Colleges: What a Way to go

For most money-shy college students, the height of gracious living consists of an off-campus pad furnished in Salvation Army modern. For a select group of Los Angeles-area students who are working their way through school, gracious living is a Tudor-styled mansion with 13 bathrooms, tennis courts, grotto, swimming pool, and five acres of grounds landscaped with large and small waterfalls and a lagoon.

The spread belongs to Engineer Jack Ryan, 37, design consultant for Mattel, Inc., Los Angeles toy manufacturers, who lives with his wife and two daughters in a house he cannot afford to maintain. It is Actor Warner Baxter’s old estate on a hilltop in Bel Air. For keeping the place in running order, between eight and twelve are privileged to call it home.

Ryan picks his staff with the care of a college admissions officer. Applicants submit a thesis on what skills they can contribute and take an aptitude test (two out of three fail). In exchange for sharing half of a three-room suite, each student puts in twelve hours a week on such jobs as washing windows, making minor repairs, and tuning up Ryan’s fleet of five cars and a truck. Estate employees rank in the top 10% of their academic class. Currently they include Mounir Khoury from Jordan, a former professional chef now a pre-med student at San Fernando Valley State College; Allen Shores, a public administration major at U.C.L.A. who plans five parties a month for the Ryans; Roger Bengtson, a U.C.L.A. history student whose hobby is landscape architecture. A botany student once catalogued the trees and plants on the property.

Biggest job belongs to Robert Baldwin, a Whittier College physics major, who looks after Owner Ryan’s private network of 77 telephone stations, modeled after the internal exchange on a Navy ship. Combinations of 220 phone numbers will light up the pools, tennis courts, caves, fountains and trees; they will open and close doors, start up the waterfalls, greet a guest with a recorded message or serenade a caller with music to wait by. On a thickly wooded trail, the phone sounds with natural bird calls instead of the usual noisy ring.

The estate manager is Nick Gutsue, a sales administration student at Woodbury College who was among the first group of Ryan’s undergraduates more than two years ago. Gutsue may get his degree next June, but having grown accustomed to the style of life as a happy hired hand, he intends to stay on permanently.