This is an interview first published in The Edgefield Advertiser in the January 8, 2020, edition.  Now, as of October 10, 2024, Mrs. Scott is 103.  Part of the interview is being published in the print edition (November 6, 2024) in celebration of her birthday and in recognition of her status as among the oldest of Edgefield County veterans.  The Advertiser salutes all our veterans as Veterans Day 2024 approaches, November 11.

Marjorie (Jerry) Scott is a name known among local history-buff circles, certainly the OEDGS (Old Edgefield District Genealogical Society), as well as the AGS (Augusta Genealogical Society) – and probably also known at the Edgefield County Veterans Office where she would be listed as a WWII Veteran.

Mrs. Scott had a birthday in October (2020) and she was 98 years old.  She has beautiful white hair, truly white and lustrous, and was sitting, last Saturday, for an interview dressed in a sky-blue jacket that gave a radiance to her blue eyes and white hair. Across from her was a desk with her computer ready for use.  She had to hear but one question and off she went with telling of her life and adventures – all asked for.

To give her some idea of what was needed, she had been told by the interviewer that it would be good for the reader to know just who she was before she came to Edgefield County, as a way to know what she brought to our area and how that dovetailed into such a productive person – while being married to the late Commander Ralph Scott and the mother of two sons.

(CDR Scott helped to set up the NJROTC unit at Aiken High School and served on the Edgefield County School Board.)

“I grew up in South New Jersey” were her first words in the interview.  A good student, we heard, told with great modesty.  And then she attended Smith College, one of the “Seven Sister Schools” on the Eastern Seaboard. There she collected 11 friends who were all on her dormitory hall (at that time Smith kept all the dormitory residents together throughout the four years) and she kept in touch through letters over the years. There are only two of them now still living, herself and “Weezie” who lives in Maine.  Mrs. Scott graduated in 1942, 78 years ago, and imagine 12 strong friendships that lasted so long.

She spoke of sending “Round Robin” letters: her letter would go to, say, Weezie, and Weezie would write a letter and include Jerry’s and would send them to the next friends; ultimately 12 letters would come back to Jerry.  It is important to mention these friends, for it was one of them that introduced her, while they were still in school, to Ralph C. Scott of Cornelia, Georgia, the oldest of eight children.  And Jerry, by the way, was an only child.  But a romance did not kindle yet.  He was a Mustang entering the Navy in World War II, and she knew he would be shipped out on the USS WASP into the Pacific, so she told him at the time of their meeting she would write him.

And she did, but much later.

Jerry, a Smith College graduate with a major in French, then went to Washington, D.C., after joining the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services), and she entered Civil Service work in D.C., entering in with hundreds who worked to break the Japanese Naval Code. Some months into her job she opened a newspaper to read that the USS WASP had been sunk in the Pacific by the Japanese.  Her thought was that she had told him she would write, and she had not.  So, she got pen and paper and wrote that letter, finally.  He got it one year later!

In the meantime, Ralph Scott had survived the sinking of his aircraft carrier and was picked up by a destroyer and taken to Guadalcanal, where he served until he got malaria.  Back to the States he went to the Naval Hospital in Annapolis.  A mutual friend told him how to reach Jerry, “And that is when the romance took off,” she said.  They dated and were married in the St. Mary’s Chapel of the National Cathedral in December of 1943.

Their life together took off after the War as she became a Navy wife and traveled with her husband all over the world, and in time they had two sons, Ralph and Robert (and he is the writer on page two of The Edgefield Advertiser). They talked of returning one day to the South, and would it be to Georgia, his home, or to Edgefield County, where her husband’s ancestors had lived on land near the Savannah River? Upon his retirement from the Navy, Commander and Mrs. Scott came with their family to Edgefield County, in 1961, to begin a new life in a rural community called Morgana.

“When our boys were in High School in North Augusta, I went to work at Augusta Preparatory to teach French.”  She told of having to spend a year or so getting the necessary classes in Education in order to have a proper certificate, which she had done while living in Virginia.  She taught in Augusta for 17 years.  But another challenge came her way that inspired a new writer of history in Edgefield County.

 When they moved to the country, her younger son (“Scottie” to his friends, “Bob” to his mother) was absent the friends he had had to run with before. However, he had a deep interest in history, according to his mother, which he then had time to pursue.  And living on ancestral land inspired him to research the family tree, which he did by going to the Edgefield County Courthouse.  By the time he left for the Naval Academy, he had created the tree of ancestors, and he handed that to his mother and asked her to carry on. 

Mrs. Scott took his work and began her own research which developed into a number of articles that enhanced what was known in this area of the rural Post Offices and of the community known as Morgana. Her husband’s grandmother had been the Postmistress for Morgana, operating the post office in her home.  

Mrs. Scott published some of her writings both in the Advertiser and in the Quill. Scotts Ferry was of special interest because that Scott was her husband’s family. And so she did a story for the Quill on ferries of the area.

The question came, after hearing of her writing about Edgefield County history and her great interest there: “Have you become a Southerner after all?” “I am a Southerner, yes,” says Jerry Scott.  She speaks of having really put roots down; after all, she says, it has been almost sixty years that she has been here, and the interviewer notes that she had lived with a Southern husband for some 18 years before that.

“I have enjoyed life,” declares Jerry Scott.  Her story authenticates that statement, with the anecdotes of travel, teaching, being a mother and wife, and in the last few decades, of publishing history. And the interviewer knows that her interests go even further through her having enjoyed so many of the cultural events in Edgefield and the Augusta area in her retirement.

She says that early in her life she was not such a great reader, that her husband Commander Scott read avidly. But that changed as she had more time and she took on history as a subject.  And what is she reading now?  Her hand moves to a rather thick book on the table next to her. It is by Eugenia Price “who wrote first about Savannah; this is her third book.”  And this native of New Jersey, now “baptized” in almost 6 decades of living here, says, “I like to read about the South.”