I’m happy to be here and to have another reprieve. Another chance to talk about the inquisitive, restless, mercurial, passionate Elisabeth Scott Bocock. To talk about mother, whom I will also occasionally refer to using her initials ESB, is to take you along with me on a bit of a frolic. A perceptive friend once said that ESB had a frolicking intellect. What she meant by this is that mother’s mind moved laterally. If she read a book about General Lee’s childhood to her child, this was followed shortly by a visit to Stratford. The day after that, she’d be informing herself about herbs found in colonial gardens, tracking down the Stratford tour leader’s cousin who lived in Richmond, and recruiting the poor, unwitting innocent to help fight the proposed downtown expressway in Richmond. All the while making sure that the architectural historian at Stratford was contacted by the historic Richmond expert whose advice was needed. Mother created webs made up of those like-minded interests as surely as Charlotte spun her home in E.B. White’s barn in Brooklyn, Maine. Most of the people in mother’s web were there willingly; drawn by the magnetism of her personality, the power of her will, and the promise of her vision. The threads of mother’s webs were formed by serendipity and the people that she collected in them became the energy behind many of her causes.

She was born smack in the middle of five children of Fred and Alee Scott, about whom, Laine Gibson, who grew up in Albemarle County, wrote a wonderful memoir entitled, My Precious Husband. Along with her sisters and brothers, Buford, Isabel, Fred, and Bracey, she was a part of a large Scots-Irish clan transported to the shores of Virginia on the waves of immigration following the Irish potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century. John Scott was a Protestant merchant in the town of Ballyshannon in Donegal. His son, Frederick Robert Scott, Grandfather Scott’s father, arrived in Petersburg, via Brooklyn to work as an accountant for Thomas Branch and Company. One of the things we do best in our family is marry well and he started the tradition by marrying the boss’ daughter, Francis Branch. A move to Richmond soon followed. As a young adult, Grandfather Scott showed the same proclivity his middle daughter Elisabeth would show a generation later for having fun, spending his parents’ money, and extending adolescence into his twenties. But then he fell under the spell of Elise Strauther, whose diminutive stature belied her compassionate commitment to him and her high expectations for him. She lit the fire that his father’s earnest lectures had been unable to ignite. Grandfather Scott and his friend Charles Stringfellow showed the optimism of youth and poor timing by opening the doors of Richmond’s newest Brokerage Firm, Scott & Stringfellow in 1893, the year of a banking panic. They succeeded despite that initial setback and Grandfather Scott earned his place in the gilded age as his willingness to take risks and his involvement with railroad finances turned him into one of the new millionaires created in the boom economy.

Grandmother and Grandfather Scott were married in 1893 much feathered by a society defined by the Civil War; one generation away from those who lives have been irrevocably altered by it. The affect this had on them is hard to overestimate. Defeated militarily, culturally humiliated, and economically destroyed, they had lived through Reconstruction and in their determination to restore governance by an elite. They sought to protect themselves as much from poor whites and blacks as from Northern carpetbaggers. Fred and Elise Scott were this generation’s progeny and all Elise’s life, despite her husband’s successful climb up the financial ladder, her memories of poverty were vivid and immediate. She could remember her mother, a young widow after the Civil War, struggling to make ends meet by running a boardinghouse in Petersburg. It may have been of genteel poverty, but it was poverty just the same and Grandmother Scott never forgot the feel of it or the cause of it. The Civil War was a subject that evoked deep emotions and irrational thinking. A half century later when I was growing up, you still just did not talk about the Civil War at our dining room table. Mother remembered her grandmother’s stories and so any conversation about theoretical causes or conditions of the war always drove mother into a rage as the deprivation and humiliation that followed defeat was still deeply personal to her.

Married young, Grandfather and Grandmother Scott bought a bankrupt apple orchard on the slope of Afton Mountain, twenty miles from here, in order to remove their growing family from the fevers that not infrequently killed children in the humid heat of summers. They tore down a carved farmhouse that most of us would have lived in happily ever after and built a mountain stone house that looks like a cross between a Scottish castle, an Italian villa, and a Newport cottage. Designed by Henry Baskerville of Richmond, the big house at Royal Orchard is a bold in your face, pretty income tax statement of early success. Just as is 909 West Franklin Street, the house they built in Richmond. Grandmother Scott, while enjoying their newfound wealth, stayed prepared to have it drop away as fast as it had appeared. In the linen closet at Royal Orchard were three boxes. Their labels read “string for large packages”, “string for small packages”, and “string too short to save”. Why then, you ask, was it saved? Only those in the audience who remember the Depression might guess. It was so you tie the strings “too short to save” together and make one string long enough to wrap a package. Grandmother Scott trained her children to save and preserve anything that could be used again and they trained their children. The day after Christmas it was my job to iron the leftover silk ribbons used on packages, roll them neatly around the cardboard left from paper towel rolls, and secure them with a straight pin.

Mother was very much a product of her parent’s world and in order to explain what made her tick, we need to focus on that world for a moment and look at a peculiarly Virginian theme – the tension between continuity and change. And Virginians’ comfort with the former and unease with the latter. ESB was born the year that Queen Victoria died, 1901 and was bought up in a society that was a macrocosm of the larger Victorian culture with its veneration of all things English, the positioning of women as decorative appendages of their husbands from which Queen Victoria herself was exempted. Rigid standards in manners and mores and above all, the conviction that whatever was going on beneath the surface, the appearance of convention must be upheld. Contrast these Victorian values with the sculptor Edward Valentine’s Pronouncement as to what qualities marked the well breed Virginian, namely dignity, simplicity, courtesy, and naturalness and we find a built-in contradiction. Raised in the bosom of traditionalism, ESB’s personality dictated that she would also push the envelope of change. Many times in childhood, her high spirits ran afoul of the strict German governor Frauline Hennas, whose favorite punishment was to lock the unrepentant Elisabeth in the closet. Admired for her beauty and vivacity, she became even more precious to her family after a bout with tuberculosis. Headstrong and conscious that she was the apple of her parent’s eye, mother developed, early, a confidence and self-assuredness that found expression in how she approached the world throughout her life. She was schooled at Miss Jenny Elliott’s, the precursor of Saint Catherine’s, and as a teenager, she went to what was then called a finishing school, Saint Timothy’s outside of Baltimore. She wasn’t even the least perturbed by her father’s insistence that girls should not go to college since her goal at that point in her life was to kick up her heels and have as much fun as possible. Being in your twenties during the twenties made that goal easy to achieve. Forty years later after father’s early death, she left headfirst into college taking courses at eight different colleges before she graduated ten years later at Virginia Commonwealth University.

As a young belle, she was said to have been engaged seven times - before her engagement to Father, that is - to rueys and future Episcopalian bishops, state businessmen, and dubious types too handsome to be trusted. My theory on her multiple engagements is that having discovered early on that the thread of engagements produced diamonds from her parents far handsomer than any her fiancé of the moment could come up with. Mother found it such a lovely and predictable cycle that she perpetuated it. These parental bribes meant to bring ESB back to her senses only wetted her appetite. At this point she was dancing on the thin line that separates conventionally acceptable behavior and its opposite. She knew instinctly where the line was and enjoyed the game since her twin goals in life were to avoid boredom and to avoid boring others. She succeeded to a remarkable degree on both counts by thinking, saying, and doing the unpredictable. But ESB never crossed the line. She may have wanted to be talked of, but she didn’t want to be talked about and she knew her parents would not have tolerated it.

When ESB’s handsome brother Buford returned from World War I, she met a brilliant, reserved, hard working lawyer ten years her senior named James Bocock. He neither danced well nor was good at small talk, but he was constant in his attention between his own trips to Soviet, Georgia to look after the mining interests of Avril Harriman Senior. For nine years, she tried his patience, but in 1928, ESB capitulated and she and James Bocock were married. My sister Bessie was born a year later, my brother Freddie two years after that and I played the caboose arriving in 1941 when Bessie and Freddie were ten and twelve years old. In the 1930s when they were children, mother was what Bessie describes as a “typical Grove Avenue mom”. Always individualistic to be sure, but safely within the bounds of convention. She worked as a society matron on behalf of the Sheltering Arms Hospital, the Memorial Home for Girls, the James River Garden Club, and the APVA, and as hostess for her father after grandmother’s guide died.

Her main interests at this point were preservation and conservation, particularly in efforts to find trees and shrubs tough enough to survive an urban setting. Ones that could both beautify their surroundings and produce cleaner air. Later she became intrigued by the connection between nutrients in the soil and human health, which meant that our backyard was taken over by compost piles; each testing the degradability of combinations of things. Tin cans, approved kitchen garbage, eggshells for the azaleas, cardboard, etcetera, etcetera. Most of my childhood was spent turning compost. As a result of being in a family with a very green thumb, I refused to garden. Bessie once gave me a sign to put in our backyard, which mother adamantly refused to call a garden. It read, “All I grow in my garden is tired”.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, years that made up my childhood, I remember a very different mother than the one that Bessie and Freddie described. Mother by that time was deeply committed to civil battles, usually over saving houses threatened by bulldozers in the prosperous 1950s. Somewhere along the way, Mary Winfield Scott, mother’s first cousin and pioneering Richmond preservationist, had convinced ESB to substitute work gloves for white gloves and to prefer roaming junkyards to putting on society tees. ESB had come to realize that the trenches of the preservation battle involved tackling developers in urban renewal host by host. The economic prosperity that followed World War II saw a flight to the suburbs in Richmond as well in scores of other cities across the nation. The irony in Richmond was that while some colonial and many Victorian architecture examples were neglected on Church Hill, those who could afford it were moving into colonial and Victorian reproductions in the suburbs. Not until 1947 was the National Trust for Preservation created and with it grew a of network of support, focus for lobbying, and a sense of common purpose. In 1956, ESB was one of the six founders of the Historic Richmond Foundation. It was created both to lobby for historic preservation and to offer a platform from which to buy, renovate, and sell historic buildings threatened by development. Concentrating first on a pilot block for Church Hill around Saint John’s Church, then on Church Hill as a whole and gradually expanding its mission to help preserve each of the city’s historic districts, so different in and of themselves, yet so vital to an understanding of how Richmond developed. Preservation nationally got a big boost with the passage in 1966 of the National Historic Preservation Act and it became more economically attractive with the Tax Reform Act of 1976, which gave preferential tax treatment to those involved in rehabbing historic commercial structures. During this period, U.S. was busy founding several entities that are fixtures of the Richmond scene today. The Hand Workshop, the 2300 Club on Church Hill, and the Carriage Museum at a city park called Maymont. In addition to this, her initiative was behind some movements that failed such as efforts to stop the building of the Downtown Expressway, to save the iron fronts on Main Street, and the push to bring trolleys back to Richmond, the first city in the United States to install them. Not to mention, being a college student during much of this period.

All of these efforts, successful and unsuccessful, were an expression of her belief that cities must work to make themselves livable and that the past must inform the present in ways that make the past come alive. Although she was very interested in the past, she did not venerate it. Hers was a positive, future-oriented vision. She didn’t want to shoe handwork or carriages in a museum setting. She wanted to teach people to do handwork and to bring school children to Maymont to actually have a ride in a horse-driven carriage. ESB never got over her first love, which was conservation and as she got older. Her love for Richmond as a livable city meant looking at ways that the natural environment can be made to enhance the built environment. Hence, her opposition to the expressway since it cut off downtown from the city’s most beautiful resource, the James River. When hearing the many things that ESB was involved in, or made note of, it sounds very orderly. One project at a time, adding up as the decades wore on. In fact, it was nothing like that. It was anything but orderly. Battles were fought on many fronts at once. Guerilla tactics were not unknown to her. And in addition to keeping the opposition wondering what her next move would be, her own teammates frequently were left scratching their heads when she made a move in her trademark, lightening quick style. The title of the book is Never Ask Permission because she never did. If you don’t believe me, ask her lawyer Tom Word who had to find rational basis for mother’s intuitive logic. Ask Fred Bocock, my brother, and ESB’s financial advisor after father died when he was called down to Shockoe Bottom from his office in the freezing winter rain. He was there to give his blessing to a bargain of a house at seven thousand dollars. They were standing in the basement of the house with the rat droppings all around and the drug needles tossed in the corner. He knew from experience that whether he approved or not, she would buy the house that was an unlivable wreck, spend multiples of the original price to move it and restore it for many more multiples.

Ask Jack Zehmer, ex-Director of Historic Richmond. ESB would ring him up and in her lovely voice, would tell him in a forty second conversation that she and her sister Mary Ross Reed, a preservationist in her own rite and with whom mother often teamed up, had agreed to buy property slatted to be bulldozed tomorrow. That they intended to deed it to Historic Richmond, expected HRF to put a preservation easement on it, and find a buyer for it. And then she would hang up with Jack, not even totally certain what property she was referring to, much less, which bank held the mortgage. After all it must have seemed, like a bad idea to tell to find the founder of Historic Richmond what she could and could not do.

Ask her daughter-in-law, Berta Bocock. When ESB would burst into her house in the glooming of a cold, December evening, playfully rolling grapefruits that she brought with her at the children and then bundling the children off to help deliver Christmas presents in her ancient green Mercedes, whose back doors were anchored shut by bungee cords attached to the oldest, and therefore, weightiest grandchild. To say that mother’s behavior was idiosyncratic was, as she got older, an inadequate description. As some wise person once said, as we get older, we just get more so. ESB’s idiosyncrasies downright became eccentricities, but that’s not to say there weren’t underlying rationales behind much that she did. Often the rationale was her way of expressing a contradiction, either in her business or her personal life.

Mother believed in benevolent dictatorship. Her sisters and brothers believed in democratic consensus building. When it became clear after father’s death that their vision for Royal Orchard was different form her own, mother brought adjoining property and over the course of two decades, worked to create her own mountain home. Goose Chase, which ESB knew people would refer to as Wild Goose Chase, was as different from the formality of Royal Orchard as it is possible to get. The A frame chalets were made almost entirely out of items she had collected - stray shutters, mantle pieces, sinks and floorboards from junkyards she raided, six foot bathtubs shipped home from trips to England. Balconies and lamps made from the knelled wood of fallen apple tree branches. One night at Goose Chase, cousin Ida Williams, found that her bed had been made up with a linen tablecloth in lieu of sheets that had gone to Richmond to be laundered and had not yet made the round trip. Outside goats lounged on the picnic table and Borsey, the cow, did the mowing. No mechanical machinery was allowed and lunch could as easily be at four o’clock as at one, as it takes a long time to wring a chicken’s neck, pluck it, and cook it. This was all a part of a conscience decision to help her grandchildren get a feel for both the difficulties and pleasures of farm life a century ago.

Goose Chase was Royal Orchard contradicted. Mother’s view of benevolent dictatorship extended to the teachings of morals to her children. She was an absolutist about a parent’s right to say “No” and often strained her daughter’s inventiveness; we had to come up with chaperones for almost anything we wanted that had to do with the opposite sex. Bessie favored Episcopalian bishops. I favored my friends’ fictitious grandmothers. But despite this concentration of what we were up to, mother didn’t have an ounce of prudery in her. Sometimes she contradicted, not societal conventions, but herself. This was particularly true in the mixed messages her children sometimes received. Paradoxically while requiring strict obedience, she prized initiative above almost any other character trait. Often the way to deal with her was to stay out of her peripheral vision. If sighted, you were often given a job to do. And to meet any objection to what you had been up to with an explanation that emphasized the way you are taking the bull by the horns. At least to her girls, the unstated message was to spread our wings as far as possible in getting an education out of state and in making friends. But for goodness sake, when it comes to marrying, marry a Virginian!

I’ve already referred to what being a Virginian meant to the generation that preceded mother. What they had been through gave them a commonality of experience. The right, they felt, to mold the society that made sense to them, if not outsiders. They had had too much of change and continuity was a theme that those who wanted to live in Virginia would ignore at their own peril. Mother herself simply couldn’t fathom putting one’s energy and efforts into any other locale. Mother didn’t think of herself a Southerner, nor particularly as an American. She was a Virginian. Born and bred in the briar patch and would have fully understood Joseph Brian’s statement that, “A Virginian is first and foremost a Virginian.” For Joseph Brian and Elisabeth Scott Bocock, this identity still had a defiant ring to it. But the statement is true for many others as well, both born here’s and come here’s and although defiance is not longer the motivating agent. For us it is rooted in the beauty and bounty of Virginia’s landscape. It is a large part of who we are.

Despite the contradictions and the ways in which ESB enjoyed flouting the conventions of society she, like the early twentieth century women leaders I've referred to, never crossed the line into radicalism. Where she could push change, she did so, but she could accept the larger concept of continuity. After all, she was still a women operating in a man’s world and took care to preserve her leverage in that world by every method her beauty, brains, and financial resources left open to her. No man in mother’s generation would have admitted that he felt women were inferior to men, but she did spend most of her life in a world where feminism had not raised its head. This did not slow her down it all. It just made the game a little tougher and the line not to be crossed harder to discern. Cities, like people, need guardians. And at some point in her middle age, mother moved into that self-appointed role. She raised issues no one wanted to consider, lost as many battles as she won, and was a thorn in the side of generations of city bureaucrats, council members, and sometimes those on her own team. But by the time she reached old age, Richmond realized it was the beneficiary of her energies and was generous in its appreciation of her accomplishments and tolerant of her excesses. She had made a place for herself and in eighty-four years of living had succeeded in her goal of escaping predictability. Mrs. Nanie Fleming, whose search for stimulation was right up there with her lifelong friends once hissed at mother in a fit of loving exasperation, “Oh Elisabeth, why can’t you just be bored like the rest of us?”