Scott plans to walk all 30 precincts in her district

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By JoANNE YOUNG / Lincoln Journal Star

On an August day with low humidity and bright sun, Susan Scott is walking Precinct 9E6.

She rings the doorbells up and down Cooper Avenue, the 3400 and 3500 blocks. 

At one of those houses, Brooke Moormeier sits on a small, sheltered porch. She’s 18, a recent Norris High School graduate, soon to enter a radiology technology program at Southeast Community College.

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Legislative candidate Susan Scott visits with John Bents as she campaigns on Cooper east of 33rd Street. (Robert Becker)

Legislative candidate Susan Scott visits with John Bents as she campaigns on Cooper east of 33rd Street. (Robert Becker)

Scott walks up to her.

“I thought you were painting your toenails and I was going to put mine out and say, ‘Would you paint mine?’” Scott says as her greeting.

She sits down next to the friendly teen, who is smoking a cigarette, and starts into her quick list of Susan Scott facts.

She’s lived in District 29 in southeast Lincoln 30 years.

She’s run all 31 Lincoln Marathons.

She moved to Nebraska as a college student to attend Creighton University.

And, by the way, she says to the teenager, you need to quit smoking. You have that beautiful smile. Will you think about it?

Brooke nods yes.

Scott continues for a while to solidify her argument against smoking and to give the young woman healthful suggestions. She also hands the new potential voter a registration form.

“There’s a man and woman on the ballot, so vote for the woman,” she says as she gets up from the stoop and turns to walk to the next house.

Two days earlier, she says as she troops down the sidewalk, she also had persuaded a 71-year-old woman — on the day before her 72nd birthday — to fill out a voter registration form.

On this mid-afternoon walk down the block, residents who have dahlias, coleus, potted lilies, mums in their landscape get  compliments from the garden-loving candidate for the Legislature.

To accomplish her goal, she plans to walk all 30 precincts in her district. This one has 326 homes, 388 mailboxes, 645 voters.

So far, she has completed 14 precincts, repeating her resume at house after house as she goes.

* Former public school teacher with a master’s in guidance and counseling, and now a substitute teacher in high school and middle school language arts for Lincoln Public Schools.

* 1910 bungalow owner.

* Management consultant.

* Former executive director of the YWCA.

* Five-year breast cancer survivor.

Back at her Cooper Street home, sitting on her patio, Scott pops the top on a caffeine-free Diet Coke and reviews election figures: On this Friday it’s 80 days to the election. She notes that of the nearly 25,000  registered voters in her district, only 28 percent exercised that privilege in the last election.

Scott is semi-retired and living on her savings. As such, she plans her trips to the store carefully. Reuses. Recycles.

She uses her air conditioner only occasionally. Once this summer, she left it on overnight.

“I felt kind of decadent,” she said.

Her entertainment includes  kayaking on Holmes Lake; as she  glides across the water, she also picks up trash.

She spends as much time as possible in the soothing outdoor  setting she created with her long-time partner Jim Budde.

Her dad, who died when she was 25, loved to garden. She started growing her own flowers and vegetables three to four years ago. The Lincoln Rose Society member has at least 20 rose bushes, 25 dahlia plants, and lilacs, hydrangeas, bleeding hearts.

In a walk around the yard, she eats a couple of small tomatoes right off the vines.

In high school, Scott had a job at South Dakota State squeezing tomatoes into a cheese cloth and harvesting the seeds for new hybrid plants. She laments the lost  taste in today’s lower acid tomatoes. 

Scott grew up Susan Quass in Brookings, S.D., population  10,000, with a stay-at-home mom, U.S. postal employee dad and a big sister.

When it was time to go to college, they offered her four years at South Dakota State, a car and a leather coat — or two years at Omaha’s Creighton University with no perks.

She chose Creighton, and then got grants and a job in the cafeteria to pay for her last two years.

“I smelled like a hash cook for my first class,” she said.

After getting her bachelor’s degree in English, she went back to South Dakota for a master’s in education, guidance and counseling.

That’s when she started running. At age 24, she couldn’t run  two consecutive blocks, she said. But after three months she could run a short mile. And by the time she was 35, she reached a 9 minute, 6 second pace.

She found running to be cathartic and motivational, and a good way to make friends. Next year, she plans to run her 32nd Lincoln Marathon.

Scott doesn’t have children of her own, but she has “grand-neighbors,” and spends time helping them with homework and taking them places.

“I take my grandneighboring kind of seriously,” she said.

She does not sit on the sidelines, she said.

“I tend to get involved with people,” she said. “It’s hard to sit and watch if I see something that needs to be fixed. That’s what makes me tick. I see what needs to be done and act on it.”

Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.