of establishing a college in the district. The committee …
