H. lee scott jr

Lee Scott, the second of three sons, was born in 1949 in Joplin, Missouri, at the hospital closest to his family's hometown of Baxter Springs, Kansas. "At the end of the war, my dad was working as a welder in California," says Scott. "But my mother was an only child, and she wanted to go back to Kansas to be near her parents. They moved into a little house that was just two doors down from where my father grew up."

Scott's mother worked as an elementary school music teacher, and his father owned a Phillips 66 gas station on the iconic cross-country American highway, Route 66. "Baxter Springs was a great place to grow up," says Scott. "Extended family on both sides lived there. It was the kind of place where no one moved in and no one moved out. I went to school with the same 70 kids my whole life, which made it easy to join in activities. I sang in the choir, I played in the band; and I was on the football, basketball, and track teams. You didn't have to be good; you just had to show up."

Scott began working in his father's gas station when he was 12. In those days, the attend

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