Signora O. Peterson Award

The Signora O. Peterson Award was one of CLC’s earliest awards. It was funded as a tribute to a gracious lady, Signora Peterson, the mother of Virginia Gangsei, the wife of Dr. Lyle Gangsei, the Academic Dean of California Lutheran College at that time. The fund was established in 1963 with memorial gifts received in honor of Mrs. Peterson’s death.

Initially, the award was to be given at the end of the school year to a high-achieving student planning to attend a Lutheran seminary. The procedure for selecting the recipient was clarified in 1965 and further clarified in 1986, with the criterion was added that the recipient was to be enrolled in one of the seminaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The recipient was to be selected by the faculty of the religion department.

The early Peterson awards were very small because the endowment fund was small. In 1995, Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in San Mateo provided a gift that nearly doubled the size of the endowment as well as the actual award. The pastor of this church was Philip Gangsei, Lyle and Virginia’s son. By this time, the presentation of the award each year was made toward the end of the spring semester. With the help of sound investments, the corpus of the fund eventually reached the new minimum required for endowment.

As time passed the University added several prestigious awards to its list. Most of them, including the Signora O. Peterson Award, are presented to recipients in the spring. The criteria for the Peterson Award remain the same, and the award still pays tribute to the memory of a gracious Christian lady.