Two years ago, Star City Mayor Herman Reid told Alice Frost her money was no good here.
“But I wanted to pay them,” she said. “They did such a lovely job.”
She was talking about the wooden bench at Star City Riverfront Park the town built and placed, free of charge, in her husband’s honor after he died in 2016.
Dr. James Frost — who answered to “Jack,” his obvious, twinkling nickname — worked out of Morgantown as the medical examiner for northern West Virginia.
Jack Frost, over the years, had formed lasting friendships with several law enforcement officers across the region in the course of his work.
That’s how he got to know Reid, who wore a badge before he picked up the gavel as Star City mayor.
The town put a plaque with Jack’s name on that bench, but the honor belonged just as much to Alice Frost, too, the mayor said then.
That’s because Alice, who died Saturday at the age of 84 at the Sundale rehab and long-term care facility, was a tireless volunteer and activist in the community.
Her complete obituary appears on Page A-9.
Educator, champion
When the self-effacing Brit wasn’t teaching classical languages at WVU, she was volunteering for the Sierra Club, Meals on Wheels and the Girl Scouts, the empowerment organization that was especially dear to her.
“Mrs. Frost was life-changing to me,” Amy Cyphert said. “She was amazing.”
Cyphert now lectures at the WVU College of Law and directs the university’s ASPIRE office, which assists students pursuing competitive scholarships and fellowships.
Before that, she was a Morgantown kid and Girl Scout enthralled by the energy and rich, British accent of Alice Frost, her troop leader.
“She championed all of us,” said Cyphert, a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School who was a senior associate at a New York City law firm before returning to her hometown to raise a family.
Jack and Alice Frost happily made Morgantown their adopted hometown when they moved here from Baltimore in 1977.
Alice was a citizen of the world and shaped by war before that.
She was born Aug. 24, 1935, in Kent County, England, four years before the Third Reich began casting large shadows over her country.
Her father was a British military officer who trundled his daughter off to a boarding school well away from the blitzkrieg bombing at the height of World War II.
After the war, she grew up on military posts in Iraq and Italy.
Lunch, and Brexit
She took an opportunity to live and work in the U.S. after graduating from the University of London, Bedford College, in 1957.
Frost was teaching at a private school in Baltimore when she met the man who would become her husband.
Jack Frost, who grew up in the Maryland city, held degrees from Princeton and Johns Hopkins.
The couple courted, got engaged and went to England — for their wedding and so Jack could finish his medical tour in the U.S. Air Force.
Cyphert made her first trip out of the U.S. because of Frost, who led a delegation of scouts to Geneva and London.
All part of the evolution, as Alice Frost told The Dominion Post in a 2004 story.
“You see these young ladies in middle school, and they’re a little shy and insecure,” she said then.
“Then, they get into scouting and they develop into remarkable, interesting people.”
Cyphert, meanwhile, said she’ll miss her friend and mentor, whom she visited last a couple of months ago.
“We had lunch at her house. We were talking about Brexit. She was as engaged as ever.”
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