Arthur and Ruth Neve Scholarship

Twenty-five years is a long time to be a widow, but Ruth Neve had a backbone of steel and made the most of those years to the benefit of many others.

Ruth’s parents, Ernst and Anne Turkheim, had immigrated to Canada from Germany. They settled in Saskatchewan, where Ruth was born. Her father was a Lutheran pastor, and Ruth was one of seven children. This large family partly explains the many nieces and nephews that appear later in this story.

Ruth did her undergraduate work at Waterloo College in Canada before going to Wittenberg University in Ohio to get her master’s degree in English. Wittenberg was and remains one of the nation’s oldest Lutheran institutions. And that is where she met Arthur Neve. The couple was married in 1941 and two years later had a son, Lawrence. He was their only child, and he passed away at the age of 29.

Arthur and Ruth were active in the communities in which they lived. Arthur was the chief financial officer for the Los Angeles United Way and Ruth was executive director for the San Fernando Valley Youth Foundation & Teen Center, receiving the mayor’s certificate of appreciation in 1965. Ruth also worked in the field of financial aid at California State University Northridge for 13 years, retiring in 1979 with faculty emeritus status, seven years after Arthur had died.

Ruth was an unusually accomplished woman. She also had a very generous heart. By1987, she had already established two significant endowments—a chapel/mausoleum in her Canadian hometown and a lectureship at Wittenberg. Because Ruth was the only member of her family with wealth, she made provision in her trust for her many nieces and nephews.

When Ruth offered her mobile home, then stored in Cathedral City, as a down payment on an endowed scholarship in the Neve name, CLU was the fortunate recipient. She had never been on the campus, but the word “Lutheran” in the University’s name was important to her. At that time she hoped to make the Conejo Valley her home. Soon Ruth formed close friendships at CLU that she maintained up to her death in 2011.

Since both Arthur and Ruth had come from a long line of Lutheran scholars, it was only natural for Ruth to design the Arthur and Ruth Neve Scholarship for upper-division and graduate students of Christian faith, with preference to be given to family members of the clergy.