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Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Sunday, June 2, 1946 Great Scott! The Lady's Been Some Daredevil! By JACK TUCKER BLANCHE STUART SCOTT, who is anything but an introvert and has made this pronounced lack of inhibition pay dividends all throughout her exciting life, has been offered a radio job at General MacArthur's Headquarters in Tokyo, with a captain's rank and an extra 25 per cent wage. Mrs. Scott, the first woman in America to drive an automobile cross-country and the first woman ever to pilot an airplane in this country, probably would take the job in a minute were it not for domestic obligations at her home, 163 Hobart St. Her mother-of whom she thinks the world-is not well and requires pretty constant care. The remarkable Blanche-or Betty as she is more familiarly known-is hale, hearty and handsome today, and full of ideas springing from an adventurous career which, for many years, earned her a national reputation. "The only thing bothering me is how to deal constructively with my time," she says, "For one thing I want to write fiction. A friend of mine in New York (Nancy Shores) made $80,000 last year with her typewriter. That makes me itchy." If Blanche could write as colorfully and pungently as she talks, she'd be a shoo-in. As a matter of fact, she does write very well. She was a staff writer in Hollywood for nine years, not to mention operation a motion picture studio in Flushing and she has turned out many a radio transcript. * * * BLANCHE first made her electric presence felt publicly in Rochester when, as a 13-year-old tomboy, she became at odds with the City Council because she was driving a car. The City Council wanted to stop her from driving because she was entirely too young, until Blanche pointed out there was no such thing as a driver's license in those days, Council bowed. When Blanche was 18, and fresh out of an uppercrust boarding school in East Bridgeport, Mass., she proceeded to flabbergast her friends and, in fact, eventually the entire country, by talking herself into the venture of driving an automobile from New York to San Francisco. this feat had been performed then by only a few men and no women. With the then Mayor Hylan officiating, Blanche took off from Manhattan to the accompaniment of cheering photographers, who knocked themselves out taking pictures. male motorists, who preferred to believe that a woman's place was behind a stove instead of a wheel, scoffed at such unlady-like ambitions, but Blanche made them eat their derogatory remarks. This was in 1910. Forty-one days later Blanche not only had completed her latter-day Balboa trek, but also continued from San Francisco to Los Angeles and thence into Lower California, where mesmerized and appreciative Mexicans threw fiestas and bullfights in her honor. The fact that Blanche was a striking brunet did little to lessen the ardent Mexicans' acclaim. All told she drove 6,100 miles singlehandedly. Two newspaperwomen accompanied her, but did no driving. * * * "YOU must realize," Blanche says, "that in those days there were only 218 miles of paved roads, exclusive of cities, in the United States. There weren't even any road maps for certain parts of the country, where cowpaths along the old Union Pacific tracks were the only 'roads.'" Blanche was arrested in Utah by a bug-eyed sheriff for failing to have a "pilot" driver precede her through the desert. Blanche talked her way out of that one, and hired a willing but somewhat befuddled young Mormon as a "pilot." The Morman got her lost in record time. Blanche's car was an Overland stock car Model 38, boasting 25 horsepower and retailing for a thousand bucks. It had four cylinders, two spare tires, a trunk for luggage and tentage, water bottles, two five-gallon cans containing gas and oil, acetylene lamps for night driving, and a cylinder of compressed air for administering to flats. "I had exactly one puncture. It was near Cheyenne at sundown," she says. "Wasn't hard to change." Mrs. Scott's car at sheep camp near Medicine Bow, Wyoming. her now ancient chariot developed no engine trouble whatever, she says, but six springs did throw in the sponge in losing arguments with gopher holes in the western sticks. The best time this venerable steed made was close to 50 miles per hour on a hard-packed stretch of sandy road in Arizona. The latter total resulted from a series of streams and rivers, which were somewhat uncharted, nearly forcing Blanche to do the Australian crawl at times. "At Omaha," she says "the local Hudson dealer offered me $5,000 to turn back [[?]] Hudson. "Turn back" I Nathaniel Rochester Planned To [[?]] It Grew Fast To Be City by ARCH MERRILL IF NATHANIEL Rochester came back for a visit today, I think he'd quite approve of the city he founded. For in many ways it mirrors his own personality he was a conservative progressive. He had grit and determination without rashness. He was industrious, thrifty and prudent. He was solid and colorful. He was inclined to be austere with strangers but affable among friends. He was loyally devoted to his family, his church, his political party, his community. Rochester SKETCH BOOK Chapter 3 Should the Colonel drop in at the next annual banquet of the Chamber of Commerce, he would be perfectly at ease. Of course, his attire would set him apart. No other diner would be wearing a long tailed gray broadcloth coat, a stiff white stock, a bellcrowned beaver hat, a buff vest and blue breeches. The lean, stooped six footer with the heavy cane, the firm step, the long silver locks and the air of one accustomed to command would get attention at any gathering-in any era. Very likely he would dominate the meeting as he had so many others in his lifetime. He had been a man of affairs, a member of the legislature of two states, before he ever saw the falls of the Genesee. He was not the kind of man one slaps on the back and greets as "Nat." He was a Southern colonel but not the "hell for leather, pistols at dawn, mint juleps on the veranda" breed. The founder of Rochester was the antithesis of Rochester's first white settler, the flamboyant, lawless backwoodsman, Ebenezer Allen. * * * NATHANIEL ROCHESTER, returning in 1946, would have a lively interest in this town that he had laid out, partly with his hands, amid the mud and stumps in 1811; the mill seat that he bought for $17.50 an acre and had seen grow into America's first boom town, "The Young Lion of the West." he would exult over the city's industrial stature, for had he not predicted, before there was a house on the One Hundred Acre Tract. that the "Falls is capable of great things." He would be pleased that the city had kept the name he gave it. This city was not named "after" Nathaniel Rochester. He decided in the beginning to give it "his family name," as he put it. The cumbersome Rochesterville was soon shortened. The colonel would rejoice at the high percentage of home owners. He had sold his first lots only to those who would agree to erect a building on each plot. His face would light up at the well kept lawns, the flowers, the gardens, the parks, the shade trees lining the residential streets, the fruit trees in the back yards. He had worked every morning before breakfast in his own garden when he was past 70. He had planted pear trees at his first home here, at Exchange and Spring Streets, for "those who come after me." He would like the city's prestige as a musical center. He had been a member of the village's first musical organization, a cornet band. The university and other educational institutions would interest the man who had been the first president of the Rochester Athenaeum. He would be horrified to learn there were gambling places in his city. In 1826 when his young son,Henry, won an election bet, the Colonel made the boy refund the money to the losers. The first senior warden of St. Luke's was a man of uncompromising rectitude. Factional strife in his city? Well, he had seen plenty of it in his time and knew the tension would This is a sketch-model for a bronze statue of Nathaniel Rochester which was proposed to be erected-but never was erected-in Rochester. Of heroic size, nine feet, it was designed in 1934 by Bryant Baker, sculptor. It was to show the founder at the age of 48 when he first came to this area. lishment of the first bank an the bitterness between his Bucktail faction and the Clintonians. He would recall, too, the great Republican mass meeting over which he had presided in 1828 and which denounced Andrew Jackson and all his works. * * * Should the Colonel be persuaded to tell his memories of a long lifetime, what a dramatic tale would he unfold. First, there would be boyhood memories of the Virginia plantation on which he was born in 1752; the death of his father and remarriage of his mother; removal to North Carolina, hard long hours in a store until he became a partner in the business. Then the stirring days of the Revolution when he cast his lot with the rebels and sat in the first constitutional convention of an independent North Carolina; when he joined the militia and became paymaster of Minute Men and commissary of general of eleven regiments of the line with the rank of colonel. After the war came his settling in Hagerstown, Md., and his steady rise to business and political influence as a banker, manufacturer, member of the Maryland Legislature. Etched vividly on the Colonel's memory would be his first visit to the wild new Genesee Country in 1800;the long horseback ride over the mountains with his aristocratic Maryland friends, Charles Carroll and William Fitzhugh; the negotiations with the eloquent land promoter, Charles Williamson, that ended in the visitors' purchase of 12,000 acres from the Pulteney Estate. Then another historic visit in 1803 when the same three Marylanders bought for $1,750 on the hundred acres of wooded swamp at the west side of the falls of the Genesee, on the site of much of present downtown Rochester. They were the same 100 acres that had been given, Indian Allen as a bonus for building a grist mill there. Nathaniel Rochester would remember 1810 as a year of decision when he closed out his interests in Maryland and set out for a new home at Dansville in the Genesee Country. His the townspeople, some of them with tear stained cheeks, lined the main street as his cavalcade set forth. What a cavalcade it was: The Colonel and his five sons and one daughter on horseback, the other women in two carriages: the ten slaves and the household goods in three great wagons. Colonel Rochester would tell you that the profit motive was not the only force that impelled him to start afresh in a new country at the age of 58. There was his abhorrence of human slavery, coupled with his wish that his family live and grow up in a new and free land. He would add that he freed his own slaves on reaching that Northern soil. * * * THEN the early bus[[?]] the Genesee Country; the building of mills and other enterprises in Dansville; the visits to the tract at the falls and the Colonel's decision to lay out a village there, because he saw future mill wheels turned by the foaming waters; saw broad streets and fine buildings where all was bleak wilderness. The old gentlemen would recall surveying much of the village site with his own hands; advertising the lots for sale in the Canandaigua papers and seeing the first house, a log one, rise in 1812 where the Powers Building now stands, at the Four Corners, for years the city's crossroads of commerce as well as the cradle of its community life. The Colonel would recall how the War of 1812 retarded the growth of this village, too close to the border for comfort. He would speak of the building of the wooded (Main Street) bridge across the river that meant so much to Rochesterville; the bridge that was to know a great tide of westward migration and put the "mudhole" at the falls on the York State map. The old man would chuckle as he fished out a letter from his partner, Carroll. In response to Rochester's discouraged confession that he was thinking of selling his share in the falls project, Carroll, who like Fitzhugh never resided in Rochester, wrote: "Hold on. It will be an estate worthy of any man." The Colonel hung on and later on he was to learn that the astute James Wadsworth had ex- Gave It [[?]] Of Fa[[?]] Maryland gentlemen and mill seat render able indeed." Nathaniel Rochester how he laid out streets, Buffalo (Ma (Carroll), wide and southern pattern, wi England common ar served in the very b for Courthouse. pleased to see a fi there to today. maybe he would Courthouse to ch Sheriff, Al Skinner, scendant of Henry whom the Colonel s the Four Corners Building site) where ing rose in 1812. He might mention he felt when the ent and Josiah Bissell building the first flour he moved here from farm in 1818 when Rochesterville was How his eyes wo he told of the turning mill town's life-the Erie Canal,the di vided a highway ov products of the gray banks of the Genesee into the world market He saw the swa and the trees felled ins clinked with m stick chimneys give stantial frame house banks lined with m streets with shops a burgeoning of the ing town in America In his old age, patriarch of the boo bore his name. He homo at Spring an Streets, beside a br ran cold, pure water trout swam, the pres Bevier Building of Institute of Technology his Maryland-born influential in the co was predominantly England stock. He battle such pushin Carthage at the lower fort (the Lyell-state- Charlotte, the lake Town at the river ra lived long enough h seen his mill town s them. * * * NATHANIEL ROCHESTER in his Third War the trees beside th brook, in 1831, full honors. His descendants st mill town he founde the sixth generation cants of old St. Luke had been. The coat his family adopted in in the 16th Century cial city flag of the Rochester. Tablets erected to his memory At the time of the c in 1934, there was a erection of a statue Rochester, to be pla spicious spot. Brya New York sculptor model of a bronze sta tall, to stand upon a seven feet high. It Colonel as he appear he came to the Gen Difficulty arose over and the plan lanquis So there's no heroic of the founder in fathered. But the city itself monument to Nathan (Next Week-Scen Path from "Mudhole oils). Skilled Safecrac Shortage Ends Baltimore-(AP)-P handiwork is making even in safecracking. After investigating of a flower shop s Capt. Henry J. Kriss all the safe opening five years, none had and skilled. There we fingerprints Kriss described
Transcription Notes:
Edited: removed bold text references, no longer required. Removed image references, not required in this project per instructions, just to transcribe text on page, good job for 1st transcriber, hard one
instead of putting [[?]] after every single line for the first column I just typed it exactly as it appears, and noted the partial visibility before the section transcription.