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Woman's Monday Club
Scrapbook
Page 6
 CORPUS
CHRISTI TEXAS, MARCH 3, 1944
Mrs. G. R. Scott Active For Forty Years
In Civic Work Continues To Maintain Enthusiastic Interest
(By Frances Rockwell)
Suppose that for seven long years
you have been confined to your home . . . and a wheelchair. You were
growing older. Illness pursued you. Your earlier days of constant activity
were gone. How do you suppose it would affect you to start a stay-at-home
existence? Would it make any difference in your personality?
Mrs. G. R. Scott, founder of the
Women’s Monday Club, energetic worker is the City Federation of Women’s
Clubs and the Texas Federation, was faced with invalidism seven years ago .
. . and from that time forth her indomitable spirit has kept her alert and
always busy.
It isn’t everyone who, having spent
the most active years of her life in the service of women’s organizations,
would feel any obligation to continue giving them her time, when she could
no longer mingle with them.
But when she heard Mrs. Whitehurst,
the national President of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, was going to pay
her a visit, Mrs. Scott donned her “Sunday best,” and regally enthroned on
her wheelchair, eagerly awaited the lady, whose work she admired.
You weren’t able to see the meeting
of those two great women, or to hear their conversation. But from a letter
written afterward by Mrs. Whitehurst you may read: “I shall never be able to
forget my visit with you . . . you have such a dynamic personality.”
What keeps Mrs. Scott interested in
living? And how has she retained that “dynamic personality?”
There’s one thing about people who
work with other people. Sometimes they’re not truly appreciated during
their lives. Great artists and great scientists have often died before
their work was recognized. Yet those who spend their days in service to
others find their reward in such small things that they’re continually
surprised by words of appreciation they’d never expected.
And so, while Mrs. Scott busily
worked on her clubs, she found the popularity of those organizations a
genuine satisfaction. “Oh, clubs for women really were a novelty in the
1800’s when we established the Monday Club,” she admits, “but everyone
seemed to take to it real well and fall right in line.”
Her one regret now is that only
three of the original members, including herself, are living at this time.
The first meeting of cultural civic-spirited Monday Club took place in the
front parlor of the spacious home in which she now lives on Valentine’s Day,
in 1897. There were ten members then, organizing “to encourage a spirit of
friendship, of intellectual inquiry and culture, and to unite pleasant
entertainment with mutual improvement; and, to keep in touch with every good
movement toward the civic betterment.”
Each successive year since then, a
Valentine’s party, held in the front parlor of the Scott’s magnificent
residence, has commemmorated that first gathering. More than a hundred
women since the Club’s founding have known the elevating and helpful
benefits of membership in the Monday Club.
For twelve years the Monday Club’s
beginning, members elected Mrs. Scott to the presidency. Ever afterward she
has continued her fervent interest in clubwork by attending district, state,
and national conventions, in order to find new ideas. As District President
she carried a wide influence which doubtless helped Mrs. Percy V.
Pennybacker to dub her, “The Admiral of The Valley.”
A tribute to her leadership was the
written request from the Club, then known as the “Arts and Crafts”, to adopt
her name and call themselves the “Scott Study Club.” Corpus Christians
today hear much of Mrs. Scott’s “namesake”, as well as of her own
organizations!
Born in Houston, Mrs. Scott married
her lawyer-husband there. G. R. Scott had one threat to his practice, and
to his very lifea weakness of the lungs, called pulmonitis, which was
predicted to kill him in six months at the time her moved to Corpus
Christi. The salubrious climate here not only prolonged Mr. Scott’s life,
by 32 years . . . but also made it possible, by improving his health, for
Mr. Scott to build up a very fine local practice in his profession. And
Corpus Christi has been the home of the Scotts ever since.
Of all the civic improvements the
Monday Club has worked onextensive improvements at Artesian Park; purchase
of a piano for the public schools; establishing a “story hour” for young
children; promoting summer concerts for evenings at Artesian Park;
attempting to build a Carnegie Library, and later co-operating with the La
Retama Public Library because of inability to match funds Mr. Carnegie would
contribute; and a variety of War activities, during both World War I and
World War II, Mrs. Scott look back on the “Ladies’ Pavilion,” built on Bay
Shore so that organizations and city groups might have a place to hold
entertainment, as her personal “pet project.” She herself would go down to
the Pavilion and help serve tamales, coffee, and salads, to help pay for the
construction of the Pavilion. The flood that washed the “Ladies’ Pavilion”
away brought an abrupt and sorrowful end to this activity.
Despite minor setbacks, and her
recent invalidism, Mrs. Scott keeps insisting, “Oh, I’ve had a very
wonderful life.” On the wall near her bed hangs a picture of Mrs. Scott at
age forty, done in colors. She will call your attention to the dress. “It
was made at Lord and Taylor, and I wore it to my sister-in-law’s wedding.
See the puffed sleeves. Oh, “she sighed, “it was real pretty.” Mrs. Scott,
herself, was “real pretty,” with jet black hair, and clear-cut features.
The air is snow white today, but the determihation in her features, is if
anything more pronounced. She is still going strong!
Faithfully attended by her daughter,
Mrs. W. E. Pope, Mrs. Scott is grateful for the loving care . . . calls her
daughter, paradoxically, “mother,” because Mrs. Pope watches over her so
thoughtfully. But she resents having to be waited on, being unable to fetch
for herself. Time and again she bewails the fact she can’t get about and
attend meetings as she used to.
But as far as being bored is
concerned, she doesn’t hive herself the chance! Always busy writing
letters, sending special Valentines and messages, she keeps her nimble mind
occupied with other people and other places. “If I didn’t write letters,
I’d go crazy!” she exclaimed. An active mind like hers must have plenty to
do. She reads the newspapers from cover to cover, and, says her daughter,
“She always knows everything that’s going on.” She will quote passages from
her reading almost word for word.
“Oh,” she sighed “People have told
me I ought to write an autobiography . . . and I suppose I ought to. But
there is one thing I am writing nowthat’s a history of our Club. I’ve been
working on it. And I want to read it at the District Convention in San
Antonio, in the Gunter Hotel.” Almost desperate, she sighed, “But I don’t
know if I’ll get there or not. It’s so hard to find a way to go.”
No one knows, yet whether she’ll be
able to go, but if she does, her listeners will be privileged, and
completely fascinated by that “dynamic personality” which so impressed Mrs.
Whitehurst.
_________________________
MRS. G. R. SCOTT
. . . Admiral of the Valley
BY EVE BETH
SELLERS
When the roll is called up at the
annual convention of the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs in Dallas this
week, one spirit will answer “here.” For, although she will be unable to
attend in person, the Admiral of the Valley, Mrs. G. R. Scott, will be there
in spirit. And every clubwoman in Texas knows it, including the president,
Mrs. J. W. Walker of Plainview, who wrote Mrs. Scott last week: “I’ll feel
your inspiration with me in Dallas throughout the convention.”
For the Admiral had never missed a
state convention until five years ago when she broke her hip and has been
confined to a wheel chair ever since. But, wait, she’s never missed a
single Fifth District convention in the past 40 years, regardless of
weather, wheel chair or what have you. And, in 1939, she bundled up
everything to attend Clara Driscoll Day in Austin; headquartered at the
Federation building itself, and bossed the proceedings from the depths of
her chair, with the portrait of herself, painted by Antonio Garcia, hanging
above her head.
Five Misses
Since 1901, when the Woman’s Monday
Club became a member of the Texas Federation, Mrs. Scott has missed only
five state conventions. And the first convention of the Texas Federation,
recognized as such, was held in Waco in 1897, the same year the Monday Club
was organized, as a matter of fact. The next Federation convention was held
in Dallas in May, 1901 and that was the year that the Monday Club entered
the state federation, later joining up with the General Federation in the
year 1903.
Mrs. Scott, who won her pseudonoym
from Mrs. Percy V. Pennybacker, the only Texas woman to become president of
the General Federation, was not only organizer of the Woman’s Monday Club,
she was president for 12 years and presided for that length of time with the
same secretary, Mrs. W. B. Hopkins. When she finished with 12 years of
office, she became president of the Fifth District and has managed it ever
since. She became one of the founders of the Texas Federation Headquarters
in Austin as a life member. Her pet study club in Corpus Christi today is
the Scott Study Club, named for her and sponsor of her birthday party every
year. And she really rejoiced when a member of the Monday Club, Mrs. Henry
Redmond, served as president of the Texas Federation from 1923-25.
She never forgets a name, not the
initials. She can recall all the big-wigs in Federated club work from one
end of the state to the other. She can tell you what took place at this or
that convention and she can make a speech with as much fire and fervor as in
other days when she stood at the rostrom. She gets things done by writing
letters now. And she gets them done, for clubwomen have been coming to her
for advice for years. She gives it. |
