Bob Scott was a relatively young man when he as elected governor, at a time when North Carolina’s constitution still limited its chief executive to one term.
Thus, many years, a generation really, have passed since Mr. Scott, who died Jan. 23 at 79, left office. And millions have moved into this burgeoning state since then.
Many may have known little, if anything, of his tenure from 1969 to 1973.
But it was a tenure with significant milestones in the state’s evolution from its agrarian past.
Mr. Scott was a down-to-earth leader who carried on a populist political dynasty started by his father, W. Kerr Scott.
“He probably wasn’t as much the full-throttled populist as his dad, but he still had that sense of representing the grass roots,” said Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at UNC and a close observer of North Carolina politics since Scott’s day.
Mr. Scott may be best remembered for bringing public kindergartens to this state, and doing it by imposing the state’s first-ever retail tax on tobacco. In these different times, it is easy to overlook the political courage and maneuvering it took to take on the tobacco growers and cigarette manufacturers who dominated the state’s economy.
He was influential in the consolidation of North Carolina’s four-year colleges under a single system presided over by a Board of Governors, a move which helped forge the outstanding public education system the state enjoys today.
After his governorship concluded, Mr. Scott continued in a variety of public-service functions, including a tenure leading the state’s community college system.
Gov. Beverly Perdue, herself brand-new to the job Mr. Scott once held, summed up his contributions in a statement Friday:
“He always believed that North Carolina could be a better place, with wider doors of opportunity for all our people, and he worked to make it so.”
For that, he should be remembered warmly.
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