Scott Thomson Crosswait (1927)

CROSSWAIT, DEVINE, STILLMAN, ROSE

Posted By: Pat Hochstetler
Date: 11/14/2008 at 14:19:20

Earlham Library Collection
Earlham Echo
November, 1927

Scott Thomson Crosswait, first son of Eugene M. and Agnes Crosswait, was born in Earlham, Iowa, November 15, 1894, and spent all of his early years in the community of his birth. He graduated from Earlham Academy in the class of 1912, and is the first of that class to be called. In scholarship and athletic attainments, as in all he undertook, Scott was successful. He was a member of the famous football team of 1911 which won his school a reputation state-wide. On the track, also, he was an outstanding figure. It was Scott’s way to give all he had, a trait which was to drive him on, self-unsparing, as long as he lived.

Following graduation he spent the next two years in Earlham, one of them as teacher in the rural school at Pitzer, the remaining time in a clerical capacity in the two drug stores. The twelve mile walk to his country school was one of the incidents of his first year in the profession which he was later to choose as a life calling.

In 1915 he was elected superintendent of the Melcher Consolidated school and served the community faithfully until 1917, when, realizing the inadequacy of his education, he entered the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His course was interrupted by the World War, and in 1918 he enlisted in the navy, taking the intensive instruction in navigation on the Great Lakes for which his study in engineering had adapted him.

Following his discharge he resumed teaching, spending the next three years as superintendent at Boyden. He had met Miss Mildred Katheryn Devine during the year at Madison, and on the 7th of June, 1921 these two lives which so ideally complemented each other were united at her home at Madison. Spending most of that summer in Earlham, the couple established a home at Alleman in the fall, and Scott took up his last life’s work, the superintendency of the consolidated school.

Surviving him are his wife and two children Mary Jean and Mark; his parents Mr. and Mrs. E. M. Crosswait, of Des Moines; six sisters and brothers, Mrs. Paul R. Stillman, Earlham, Mrs. R. L. Rose, Ft. Wayne, Ind., Earle M., of Melvin, Iowa, Glenn and Lloyd of Waterloo, Iowa, and Marjorie who resides with her parents; several nephews and nieces, aunts, uncles and cousins and friends in number inestimable.

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