La Jolla’s Savvy Philanthropist, 97, Likes to Give Gifts That Keep Giving

She seems hardly able to help herself these days, much less contribute to the general welfare of society.

A small, frail-looking woman, she’s confined to a hospital bed in her La Jolla apartment, where her constant companions are a live-in nurse and a small terrier named Rags. She’s recovering from a broken leg, an injury she sustained last month when she tumbled out of her wheelchair and onto the kitchen floor.

But don’t waste your pity on Florence Seeley Riford. The 97-year-old grande dame of San Diego philanthropy is already hatching a plan to make more money, even from her sickbed.

“I expect to make another million,” Riford said with the nonchalance of someone making change for a dollar. “I’m pretty good at making money.”

Pretty good at giving it away, too.

More Than $10.5 Million

At last count, the La Jolla widow has donated more than $10.5 million since the 1970s to a variety of causes--particularly those benefiting La Jolla and medical research--making her one of the most generous benefactors in San Diego.

One of her favorite recipients is UC San Diego, and last week the university announced that Riford had agreed to donate $1 million to help buy more humanities materials for the school library. The gift brings her largess toward the school to nearly $4 million, making her the leading individual donor to UC San Diego, said John Steinitz, university director of planned giving.

Riford is also the leading donor to the San Diego Community Foundation, a private, nonprofit group with $28 million in assets. Riford has given the foundation $1.8 million for projects including arthritis research, the county animal shelter and transportation for senior citizens in La Jolla.

In 1983, Riford gave a $2-million piece of property on Draper Avenue to the City of San Diego for construction of the new branch library in La Jolla, and now she is hoping to buy the adjacent lot so the branch can have a bigger parking lot.

Other gifts: $1.1 million to the Rotary Club of La Jolla for college scholarships; $1.5 million to the Salvation Army to establish the Florence Riford Senior Club in La Jolla; $550,000 to the county animal shelter; $200,000 to help construct a senior citizen center in Tonganoxie, Kan., her childhood home.

And what else should a millionairess do with her money?

“Should I have a lot of cocktail parties like most of the La Jollans do?” Riford said from her bed last week. “I can’t see myself ever spending money like that because it’s such a waste of doing things. You’re not doing anything to help anybody.

“I want to give it away because I don’t want anyone fighting over my money,” she said. “And I don’t give it to individuals. I give it to large groups. I’m doing a lot of good with my money.”

Now in the twilight of her life, Riford approaches her philanthropy with the same kind of no-nonsense, hard-nosed approach that helped her make the money in the first place.

Her husband, Ira, put together real estate deals for businessmen in Chicago before he retired in 1941 and the couple settled in La Jolla. When he died in the early 1960s, he left his wife about $1 million, Riford said. The couple was childless.

Until then, Riford knew little about finance; content to paint and play golf, she didn’t even know how to write a check, according to a short biography.

Yet she was determined to learn the money game, and she began to study the financial pages in the newspaper to pick up on market trends. She bought real estate, stocks and bonds.

“I loved playing in money because I was very successful in whatever I did,” Riford said. “I would work on certain stocks. Of course, any real estate I would buy I would sell it for three times what I bought it for.

“I would tell them (potential buyers) to take it or leave it. I didn’t play around. They usually would take it. Why, I don’t know. I would always ask for much more than what I would get.”

Over time, Riford said she multiplied her husband’s million six or seven times. Even now, she handles all of her own stock transactions through a discount brokerage. She says she doesn’t listen to professional brokers, mainly because she has lost money whenever she has followed their advice.

Steinitz estimated Riford’s current net worth at roughly $300,000, a figure she hopes to improve greatly by playing the stock market even more. She said she’s eager to recoup her paper losses on the 3,000 shares of Bank of America stock she bought before it dipped in price and the bank stopped paying dividends.

“That’s when I should have bought it,” she said about the slide in the stock. “In fact, what I should do right now is buy another 1,000 shares of B of A.”

Chance Played a Part

While Riford is certainly businesslike, there is a bit of the coincidental in how she has come to be one of San Diego’s most prodigious givers.

For instance, her much-publicized involvement with UC San Diego developed after a chance meeting with a university employee in a second-hand clothing shop several years ago. That eventually led to an introduction to Chancellor Richard Atkinson and her subsequent gifts to the school, Steinitz said.

One of those gifts--a $100,000 donation to the library in the name of Philippines President Corazon Aquino--came after Riford called Steinitz at home one weekend.

“She started the conversation by saying that did I know that Corazon Aquino has never had her nails done?” Steinitz recalled. “I said, ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

“This was at a time when the previous president’s wife, Imelda Marcos, was being taken over the hurdles because of her thousands of pairs of shoes. Mrs. Riford really liked that remark about Aquino’s frugality. That particularly caught her attention, so she wanted to do something to honor her.”

The majority of Riford’s gifts, however, follow the theme of helping senior citizens, improving La Jolla and funding medical research.

She gave UC San Diego $500,000 for a chair in AIDS research and property worth $1 million to fund a chair in the research of Alzheimer’s disease, which her husband died of. The two research chairs were outright gifts.

Steinitz said the $1-million Alzheimer’s donation was instrumental in attracting Dr. Robert Katzman and his research team from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York.

“In one fell swoop, we were really able to assemble a first-rate (Alzheimer’s research) team at UCSD,” Steinitz said.

Although Riford is generous, she is also very strict about how her money is to be handled after she donates it, said Helen Monroe, director of the San Diego Community Foundation.

“She is a very challenging donor because her interests always are to have a check-and-balance system to oversee the gifts that she makes,” Monroe said. “She’s very mindful of people who are not careful of the money that is given to them.”

Most of Riford’s donations are not outright gifts. Instead they are set up in special accounts that pay her interest until she dies. After that, the principal and interest will be turned over to the cause she has designated.

Some of her gifts, however, have been outright--like the research chairs for Alzheimer’s disease and AIDS and the $100,000 van at UC San Diego to conduct research on osteoporosis patients.

Riford said she is particularly proud of the $1.5-million donation she made in the early 1970s to the former Horizon Club and the Salvation Army to establish the Florence Riford Senior Club, at 6811 La Jolla Blvd.

She also likes what the La Jolla Rotary Club has done with her gift of a piece of Pacific Beach property. Instead of selling it, the club has leased the property to create a steady income.

She keeps Rotary’s thank-you note handy as a reminder of the gift.

“When I get depressed or I’m unhappy, I get that letter out and read it about what they have done,” she said. “That always cheers me up because they’ve done very good by it.”