Donna Ford Attallah’s Long Beach home is a place of warmth and respite—and angels. Thousands of angels.
Figurines adorn every surface, artfully arranged in glass display cases. Their tranquil gazes, from paintings and sculptures, fix on visitors.
No two are alike, and what’s more, they’re tangible symbols of how the former elementary school teacher, beloved wife, real estate mogul and Chapman University benefactor, lives her life. It’s about giving to others with a pure heart and creating a lasting impact.
The philosophy was forged with her late husband, Fahmy Attallah and stated perhaps best in a poem he wrote for her on the occasion of their 36th wedding anniversary, titled “Hand and Heart,” which read in part:
The one hand
In my hand
Is yours
My Angel Heart.
We enhance our beings.
We help others.
We serve good causes.
We uplift souls and hearts like ours.
My Angel Heart.
Decades of Devotion
Donna Attallah, a 1961 graduate, is also a Chapman University angel. In August, “The Angel” touched the school again with a $10 million legacy gift to the College of Educational Studies.
“This gift will endow the college,” said Assistant Vice President for Legacy Planning David Moore. “Those funds become an annual operating enhancement fund to really support the success and growth of the program.”
In appreciation, Chapman is renaming the college after Attallah. “There are very few colleges of education studies named throughout the nation,” Moore said. “For us to have our college of education studies named for a teacher—a local teacher, from a Cypress school—is really special.”
The $10 million gift, ranked No. 7 on this week’s list of the largest charitable gifts made in Orange County last year, is the latest in decades of generosity.
Past gifts include the Donna Ford and Fahmy Attallah Ph.D.; the Library of Arts and Humanities in Leatherby Libraries; endowment of the Donna Ford Attallah Teaching Academy, the Fahmy Attallah Ph.D. and Donna Attallah Chair in Humanistic Psychology; an endowed chair of Church Relations; and an endowed professorship at the College of Educational Studies. In addition, every year since 2010, she has given the school $50,000 in unrestricted funds and will continue to do so, she said. She’s also served on Chapman’s board of directors for the past nine years.
Perhaps the most special gift to Donna is the Fahmy Attallah Ph.D. piazza in the middle of the campus, dedicated in 2008 to her husband’s memory. It includes an amphitheater and open-air stage with a state-of-the-art sound system. Its centerpiece is a four-pillar fountain, each pillar inscribed with lines from his poetry book “Beauty of Being.”
“Donna is such a special person to Chapman, it just makes perfect sense to name the College of Educational Studies after her, an alumna and longtime teacher,” said Chapman President Daniele Struppa at an August event announcing the naming of the college. “She loves the students, the classroom, and teaching; her nurturing demeanor, patience for learning, and sense of humor are her special blend she brings to the teaching profession and to her friendship to Chapman.”
Donna
Attallah grew up in Victorville, Calif., daughter of a teacher and railroad engineer. Though money was never plentiful, she said, her parents always found enough to donate to the First Christian Church, where her father was a deacon. He also donated his time as the church’s all-around handy man, repairing this and that, and at one point donating and installing a heating system at the church.
“My parents were always just there, helping out wherever they were needed,” Attallah recalled.
It was little surprise that the young Attallah decided to pursue teaching as a profession: Not only was her mother a teacher, but both her grandparents and an aunt were, too.
“It was in the genes,” she said with a laugh.
The summer after high school, she met a group of young students from Chapman College—it became a university in 1991—at a youth camp in Idyllwild. “I was really impressed. They were really wonderful people. Nice, they had good ethics.” Plus, to her delight, she learned that Chapman was affiliated with The Disciples of Christ, a denomination of the Christian Church.
Attallah fit right in at Chapman. “I was treated like a real person,” she says. “I wasn’t just one person among many. The professors got to know me, took a personal interest. They really cared about me.”
After college, she began teaching at an elementary school in Cypress, taking on her first class of kindergartners in 1961. She was there for 40 years. “I spent the first 19 years teaching kindergarten,” she says. “I loved it. Then they moved me to teach first grade, where I spent the next 21 years.”
Fahmy
On the other side of the world, Fahmy was in the midst of reshaping his life. A competitive swimmer who’d represented Egypt in the 1948 Olympics, he worked for the Egyptian government in London. Also a writer and poet, he published a book in Arabic, “My Days.” But he wanted a change.
He’d always been interested in psychology. But he didn’t want to stay in London; he was a “sun-worshiper,” Donna said. In the mid-1950s, he moved to Southern California, a place he’d only seen in the movies. He arrived with $18 and ambition to improve. He was in his early 40s and starting over.
$5,000 Down
Attallah met her husband the year she started teaching. By then, he was a noted school psychologist working in the same school district. He’d attended the University of Southern California on a full scholarship. Despite the 30-year difference in age, the lifelong bachelor was smitten, and the two married within a year.
Rather than go on an extended honeymoon, they decided to invest Fahmy’s $5,000 savings on a down payment on a $50,000 five-unit apartment building in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach in need of sprucing up. Today, prices for four- and six-unit buildings in Belmont Shore range from about $1.5 million to $5 million.
“Fahmy wasn’t handy at all,” Attallah says with a chuckle. “I did the maintenance on all the apartments.”
They lived in one unit and rented out the others. Eventually, they bought another apartment building, then another, and within the space of several decades had sizable holdings in residential real estate, including buildings in Belmont Shore and other parts of Los Angeles County.
In the early 1990s, the couple decided to sell one holding, a 1920s former hotel in L.A. that had been converted into an 86-unit apartment building. The value had exploded during the three decades they’d owned it, and they sold the building for $4.3 million. “We were really able to ramp up our giving then,” she said.
Angels Multiply
Donna and Fahmy were married 43 years before he died at 96. He was a leader in his profession as a psychologist. He wrote several more books, and Donna thrived in her teaching, earning recognitions and awards over the decades.
At some point during those years, she began collecting angels. Attallah estimates she had 2,000 by the early 2000s. After Fahmy died in 2005, she went through a period where she haunted the online auction site eBay at all hours, bidding on nearly every angel she saw. She now puts her collection at around 5,000.
“Perhaps it was a way to help fill the hole left behind with Fahmy’s death. As time has passed, I no longer do that. Now I just enjoy my collections.”
And now she’s sharing her angels. Several treasured figures are displayed in the Donna Ford and Fahmy Attallah Ph.D. Library of Arts and Humanities, including a hand-carved wooden one, a gourd figure with emu feathers, and “Guardian Angel,” a leaded stained-glass sculpture.
“Remember Angel” has a special place in her heart. Designed by exercise celebrity-turned-artist Richard Simmons, it strongly resembles Fahmy, she says. As he wrote:
Decades and decades I longed
Serenely for the Hand
Craved calmly for the pure heart
Like yours, my Angel Heart
Then Providence sent you
From the paradise of angels—
The most glorious gift
Of all His gifts to me.”
