In the course of looking for something else in the 1942 Davis Enterprise, I happened onto an
item announcing that William Henry Scott would once more stand for election as
the Davis-area Justice of the Peace (image 1).
This small item caused me to realize that I have never done
a post on Scott as a “major shaper” of Davis, even though I have done so on
people like Calvin Covell and even A. Gordon Anderson.
So, I decided I would, at a minimum, post his obituary,
which I expected to be like those on Covell and Anderson already posted here, a
longish and highly appreciative essay on his life.
But, in reading it, I was surprised and disappointed to find
a short, narrow and almost dismissive account (image 2).
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Puzzling to me, it fails to convey that Scott was, as the
editor and publisher of the Enterprise, the preeminent public voice of Davis for
three and a half decades.
As Larkey observes in
her excellent history of Davis, “he not only administered local justice but
dictated to the conscience of the community through weekly editorials that
repeatedly advocated civic improvement and registered a sense of great pride in
the developing city” (Davisville ’68.
p. 76).
My surprise and disappointment about this obituary then
caused me to remember that I have observed this same oddness among obituaries
of some other well-known Davisites.
Although I have not done a systematic quantitative
comparison, my impression is that the scale and effusiveness (or lack thereof)
of the obituaries of once prominent people are a function of two variables.
First, the longer a person lives, the less the number of
people who remember her or him and the number of people who any longer care
about the death. Dying at age 88 in 1951, Scott had lived well past the era of
his influence and prominence.
Second, major social upheavals change collective mindsets
about what has happened in a town and what is, or was, important. The more I
look at Davis history, the more I am struck that World War II represented the
end the one order and the the start of a new one. At his death in 1951, Scott
was “history” in the pejorative sense of “that’s history.”
The new--and newly arriving--elites of an exploding Davis viewed
the “old boys” of the “G Street crowd” (of which Scott was a key figure) as old
fashioned, passé and even a little immoral. The ethos of organizations such as
the newly formed League of Women Voters promoted ideas that moved in more open,
inclusive and “good government” civic
directions.
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