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Charlotte: |
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The accountant on west 10th street
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The 25-year-old man was working quietly on West Tenth Street in Charlotte in 1923. He was an accountant for Scott Charnley Company. He had been graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after transferring from Georgia Tech following a football injury.
He joined Phalanx 31, the historic first lodge in his home town, and petitioned for the Scottish Rite degrees, Valley of Charlotte.
In the ensuing 64 years he sustained his Masonic ties, even as his new career took him away from accounting to the west coast. He felt that motion pictures might figure in his future.
Did they ever. He worked hard in Hollywood making more than a hundred movies, including 42 westerns, in which he inevitably starred.
You may remember his name. It was George Randolph Scott. Dropping the George, Randolph Scott became one of the most widely known and successful heroes in American film history. His handsome, rugged, six-foot-four good looks, his I-mean-business demeanor, his straight-arrow authority, his respect for women and his superb good-guy image atop his palomino Stardust made Randolph Scott the ultimate world-class cowboy.*
Over 64 years he sustained his Masonic ties in Charlotte. He’d come home from time to time to visit family, but mostly he worked hard in California.
At first he served as Gary Cooper’s dialog coach for the 1929 film, The Virginian. Then Brother Scott’s big break came in 1936 when he played Hawkeye in Last of the Mohicans. He achieved undisputed stardom in 1941 with Western Union. After that there was always a script and another film waiting for him. As a result of his professional success—and his close attention to The Wall Street Journal between scenes, he left a quarter-billion-dollar estate to his second wife Patricia and children, Christopher and Sandra, when he died in 1987.
He also left millions of fans and good friends including Cary Grant, Joel McCrea, Fred Astaire and fellow Charlottean Billy Graham. Brother Randolph Scott is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Charlotte on a hill overlooking Trade and Tryon. So in a way he is spending eternity on the square.
To men and Masons, he will be remembered as “The Good Guy.”
* Scott wasn’t the only Masonic cowboy, real or movie. Consider Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Will Rogers, John Wayne, Jim Bowie, Kit Carson, Tom Mix, Roy Acuff and William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill).
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Produced by the public relations committee of the Grand Lodge AF&AM of Masons in North Carolina,
2921 Glenwood Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27628 MMVIII
Author/editor: Walter J. Klein wklein(at)carolina.rr.com
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