There’s probably no rock & roller in Cleveland over the age of 25 who doesn’t know who Jane Scott is. The tireless reporter wrote about pop music for the Plain Dealer for nearly 40 years, starting in 1964 when she covered the Beatles because no one else wanted to. Scott passed away Monday at the age of 92. She was living at Ennis Court in Lakewood and had Alzheimers for the past few years.
The Cleveland native came to her métier late. She graduated from the University of Michigan and served as a WAVE during World War II. She landed at the Plain Dealer in 1952, following a stint with a Chagrin Valley community paper. During the ’50s and early ’60s, she handled the few beats then open to women: society news, and teen and “golden age” columns.
When the Beatles hit the U.S. in 1964, most newspapers covered them at a distance, usually in the form of a condescending, bemused column by some middle-aged writer who compared them unfavorably to Tony Bennett and Benny Goodman and opined that they would be forgotten by next year.
Scott approached them instead — like she approached all stories — without preconceived attitude. Those who criticized her coverage because she didn’t write high-flown analyses of the music and criticized rarely and only gently missed the point. She was first of all a reporter, aiming to get the story of who, what, where, when and why. It wasn’t that she didn’t know some of the music she was writing about was mediocre. But her attitude was that if a band or musician cared enough to be making the music, and someone cared enough to listen, they deserved respect.
The only thing that turned her off was a musician’s blatant disrespect and rudeness, especially toward fans, and she had a sly way of working it into a story without being nasty. She also encouraged younger reporters, including me (I was the freelance second-string rock writer for the Plain Dealer for more than a decade in the late ’70s and ’80s). She didn’t have an envious bone in her body and didn’t feel threatened by those who might have wanted to be in her position, perhaps because she knew how much work and dedication were involved.
