RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) ó Former Gov. Bob Scott, a member of one of North Carolina’s most prolific political families who got a retail cigarette tax passed to pay for public kindergarten and later ran the state’s community college system, died Friday at the age of 79.
Scott died about 3 a.m. at Hospice Palliative Care Center of Alamance County, according to his daughter, former state Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps. His health had been declining for months.
“We will miss him and we know that he loved this state and the people in this state,” Phipps told The Associated Press. “We’ll miss his humor and his compassion.”
Carved in the model of father Kerr Scott, who was North Carolina’s chief executive 20 years earlier, Bob Scott served as governor from 1969 to 1973. The younger Scott later served as president of the North Carolina Community College System from 1983 to 1994.
“North Carolina has lost one of our greatest governors … and many of us have lost a friend,” Gov. Beverly Perdue said in a statement, ordering state flags at half-staff through sunset Tuesday, the day of his funeral. “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.”
While still embracing the family’s populism and connections to rural residents ó to the point of serving possum at black-tie dinners at the Executive Mansion ó Bob Scott was governor during a turbulent era fraught with difficult choices on public education, integration and the future of Big Tobacco.
“He was down-to-earth. When he believed in something he would do it,” said Administrative Law Judge Fred Morrison, who served as Scott’s legal counsel while governor. “He just was an innovator.”
Scott used the governor’s bully pulpit to help push through the first retail tax on cigarettes at a time when tobacco was still king in North Carolina. The tax ó 2 cents on the dollar ó helped finance the first public kindergartens in the state. The package also included a penny tax on soda.
“The way I put it then, if a person didn’t have anything better to do than ride around smoking and drinking, he ought to pay a little more tax,” Scott said in an 2001 interview with The Associated Press.
Like his father, who made improving secondary roads for farmers to get their crops to market a focus of his term as governor, Bob Scott made improvement the clarion call of his administration.
“Let the timid, the faint-hearted, the foot-draggers, the do-nothings be forewarned: We are going to make progress in this administration,” Scott said during his 1969 inaugural address.
“Kerr’s boy!” the crowd said in response, according to Scott’s official papers.
Scott became governor just as a lawsuit attempting to integrate Charlotte schools was moving through the court system on its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The black plaintiffs ultimately won the case in 1971, but not before Scott pledged that he wouldn’t allow state money to be spent for busing.
Scott also helped push for an increase in the state’s gasoline tax, which paid for expanding the state highway system. He later said modern politicians would have a tougher time winning the sort of tax increases he advocated.
“I don’t think North Carolina has had in many, many years the political will in providing revenues for essential services for the people,” he said in 2001.
During his term, North Carolina’s two fractured governing bodies of the state’s four-year colleges were becoming the University of North Carolina Board of Governors. The merger predictably required some deal making and compromise by Scott. In 1971, he worked to ensure Republican and minority representation on the board. He also appointed the state’s first black Superior Court judge.
Robert Walter Scott was born June 13, 1929, near Alamance County’s Haw River, the seat of power for the political family. His grandfather, “Farmer Bob” Scott, served in the Legislature and his uncle was former state Senate president pro tempore Ralph Scott.
Scott’s father was agriculture commissioner for 11 years before winning election as governor in 1948, rolling into Raleigh his “Branch-head boys,” a reference to hardworking people that lived at the head of the branch in the woods. Kerr Scott later served in the U.S. Senate, where he died in office in 1958.
Phipps was elected state agriculture commissioner in 2000, but resigned and later went to prison after she pleaded guilty to extorting illegal campaign contributions.
Bob Scott grew up on the family dairy farm before going to Duke University and then graduating from North Carolina State University in 1952. He served in the U.S. Army before returning home to manage the farm.
“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 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He was elected lieutenant governor in 1964 under Gov. Dan Moore. With the state Constitution at the time prohibiting governors from serving more than one term, Scott won the governorship four years later.
By the end of his term, voters decided they wanted a different direction and for the first time since 1896, they elected a Republican, James Holshouser, as governor.
Scott, only 43 when he left office, ran for governor again in 1980, only to get beaten badly by incumbent Gov. Jim Hunt in the Democratic primary in what Guillory called “a misbegotten adventure.”
“He clearly had a zest for politics and a zest for governing,” Guillory said.
The ex-governor’s funeral is scheduled for 11 a.m. Tuesday at Hawfields Presbyterian Church in Alamance County.
In addition to Phipps, Scott’s survivors include his wife of 58 years, Jessie Rae Scott; three other daughters and seven grandchildren.