Kathleen Jennie Carlos Scroggins

Kathleen Jennie Carlos Scroggins was born March 20, 1932. A native of Provincetown, MA on the tip of Cape Cod, she was of mostly Portuguese heritage. Her bi-lingual skills did not really survive her childhood, but her family has marked the years and special occasions with Portuguese foods and always delightful return visits to the little tourist town on the Cape, crowded with stories and spectacles. But the sleepy seaside days of Kathleen’s childhood were punctuated by World War II, a period when her family had to leave the dunes carpeted by blueberry bushes and beach plums for the factories of Connecticut where her parents worked for the war effort. Back home after the war, with her parents busy in the growing tourist industry, Kathleen excelled through high school to be named Valedictorian of her graduating class in 1949.

Soon after that, in the earliest days of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force opened a radar base just up the road, and a lanky Southerner named Curtis Scroggins found his way to a windswept beachhead in North Truro. It wasn’t long before he visited Adams Pharmacy on Commercial Street in Provincetown, where at the soda fountain he quickly impressed with his Louisiana drawl and manners.

It was a quick and heady courtship, and Curt and Kat, as they were commonly known to family and friends, married at St. Peter’s in Provincetown, on October 13, 1951. She was about 15 minutes late for the ceremony, and it only got worse after that! But time was on their side, and Kat and Curt were a great and enduring love story. Life brought many stresses and challenges, but they never failed to place the expression of love, and the sharing of kindness and laughter, as priorities. For their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, they dressed in their wedding outfits, with his Air Force uniform not even close to buttoning over his middle-aged middle, and her wedding dress refusing to zip. They posed for a photo, we kids had it made into a poster, and they merrily hung it on their bedroom wall.

Perfect? No, of course not. Their first seven children arrived in nine years, and diaper pails were more numerous than bouquets of flowers. Until the birth of Amy, their seventh child, Kat went back to work between every pregnancy. They had left Cape Cod and settled in Chicago, where Curt attended DeVry on the G.I. Bill and worked for different companies designing electronic and telephonic switches and systems. After his factory shifts, he delivered pizza to bring in more money.

Her children grew, standing taller and taller in the halls of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School, as her thick New England accent gradually broadened to adopt some flat Midwestern patterns. Glen, Kathy, Mike and David formed a neat quartet, followed after a small break by the trio of Sharon, Danny and Amy. A big house on Pensacola Avenue barely contained the energy within it. And Kat was perhaps the most energetic of the entire household! She simply never stopped. From working outside of the home, she would swivel to meal preparation, evening family time, getting everyone bathed and bedded, and then late night chores of diapers and school uniforms. Every fall, this to-do list expanded with her nearly obsessive love of Christmas Cookies, and late at night she would bake and put away, leaving tantalizing aromas and strict embargos on sampling anything before Christmas!

Curt was the wisecracker, the wit, the punchline guy. Kat was simply the party. And loved it. No occasion was beyond decoration and celebration. Her joy in joy was infectious. It didn’t matter if money was always a little tight, each of us would get dozens of Christmas gifts, with

many of them coming from garage sales and still bearing masking tape prices. But what a colorful mountain of gifts it made! Pair that with platters of Christmas Cookies(finally!), and takeout hamburgers (once every year, Merry Christmas!), and it was a daylong party.

The Christmas celebration played out against a tattered sign reading Happy Birthday!, with big block letters and shredded paper fringe – it stayed permanently anchored to the dining room wall and got dusted regularly even as its initially bright colors faded and took on a rather dutiful look. After the arrival of Paul and Jody to the family, there was almost always a birthday around the corner, and Kat’s cheerleading of the party even trained Daisy, our dog, to bay throughout the singing of Happy Birthday, her tail taut and her head held high in celebration.

Kat’s total embrace of motherhood (which didn’t always mean a good mood, but oh well) is one of the most remarkable aspects of her time with us. She was uniquely willing and able to extend the force of her own love and zeal, to channel them to her children and others regardless of what it was that ignited their passion or curiosity. She was a blunt but powerful tool of self-development. A woman without any pronounced hobbies or passions of her own poured out rivers of focused encouragement and unconditional love to every young person she knew. Kat Scroggins was really, really good at inspiring.

The family relocated to Louisiana in 1973, and the last six of Kat’s children felt her strong imprint in their schooling too, when she became a regular substitute teacher in the Bossier City schools. And here she came into her own, as a star of sorts, an incredibly popular person. She presented a ‘who’s-got-time-to-waste-judging-you?’ manner, with which she dispensed encouragements to timid kids and bold challenges to bullies and hotheads who thought they had grown out of vulnerability. She stood out from all the other adults, and kids gathered close, let down their guards, let themselves be moved by this incredibly interested and friendly champion of whatever they honestly gave themselves to.

By the time they were mostly empty nesting, Kat quit teaching and became the school crossing guard for Waller Elementary around the corner from the house, a job to which she was almost always late and arrived in a frequently too fast car, especially given that she could have walked it easily. But here again, and over years and years, she wove herself into the lives of countless children, asking about their hopes and quests, asking for updates and remembering, marking their days with a watchful love.

Until she could no longer navigate the physical challenges of dining out and errands, Kat was routinely greeted in restaurants and stores by an adult face with maybe misty eyes, or proud ‘I-did-it!’ eyes, and reminded how she had made a difference, been treasured, woven herself into the very heart of someone else’s story. And there she’ll stay.

Her story is ours to share now: her husband of 66 years, Curt, never less than the charming Southern gentleman and her consistently gallant champion; her children in order, with their spouse’s name following, include Glen and Lynn, Kathy, Michael and Shannon, David and Helen, Sharon and Harvey, Danny and Chuck, Amy and Ray, Paul and Kaye, and Jody and Wade; her brother, Frankie and his wife Susan; Curt’s brother and his wife Donald and Sandi Scroggins; thirteen grandchildren: Carley, Andrew, Joni, Nicole, James, Peter, Keeley, Stephen, Daniel, Phillip, Mitchell, Caleb and JingJing; fourteen great grandchildren, and a host of nieces and nephews.