Alberta Iliff Shattuck is mannerly and dignified — prim even — yet this 100-year-old scion of a fabled Colorado family is an unconventional woman.
Her family, which founded the nationally respected Iliff School of Theology in 1892 and is credited with giving a big hand to the University of Denver, was generous with its wealth when it had it.
The Iliffs also knew hard times.
This month, though, the family has cause for a special celebration, with Shattuck’s personal century mark reached Tuesday and an open house in her honor planned for Dec. 5.
Shattuck is modest about her family, describing it as “interesting,” yet it is the kind of family whose castoff clothes and old tea sets are museum pieces, and their former homes are the museums.
“Alberta takes the family legacy seriously, and it comes with a certain weight, but she has always carried it with grace,” said her 66-year-old niece, Suzy Iliff Witzler, the last of the Denver Iliffs.
“I adore her,” Witzler said of Shattuck. “I’ve never heard her say a mean word about anybody.”
Shattuck comes from the kind of pioneer stock that won, if not owned, the West.
Gold rush granddad
Her grandfather, John Wesley Iliff Sr., left a prosperous family farm in Ohio and joined the 1859 gold rush to Denver. But he didn’t mine. He sold supplies to miners.
The cattle herds he started in 1861 made enough money for him to buy a hundred miles of land along the South Platte River from Julesberg to Greeley. He opened the first bank in Cheyenne.
Alberta’s father, William Seward Iliff Sr., was the only son of John and his first wife, Sarah, who died two months after William’s birth in 1865.
William and his father’s second wife, Elizabeth Fraser Iliff Warren, would fulfill his father’s dream of establishing a training school for ministers in the Rocky Mountains when they co-founded the Iliff School of Theology.
Shattuck, nicknamed “Shorty” by her two older brothers, was a pioneer in her own right. She had hoped to attend medical school at the University of Colorado at a time when women physicians were unusual. However, the Great Depression dented her family’s fortunes at the wrong time as far as her graduate education was concerned.
“My father was what today would be called an entrepreneur,” Shattuck said. “There were times when he was very affluent, and times when he wasn’t. My parents couldn’t help me, and I wanted to be independent anyway.”
Medical school job
She nevertheless persevered in science, taking a job at the medical school’s Child Research Council. She was given the title of assistant professor in biochemistry and she taught freshman medical students, which enabled her to take classes without paying tuition.
In 1942 she received her doctorate with a dissertation titled, “A Study of the Effect of Altitude on Certain Physiological Functions of Human Subjects.”
She was an avid sportswoman, playing golf and tennis, skiing, hiking and more.
After earning her doctorate, she continued work at the Child Research Council, conducting metabolic tests for a massive research project investigating a suspected connection between asthma and tuberculosis.
“It was proved quite wrong,” she said.
She married in 1959 when almost 50. She wed Dr. Robert C. Shattuck and adopted his two grown sons.
“I’d known him all my life,” she said. “He was the older brother of my two very good childhood friends.”
As devout Methodists, she said, she and Robert shared the same values and a calm enjoyment of life.
“He never once raised his voice to me,” she said. “He did tease me.”
And so her only regret, not becoming a doctor, turned into the lasting joy of her life.
“I never would have married my husband if I had gone on to medical school,” she said. “I’d have had a very empty life if I hadn’t married him. It was a very happy marriage.”
Robert passed away in 1996. Although she lost her sight a decade ago and resides at the Aspen Siesta nursing-care home, Shattuck is still an Iliff trustee emeritus. She attended Iliff board meetings well into her 90s.
“She was always very engaged,” said Iliff spokeswoman Greta Gloven. “She was very pragmatic. She always had wonderful opinions.”
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
