Former Gov. Bob Scott, who served from 1969-73 and who got the legislature to adopt the state's first cigarette tax and who pushed for restructuring of higher education in a move that led to creation of the present UNC system, has died, according to longtime family friend Fred Morrison, who served as Scott's legal counsel. Scott had been in Alamance Hospice for several days after spending time at Alamance Hospital.
Scott was the son of former Gov. Kerr Scott, whose upset victory over establishment Democrats in 1948 had changed North Carolina politics in major ways. The elder Scott, later a U.S. senator, represented the "branchhead boys" -- ordinary folks, farmers and other rural residents who live way up at the heads of branches and creeks and who had to endure muddy dirt roads to try to get their crops to market.
Bob Scott was somewhat more conservative than his father, but still liked to shake up the establishment and seemed to revel in firing darts at those in charge. He attempted to make a political comeback against Gov. Jim Hunt in 1980 and lost badly in the primary, but later became head of the N.C. Community College system and did much to represent that system's interests in the legislature. His later days were not happy ones. His daughter, Meg Scott Phipps, was elected commissioner of agriculture but later went to federal prison for several years in a scandal over campaign contributions. The last years of his life Scott had to use an oxygen mask to help him breathe, surely an annoyance for an active fellow who was used to going where he liked and doing what he wanted to do.
Scott was a lot of fun to cover. He was the first governor I covered after graduating from college -- I still remember the long sideburns he sported shortly after taking office -- and later he chaired the Appalachian Regional Commission in Washington during Jimmy Carter's presidency. Scott liked a good joke and he loved ribbing his friends and his adversaries. Whenever I saw him he'd grin and drawl, "Well, here comes the coarser element."
Friday, January 23, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
and died of....?????
great journalism, HAH
Bob Scott was a good man and a good Governor. I hope Mrs. Perdue can be 1/2 as good at doing her job. On the other hand Mike was sensible in his early tenure but did some dumb things later in his second term. We need more people from North Carolina willing to serve in government without expecting so much from lobbyist and other sources and helping their friends too much.
Anonymous at 9:24: The family has not disclosed a cause of death for Gov. Scott.
Gov. Bob Scott embodied and harmonized two great traditions in Southern politics--traditionalist and progressive. And his love for the people and the places of the Tar Heel State was evident not only in the content of his own official remarks, speeches and appearances as lieutenant governor (1965-1969) and governor (1969-1973) of North Carolina but also in the attitudes demonstrated by his staff members toward the hopes and aspirations of rank-and-file North Carolinians.
Back in the times of the Bob Scott administration in Raleigh, much like what has been written about the era of his father W. Kerr Scott's term as governor (1949-1953), there was less talk about political infighting among influential Capital City political operatives and more news about the devotion of the people working in the state's highest office to the cause of advancing of the interests of the people of North Carolina.
As a rookie reporter for the Durham Morning Herald in the early 1970s I was surprised and perhaps even flabbergasted that an outgoing member of Gov. Scott's administrative staff, former Greensboro Daily News journalist Bob Auman, wished to recommend me for a position on the governor's speechwriting staff--perhaps what we would call today the communications and press office. Just into my second year of full-time newspaper reporting, I felt that I had not yet acquired the necessary experience in and knowledge of public affairs and state government-press relations to assume such a important administrative position in my early 20s.
But to show you what heady days those were indeed, some of us journalistic greenhorns did receive invitations to cover an official dinner at the Governor's Mansion on Raleigh's Blount Street alongside some of the Capital City's veteran political reporters, and I enjoyed the opportunity to see and hear a performance at this event by the U.S. Air Force Strolling Strings. As a violin/fiddle player myself, I felt the urge to sign up right then and there!
But these are just recollections of the fresh and youthful philosophical approach and political style that Bob Scott and his gubernatorial team adopted in Raleigh as a way of moving the state ahead on a vast array of issues and goals from developing and expanding community colleges, reorganizing and unifying the greater University of North Carolina higher educational system and fostering more harmonious race relations in a time when change was a fact of daily life in North Carolina and the South.
To my friends back home in Charlotte, I can say that in those days of Bob Scott's administration, few people in Raleigh seemed to be worried about what part of the state you may have come from originally or perhaps what other state in the Union you may have grown up in but rather what your hopes and indeed ambitions were to make life better for all right here in the Old North State, "where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great."
The youthful and progressive attitudes toward building a better future for all North Carolinians demonstrated by Gov. Scott's team made a great impression on many of us who were just then learning the ways of North Carolina journalism and politics. While we may not have always been able to live up to those highest of standards in matters of press and politics in this state, like Don Quixote perhaps in Cervantes' great classic, even when we take a spill in pursuing "the great quest," we still want to saddle up again and perhaps "try it another way."
So here's to the Scotts and the entire "Branchhead" tradition from which we have learned that even as technology and science continue to advance, there are many natural and fitting ways to "go down by the river" or travel the back roads and byways of North Carolina in the search for the rejuvenation and nurturing of daily living from our smallest towns and rural communities to the largest urban corridors of city life in a Southern state that we are proud to call home.
jordan 2
jordan 3
jordan 4
jordan 5
jordan 19
jordan 20
jordan 21
jordan 22
Post a Comment