Harold Sunde Memorial Scholarship

The first contact with the Sunde family came in the form of a telephone call from Palm Desert. While Harold and Chleoma Sunde had lived in Thousand Oaks in the early 1960s the couple had had no interaction with the college up until the phone call. The campus had grown but in the meantime, Harold had retired from his position as an engineer in research with Lockheed Martin. At his retirement the couple had moved to Palm Desert. Their peaceful retirement was interrupted by Harold’s death, and suddenly Chleoma found herself a widow.

The Sundes had created an estate plan together, but after Harold’s death Chleoma decided she would like to establish a scholarship in his memory. Although she was a Methodist and Harold had been a Lutheran, it seemed only natural and right to have his memorial be at a Lutheran institution. A Palm Desert friend suggested that she contact Kenneth Siegele, who worked at CLC in estate planning, who might be of help in her decision-making. And so she made that phone call in December 1983, a call that marked the beginning of a great friendship.

Chleoma Sunde was a woman of action. By the following spring, she had made her first gift of $5,000 to CLC establishing the endowed scholarship. Two months later she changed her estate plan for the purpose of building that endowment. Her connection with CLC also gave her an additional focus for her charity. She owned a fairly valuable violin which she had appraised and repaired before donating it to the university’s music department. She also had a creative side which she expressed through needlepoint and quilting, donating many of her creations to appropriate charities. One of her final steps was to name CLU as the executor of her will, an act that resulted in considerable additional funding for the Harold Sunde Memorial Scholarship.

Recipients of the Harold Sunde Memorial Scholarship are to have declared an interest in pursuing pre-engineering, computer science or higher mathematics and may be either undergraduate or graduate students. They also must rank in the top 25 percent of their class.