Los Angeles Times
July 22 2005

Cal State Northridge Gets $7.3-Million Gift

The bequest, the university’s largest cash donation, came from a
couple who became wealthy buying, fixing and selling homes.

By Andrew Wang, Times Staff Writer

A retired art teacher and her husband, a former phone company
technician, left Cal State Northridge $7.3 million for scholarships,
the largest cash gift in the university’s history, school officials
announced this week.

Mary Bayramian, who died in 2001, graduated from the school in 1963,
when it was San Fernando Valley State College. After retirement, she
and her husband, Jack, who died in January, successfully invested in
real estate.

“They lived the American dream,” Don Barsumian, one of the Bayramians’
nephews and the trustee of their estate, said of his aunt and uncle,
both children of Armenian immigrants who fled Turkey in the early
20th century to escape persecution.

“Hard work, integrity, saving and investing,” he added. “You know in
books how they talk about how to get from here to there? They did it.”

Cal State Northridge President Jolene Koester said the donation from
the Bayramians’ estate “was just a very wonderful recognition for us
of the strength of Cal State Northridge and what we mean to people
who attended the university. It will help us attract top students, but
it also will help us support the excellent students we already have.”

The Cal State board of trustees voted unanimously Wednesday to name
Northridge’s student services building after the couple.

Their cash donation surpasses the $7 million given by Disney Chief
Executive Michael Eisner in 2002, though it wasn’t the largest donation
the university has received. In 2003, businessman Roland Tseng, who
briefly attended the school in the 1970s, pledged to donate Chinese
antiquities valued at $38 million.

Barsumian described his aunt as a “World War II wife” who had survived
the lean times of the Depression as a child, married young and settled
with her husband in the San Fernando Valley, first in Reseda and later
in Northridge, near the Cal State campus. The couple had one son,
Ronald, who died in 1998.

Attending college “was an opportunity for her,” Barsumian said. Mary
Bayramian enrolled at San Fernando Valley State College in 1960.
After graduating, Bayramian taught art at San Fernando High School,
where she was known by students as “Mrs. B” until she retired in 1970.

Jack Bayramian was a World War II naval veteran and worked as a vacuum
cleaner salesman and electrician after the war. He later worked as
a technician for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph.

The Bayramians moved in 1971 to Laguna Beach, where they lived for
the next 30 years, buying, renovating and selling homes.

“My uncle, he was a very handy kind of a guy, and he did carpeting and
electric work,” Barsumian, 71, said. “Mary was an artistic person, so
she would do the interiors and decorating…. They’d fix [homes] up and
resell them and move on to another one and another one and another one.

“They did quite well in their retirement.”

The Bayramians are survived by five grandchildren and several
great-grandchildren.

University spokesman John Chandler said the endowment will establish
the Bayramian Family Scholarship Fund. The earnings from $5 million of
the fund will support the newly named Bayramian Presidential Scholar
awards, merit-based scholarships of $5,000 for high-achieving students,
he said.

Earnings from the remaining $2.3 million will fund the Mary Bayramian
Arts Scholars program.