Education: New Colleges

George Pepperdine, a restless $15-a-week bookkeeper in a Kansas City (Kans.) garage, entered the auto supply business in 1909 with nothing to his name but $5 worth of stamps and a printing bill. Tirelessly circularizing small-town bankers and car owners, George Pepperdine sold that year $12,000 worth of tops, tires, gadgets. Five years later he opened a branch of his thriving Western Auto Supply Co. in Denver. When rich Mr. Pepperdine sold his controlling interest and retired to California, he became so twitchy that he started a new Western Auto Supply Co. on the Pacific Coast, which now has more stores (over 200) than the original company. Familiar to most coast motorists is Western’s emblem, “Saving Sam,” a model of which stands as a mascot on the Pepperdine desk. Together Mr. Pepperdine’s twin creations sold $35,000,000 worth of automobile equipment last year, but Mr. Pepperdine at 50 is as restless as ever.

Last week George Pepperdine was bubbling with plans for a new enterprise to be called George Pepperdine College. He has 34 acres of land on Los Angeles’ flat south side, plans for ten buildings, of which four, low and glass-sided, will be up and ready for use this autumn. Architect John M. Cooper last week filed with Los Angeles authorities plans and specifications for the first, an $85,000 administration centre. Quietly directing operations from an office in Los Angeles’ Chamber of Commerce Building, Mr. Pepperdine has already lined up a president, Batsell Baxter of Tennessee’s David Lipscomb College, a faculty recruited from Duke, University of Colorado, University of California, University of Oklahoma and several small southern schools. Pious Founder Pepperdine is a.pillar of the Church of Christ and his teachers were selected partially “for their devotion to Christian ideals and fundamental faith.”

George Pepperdine College will open Sept. 20 as a four-year, co-educational liberal arts school with a $1,000,000 endowment, of which Mr. Pepperdine and National Cash Register’s Clarence Shattuck will be among the chief trustees. As his college grows, Mr. Pepperdine plans to assign it further income from his approximately six-year-old George Pepperdine Foundation, a philanthropic corporation which holds an unspecified amount of securities and California real estate, including Hollywood’s swank Ravenswood Apartments where Mae West is a tenant.

Said Founder Pepperdine, who reluctantly admits that he never reached high school: ”I believe the greatest contribution I can possibly make to the coming generation is to establish and endow an institution of higher learning where Christian living . . . is stressed.”

Queens. Scheduled to open in September for 400 students is co-educational Queens College, the fourth of New York City’s teeming municipal centres of higher learning: City College, Hunter College, Brooklyn College. Last fortnight Scripps-Howard’s liberal Financial Pundit John Thomas Flynn, as chairman of a committee of the Board of Higher Education to get Queens College started, announced that his committee had picked a president. He was round-faced, Rumanian born Dr. Paul Klapper, 51, dean of the School of Education at City College. President-elect Klapper’s salary will be raised from $11,000 to $15,000.