140 UtTauH INTERNATIONAL: A BIOGRAPHY OF A BUSINESS property, giving commuters access to downtown San Francisco in twenty-five minutes. Almost twenty-eight hundred acres of the ranch transformed into residential development by 1970, when Utah sold its remaining property to another developer. In the end, the Moraga venture proved one of Utah’s most profitable land investments, producing a gross profit in excess of $12 million in little more than a decade. In 1959, Utah purchased 1,450 acres in Pauma Valley near the foot of Mount Palomar, home of what was then America’s largest telescope. Located in the heartland of California’s citrus and avocado industries, Pauma Valley already had a well-known golf course that featured “challenge” matches among such respected golfers as Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and Jack Nicklaus. Palmer had listed the course as among the top five in the world. When completed, the development also featured an equestrian complex— appropriate inasmuch as John Wayne had once owned a ranch house on the property. Year-round perfect weather combined to round out what was perhaps Utah Construction’s most beautiful land development. The company’s board of directors enjoyed Pauma Valley enormously, so they consistently scheduled board meetings there and also celebrated Marriner Eccles’s seventy-eighth birthday there. When the developers of the golf course pushed to open it to the public, Utah purchased it to maintain it as a private course for the original home buyers. The company also constructed a 2,700-foot private airstrip that further emphasized the community’s exclusivity. For all its attractiveness, however, Pauma was not a financial success. While the company’s land development interests were still expanding in the early 1960s, Utah began the construction and development of high-rise apartments for the elderly, providing food, shelter, recreation, and medical services under one roof. usually became nonprofit corporations Church-sponsored, subsequent owners and operators. Canterbury Woods in Pacific Grove, California, was the first such project, built on land bequeathed to the Episcopal Church. Its then distinctive design combined the privacy of separate cottages and apartments with the convenience of central dining facilities. “It is the kindliest human environment I have ever experienced,” said one resident. Utah’s