“The University of Utah adopted me.” At 95-years-young, Alice Telford vividly recalls when her friendship with the U began. It was in 1992, two years after moving to Salt Lake City from her hometown of Kaysville. A friend who worked at the U in business development at the time began inviting her to luncheons and lectures. Over the next decade, this gregarious retiree attended as many lectures as she could that related to health.
“I don’t know where I’d be without the University. I’ve learned so much and have made lifelong friendships,” says Alice, who also credits the U with her favorable vision. She was diagnosed in 1998 with macular degeneration. The doctor prescribed I-Caps and the appropriate nutrition that would help keep her eyes in the dry state. In 2018, the eye doctor prescribed AREDS, soft gel and Alice’s vision has improved. She can now read the newspaper and books without glasses. It has been 31 years since her diagnosis and due to the great doctors at the Moran Eye Center, her eyesight has improved. “Lucky me!” she exclaimed.
Alice was never short of friends and was always up for an educational adventure. Her love of fitness and health grew from a youth spent riding horseback, biking, hiking, ice skating, and fishing. Just out of high school, Alice was a riveter in World War II for six months before returning to school at Utah State University, where she jokingly refers to meeting and marrying her husband, “That’s where I got my M.R.S. degree.” Later she tragically lost her husband to rheumatic fever and her son in the Vietnam War.
Just like riding her childhood bike, Alice maintained balance and resisted against a strong headwind. This dynamo left a poor-paying secretarial job for entrepreneurship. “I got into real estate to occupy my time and to prepare for my retirement,” she says. She became a voracious reader of Forbes, Fortune, and Wall Street Journal in order to study interest rates. “My dad had 30 acres of farmland that I saw potential in,” Alice recalls. By partnering with an experienced land surveyor (who fortunately was male, because in the 1970’s women couldn’t take out construction loans alone), 94 homes were built on those 30 acres.
Once she moved to Salt Lake City in the nineties, Alice joined many women’s professional groups, including the Utah Association of Women Business and Zonta, an international service organization with the mission of advancing the status of women. “I was interested in what these women did for professions and how they dressed,” Alice says. “I still have friends today from Zonta.”
Alice joined the Bonneville Cycling Club. Years before as a novice realtor, she took to riding her bike around her subdivision to catch potential buyers who didn’t stop by her model home to chat. “We traveled all over: Utah, Canada, California, Colorado, Siberia, Russia, twice to China and the San Juan and Gulf Islands,” Alice says. “On one of my trips to the San Juan Islands, I asked a new friend where she was from and she said Lewiston, Utah. I told her my husband and I had our courting days in the farmlands and use to go target shooting there, and I always wanted to go back there and bike. My friend said, “Let’s do it.”
The duo met the following season to ride the Lewiston countryside. “While we biked that day, we discussed an all-women bike ride. We were inspired by the Cinderella ride in California. It took a year to put together and we recruited all the husbands to SAG (support and gear) it,” Alice says.
In 1988, the Little Red Riding Hood bike ride was born with twenty women in attendance. This year, 3,905 women riders participated in Little Red and raised approximately $150,000.00 for the Huntsman Cancer Foundation Research. Alice’s charitable acts do not end there though.
Today, sketches and oil paintings of Kaysville, Morgan, and Huntsville landscapes line the walls of Telford’s downtown apartment, painted by her Uncle LeConte Stewart and other local artists. “The biggest majority of my paintings reflect on the early years of my life, riding my horse all over that area, the pond where we fished and ice skated in the winter, and the barn yards and the thrashing machines have fond ties to my life. My good friend Tony Rasmussen told me that because the Utah landscape has changed so much, these paintings reveal the history of what Utah used to look like,” she shared.
The proceeds for the sale of the art will be in the form of scholarships. The scholarships will benefit veterans, single mothers, and any U.S. citizens studying in the College of Health and various University departments.