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Community Corner

Alta Dena Founders Talk History, Ponzi Scheme Allegations

Family members of Alta Dena Dairy founder Harold Stueve discuss the company, the move to Diamond Bar, and a recent Ponzi scheme based in the family's old neighborhood that drew investors with a contract to distribute Alta Dena products.

Donna Stueve Clarke remembers her father as a man of "great generosity and extravagant faith." 

For her dad, Harold Stueve, life wasn’t planned: he went wherever he felt the Lord’s finger pointed him. With only an eighth grade education, he believed the Lord pointed him to California.

At first, the workday only being 9-10 hours long bothered the former Missouri farm boy. His brothers assured him “he would get used to it.”

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In the Beginning

Before Harold moved to Diamond Bar as the founder of the Alta Dena Dairy Company, he purchased a truck and a milk delivery route. The plant manager of his supplier for the route wanted him to make phony milk product labels. Harold refused and credited the Lord with that working out so well.  

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Rather than comply, in 1945, he and his brother Edgar founded Alta Dena Dairy with sixty-one cows, two bulls and a milk truck.

In 1951, the company's trademark drive-through debuted. The company called the stores "cash and carries," an idea that Harold was pleased "really took off." When Harold's brother Elmer was out of the service, he became a partner in the venture.

Harold, being one of 18 children, had lots of family willing to help the family enterprise grow. The Monrovia-based Alta Dena Dairy grew to employ 70 family members in the 1960s.  

By 1989, the dairy employed 800 people and the small dairy herd had grown to 18,000 head. Producing 20,000 gallons of certified raw milk daily, Alta Dena products included raw milk and butter, buttermilk, ice cream, kefir and yogurt.

Sold in grocery and health food stores in every state, Alta Dena was the largest producing and distributing dairy in the world when the majority interest sold in 1989 to Zausner Foods, an American subsidiary of Bongrain S.A. of France.

The Stueve Journey to Diamond Bar    

More important to Harold than his business was his family and his church life.

A widower and Monrovia city council member, Harold decided one night in 1967 he would pass on a couples-filled dinner in Long Beach for dinner at a nearby coffee shop. Also dining there was Ruth, a widow, with her 8-year-old daughter, Nancy.  

The child, believing the world is full with future friends, took a shine to Harold, who reciprocated by later asking her mother to dance. Ruth was hesitant, but her daughter accepted the invitation for her. Nancy said she remembers her mom being a “different kind of happy” after the evening ended. A year later, Ruth and Harold married.

As Mayor of Monrovia, Harold blended his and Ruth’s families into his home there. Later, they moved to one of the company dairies in Ontario. By 1977, a son was herdsmen where they were living and needed a place to live, putting Ruth and Harold searching for a home to call their own.

Their first goal was to find something that would be convenient to Costa Mesa — where she worked — and City of Industry — where he worked. Harold had never owned a new home and thought that would be nice. However, "his absolute joy was working with the soil," Ruth said.

Ruth’s wish was "whatever made (Harold) happy."

"It was the 'gold rush'," Ruth said, "with property prices going up every day."

The couple came upon a small Lutheran congregation, which that at the time was meeting in an  school room. The congregation was part of the Missouri Synod, which owned a nearby property with hope it could build a church.

Harold visualized this should not be just a church to serve the community, but also a school.

The thought would turn the lot into the

“This was a drawing point to Diamond Bar," Ruth said, "because (Harold) saw the opportunity to do God’s work."

Ruth and Harold bought a modest one-story home with a backyard view overlooking verdant hillsides. The day they closed escrow, the Stueves were offered more than their purchase price.

He planted 55 fruit trees that Ruth nostalgically calls their "forest." Until shortly before Harold's death in 2006, if there was daylight and Harold was not at work, he was in the garden.

On The Ponzi Scheme

A school in the Stueve's former neck of the woods recently made headlines after  scheme that drew in around $14 million and over 45 "investors."

L.A. County Sheriff's investigators said that the trio claimed to have an exclusive contract with Disney resorts and other businesses to distribute Alta Dena Dairy products. Ruth said she would not have bought the story.

“I would ask is about how they obtained a contract to sell Alta Dena products. I would want the names of company contacts," Ruth said. "I would engage them in conversation in history and be extremely interested in how they were chosen, as Alta Dena has its own sales force.”

Ruth also said that Alta Dena is a different company than when the Stueve family owned it, and she was surprised that the scheme had run for two years without further questions from investors.

“If the women came to me (as a potential investor), this all would have been over a long time ago,” Ruth said.

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