Paul and Edith Knief Memorial Scholarship
How many different ways are there to fund a scholarship? The answer is many—and Edith Knief used a number of them in her lifetime to create the scholarship that bears her name.
As lifelong Lutherans, Paul and Edith Knief were two of Cal Lutheran’s earliest supporters. In fact, they became Founding Fellows in 1959, the year that CLC was incorporated. Only those who committed future support to the college were given that status.
Paul was born in Milwaukee and attended the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. In 1923 he and his family moved to Santa Monica, before he was able to complete his degree. In California that Paul went to work for the Santa Monica Outlook where he worked for 40 years. He spent weekends moonlighting as a West Side weekend reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Paul was not able to complete his college work since the family was supporting his sister Gretchen at UCLA. She completed graduate studies and ultimately became a prominent county and state librarian. It was not unusual during those Depression years for families to make such hard choices.
Edith was also born in Milwaukee. In fact, her family’s home and Paul’s were just a few blocks apart, but the couple did not meet until much later. Edith graduated from the University of Wisconsin and taught school for several years before her marriage to Paul in 1933. They had three daughters—Doris, Erica and Mary. Edith was an insatiable reader but also spent many hours doing volunteer work. In 1953 the city of Santa Monica recognized her work by naming her Woman of the Year. She was also extremely active in church activities in Santa Monica and later in Santa Barbara.
Paul passed away in 1970 following 37 years as Edith’s husband. Edith spent the next 33 years of her life as a widow. Her energy and her faith did not allow her to be idle. Early in 1989, having decided to create a scholarship in Paul’s memory, she sold some stock in order to purchase a gift annuity to fund the scholarship upon her death. However, the idea of helping students immediately nagged at her. And so, in 1991, when she learned that Paul’s sister Gretchen had left her a share of a farm in Alabama, she knew she had found a way to make the scholarship happen more quickly.Following Edith’s death in 2003, her daughters requested that her name be joined with Paul’s on the scholarship. Since she had been a lifelong lover of the humanities, the Paul and Edith Knief Memorial Scholarship is now awarded to a student majoring in one of the humanities. As Edith found, there are indeed many ways to fund a scholarship if the intention is a strong one.