109 East Palace Read Free Page B

once confided to a friend that she had arrived at the elite women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts, with every intention of becoming a campus leader. She was outgoing and engaging, and from early on had demonstrated the great appetite for life that was her father’s greatest gift to her. As the fourth of five children in the large, noisy, and devoted Scarritt family, Dorothy had grown up with a firm sense of her place in the world.
    The Scarritts were an exceptionally upright, educated, and substantial midwestern clan. Her father, William Chick Scarritt, had earned a law degree from Boston University and was a prominent corporate lawyer and leading citizen in their town. He was active in civic affairs and politics, and he was a power at the Melrose Methodist Episcopal Church, which had been founded by the family patriarch, the Reverend Nathan Scarritt, a well-known local minister. The Reverend Scarritt had come to Missouri from Edwardsville, Illinois, in 1848 to “teach the classics” in the barren prairie outpost and had earned a reputation as a fine preacher, and an even better businessman. By the time he died in 1890, he had accumulated 260 acres of farmland in the Northeast District, which made him one of the largest landowners in the area and one of the first millionaires. He left each of his six children a substantial sum and enough acreage to build on, so that when Dorothy was growing up, the Scarritts were a powerful Kansas City family and among them owned nearly a dozen mansions on the banks of the Missouri River. Dorothy’s mother, Frances Davis, was from a southern family that had migrated to Missouri, and the lovely redhead retained the genteel manners and impassioned Confederate politics of her old Virginia roots. She was a leading light in Kansas City’s social committees and garden clubs and a strong supporter of the arts.
    Dorothy’s father was the chief influence in her early life, and it was from him she got her buoyant personality and undeniable presence. He raised his children to be strong, self-reliant, and athletic, and Dorothy and her siblings pursued tennis, swimming, hiking, and mountain climbing. William Scarritt spared no expense to see that his children benefited from the finest academic training, taking the unusual step at the time of sending both his sons and his daughters to the only private preparatory school in the area, and then east to college. He loved to travel and had a taste for dramatic scenery, taking his children on expeditions to Alaska, across Canada to the Rockies, and to Yosemite National Park and the western United States. After college, he escorted Dorothy on a grand tour of Europe. He encouraged her to pursue a life of pleasure, interest, and adventure. But as forward-thinking as he was in many ways in regard to women, he was also conventional enough to expect his only surviving daughter would eventually come home and settle down. On her return from Europe, however, Dorothy had difficulty resigning herself to the slow, predictable rhythms of her parents’ country club life and to the succession of tea dances and balls, all intended to lead her into a union with a boy from another good family.
    In the fall of 1923, four years after graduating from Smith, she received an invitation to visit a college classmate, Alida Bigelow, who was vacationing at White Bear Lake in Minnesota. Dorothy seized the opportunity to escape Kansas City and renew her old acquaintance. While she was there, she met and immediately fell in love with her friend’s cousin, Joseph Chambers McKibbin.He had sailed his own boat on White Bear Lake since boyhood, and as he took her out on the water, he regaled her with tales of his racing exploits. He was thirty, a Princeton graduate, and a World War I vet, though, as he was quick to acknowledge, he had spent all his time as an army major training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. He was tall and an excellent athlete: he made varsity crew in college, was