The Missouri Kid

I grew up in the Ozarks of Missouri. I was born in 1911, on Sunday, May 28th, and raised in the foothills near a little town called Fairfield, near Warsaw, on the Pomme de Terre River. They named me James Melvin Scott. James was after my dad and granddads before him. But just about everybody called me Melvin or, later, Scotty. I got a hare-brained idea that maybe it might interest my family - especially my children and grand kids - if they knew something about the kind of life I had as a child and how a kid like me ended up in California.

Some might say we were hillbillies. We were poor by today's standards. So was just about everyone else in Fairfield. Back then, Fairfield was considered the moonshine capital of the Midwest. People made extra money from it.

Missouri is a network of great rivers and magnificent streams. We grew up hunting and fishing. We didn't have much - very few kids did - but we never gave it much thought. I guess we were hillbillies after all. It was once written that an Ozark hillman, with his rabbit gun and dog, was a Missourian through and through. To me, it's the other way around: that a Missourian is a hill man.

Dad and mom, James and Cordelia Scott, were popular and well thought of in the community. I can't think of a time nor remember mom or dad ever complaining about not having enough. They did with what they could with what they had.

Dad was always bucking for the school board. He and Uncle Harrick Love and a few other local men did a lot of campaigning and a little bit of politicking as they pushed for a two-year high school, or maybe I never would have gone to senior high.

The Scotts, descendants of Ireland, came from Virginia to Kentucky, and from Kentucky to Missouri. We know that Great-great-grand-dad Scott was born in 1776 and lived to be seventy-one. And we know that Great-grandmother Philipina Stanfield, born in 1783, lived to just twenty-three days shy of her 100th birthday. She was born in North Carolina, and Great-grandpa Scott was born in Virginia.

They were married in Cumberland County, Kentucky. Great-granddad was twenty-seven years old. Great-grandma was a couple of years younger. He went in to Kentucky as a young man and bought land in Cumberland County. This was about the time that Daniel Boone left Kentucky, in 1799, when Boone set out for a new wilderness and founded a home in Milan, Missouri.

The making of the Boone Trail through North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky no doubt brought the adventurous young Scott to Kentucky. Somewhere along the trail he met Philipina and married her. From that union, they had eleven children, two of whom would settle in the new frontier that was yet to be named and would later became the fine state of Missouri. These pioneers were searching for that vast stretch of land along the tributaries of the Osage River. Open land near a river was what they were looking for and what they discovered as they ventured on their way along the trail. Missouri was similar to their beautiful Kentucky, but with the timber and bottom land to be cleared and turned into rich, productive fields. The rivers were chock full of white bass, crappie, walleye, spoonbill, and, of course, cat fish for the pickings.

The Scott line produced strong men. They were hardy, God-fearing, hard-working men, and the women they married came from families of the same tough stock. From these pioneers, in what are now Benton and Sinclair counties, you could shake a bush and out would come a Scott, the same tough, hard-working breed as their pioneering ancestors a few generations earlier.

It is the beauty of the foothills of the Missouri Ozarks I remember the most when I think back on my childhood. The pristine rivers and creeks. The hills green with trees. The river banks peppered with rocks. The wildlife. Oh, how I wish I could describe exactly what I saw in those magnificent, rolling green Hills of the Ozarks and the excitement and the adventures conjured up in the imagination of a young boy on the banks of the Pomme de Terre and Osage River. It is where I spent my first years. I was educated in the Missouri hills of my youth. There was a rare balance of a God-fearing life cocooned in those hills and rivers and in the lives of the people who inhabited the Ozark hills.

Now, as the years quickly pass by, the memories of my brothers' and sister's childhoods, and my own, have become more vivid to me. Now, I want to share those early Missouri years.

Most people can go back to their home towns. I can't. Fairfield was covered over in seventy-five feet of water in 1972 when the Truman Dam was built. The graves of my parents were moved to the Iconium cemetery nearby. In the late 1980s during a visit to Missouri, my brother Carlos 'Bush' Scott took me out on Truman Lake. He stopped the boat and said, 'Do you know where we are? We're sitting on top of main street in Fairfield.' While the town where we grew up may be gone, the memories remain.

This is my story, to my children and grandchildren, so they, too, can know the nature of things that made those thar hills come so alive for a young country boy.