Rural childhood holds more influence than father's political career
Although he was the son of former North Carolina governor W. Kerr Scott, Robert W. Scott never anticipated a career in politics, he says in this passage, in which he describes his rural background. As a child, he learned values from his closely knit, churchgoing community, an inward-looking place that did not necessarily prepare him for the political arena, but did prepare him for a rewarding personal life.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Robert W. (Bob) Scott, February 4, 1998. Interview C-0336-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
Governor Scott, I want to begin with some questions about your early
political interest and development. When did you begin thinking about a
career in politics?
- ROBERT W. (BOB) SCOTT:
-
I don't know that I ever thought about a career in politics;
it just happened. At this point of time when we are discussing,
I'm approaching my sixty-ninth birthday, and in reflection
I've actually had four careers. The one that I was formally
trained for at NC State University, in animal science—I grew
up on the farm and returned to the farm, and my job was to manage the
farm. My father, who was living at the time, made the comment to me that
one politician in the family was enough and he would take care of that
and my job was to run the family business, and what that meant in those
days was farming.
So the career in agriculture, and then the career in politics. We can
talk about that a little later. And then, of course, like most folks, I
had a period of time in the military, but that wasn't a
career—I considered that, at one time. Then the career I
guess on the periphery of politics—that is to say not running
for and holding public office but being involved in governmental work.
In this particular case it was the Department of Community Colleges, the
community college system, where I worked for twelve years. I guess that
was a career of education and administration. And then the fourth career
I guess I'm in now, which is doing a little bit of everything
and just trying to enjoy life and make some contribution and get at a
less pace.
So, I mean, I never set out with the goal of having a career in politics,
or to hold public office, or any of that stuff. I was always active in a
political sense, even in high school and in college, being involved in
student government activities, whatever's going on. But not
with the idea of having a career track of any sort.
I grew up, of course, in a rural community that was very typical of
Piedmont North Carolina. My mother and father—my father was
acting politically, my mother was his helpmate, she was a very quiet,
diminutive type of woman, very supportive of my father, but really
didn't care for the public eye that much. So I grew up in a
rural environment, agriculturally oriented. I'm a
Presbyterian by faith—I didn't know there was any
other denomination until I was old enough
[unclear] , because the Presbyterian Church was the center of
our activities in this little rural community. I
went for my first grade to the little community school, and that was the
last time that that school operated. The first round of consolidations
was back in the 1930s, so the little community school where we had seven
grades in three rooms, that was consolidated into a larger community
school, with several other rural communities. And the church and the
community are very old, historically. I had an aunt, who I just barely
remember, but she remembered seeing troops, both Union and Confederate
troops, going up and down the road in the community. This community was
in the route from Hillsborough to Gilford Courthouse during the
Revolution. The church was established about 1755, and our family have
been members here, for all of that time. So our roots are very deep
here. And later on in life as I had opportunities, maybe, to better
myself, if you will, financially and in other areas, I never seriously
considered it, because this is my home, and I understood my little pond
here and I didn't really care to get out and swim in the
ocean.
- JACK FLEER:
-
What is it about the values of this sort of rural environment and rural
community that you think appealed to you, that caused you to want to
stay there initially and in fact for the rest of your life?
- ROBERT W. (BOB) SCOTT:
-
Well, the values—there's no question about it, the
rural environment here and the influence of the church and the rural
community school where everybody knew everybody—that had some
intricate impact upon me and my decision-making in later years in public
office. As I said in my inaugural address, in the
closing comments of my inaugural address in 1969, that I wanted to serve
in the office of governor—this is not an exact
quote—that I wanted to serve in the office of governor in a
manner that would reflect credit upon my parents, my family, my church,
and my community. I did not want to disappoint them and the values that
were instilled—and included in that, I think, were my
teachers at the school. I didn't want to do anything that
would lessen their expectations of me. I knew what those expectations
were and I wanted to meet those expectations. And I knew those
expectations included a set of values and ethics.
So it did have a great influence on me and I can talk at length about my
church activities growing up and the rural community school and the
closeness we had. Even when I entered the first grade, when we moved to
the so-called consolidated school, known as Alexander Wilson School,
located on Highway 54—it's still there, although
it's only an elementary school now. There were only
twenty-nine in our graduating class, and there were twenty girls and
nine boys, and we boys loved that. Practically all of
us—having only nine boys who were seniors, and old enough to
drive a school bus, we all were driving school buses. If we had any kind
of athletic team at all, everybody got to play, because we just
didn't have that many people. Everybody was in the school
play.
So it was a close-knit community of people, and that, too, had its impact
on me. I think the community of Hall Fields, white Anglo-Saxon
Protestant—yes, we had minorities, African-Americans working
here, obviously we had them in our farm here, but it
was still a very close-knit community. And if someone is interested in
writing about anything in my early childhood, if they would read the
book which is in the state library and other libraries entitled
The Church in the Gold Fields, written by Dr. Herbert
Turner, who was a son of this church and this
community—he's dead now, of course—and
he was a professor of history and philosophy at Mary Baldwin College.
But he wrote a book about this community, and I think it captures many
of the—one can sense the elements there that came into
influencing my makeup, as well my parents, because they, too, grew up
here. They were just a couple of miles down the road from each other.
They were childhood sweethearts, they went to the school closings
together and all of that. And I met my wife here in the consolidation of
that school in the first years.