Darlene (Scott) Kerr

Ancestors

Descendants

Problems/Questions Profile managers: Darlene Kerr [send private message] and Tovah Whitesell [send private message]

Biography

Birth and Early Life

J. Darlene Scott was the first born child of Jack Elliott Scott and Virginia Margaret Wheeler in 1942 in Los Angeles, California, United States.

Sibling

1. Jack Elliott Scott II still living.

I attended so many elementary schools due to my father's occupation that there is no record and I remember very little about them, including names. We often moved in just a matter of months. My brother Jack Elliott Scott II was born in 1950 in Los Angeles, California when we lived on Nelson Avenue in Redondo Beach, Los Angeles, California. Within a few years of his birth, the family moved to Dallas, Texas and to Fort Worth, Texas and to New Jersey, Kansas and Minnesota. Each time we returned to California for a short time. In 1959 we moved to Rancho Santa Fe, San Diego, California, a small and beautiful community with almost perfect year round mediterranean climate.

Main Street Rancho Santa Fe

We remained there for a number of years. I attended San Dieguito High School in Encinitas, San Diego, California during my freshman and sophomore years, went to Boydens private school in downtown San Diego for part of my junior year and then to Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles, California for the remainder of that year while living with my maternal grandparents in Manhattan Beach. During my senior year, I lived at home with my mother and brother, Jack, and graduated from San Dieguito. During this time I met the man I was to marry and we dated through most of my senior year in high school while he was home for a break from college in New Mexico. His family had recently moved to Rancho from Dobbs Ferry, New York.

Bill Cobb, in white jacket, & Darlene Scott, in black dress & pearls, in Rancho Santa Fe at party. All couples shown here married within a few months.

First Marriage and Family

I was first married to William Warren Cobb in 1960 and we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where our son William Scott Cobb was born. Scott is our only child. Soon after Scott's birth, we moved back to Rancho Santa Fe, San Diego, California and lived with Bill's parents for a short time until we got our own apartment and Bill returned to school to get his degrees, first in Botany and then as a teacher. I must say here that my husband, Michael and I are the best of friends with Bill and his now wife, Robey. Robey likes to say that we are wife-in-laws. Bill, Scott and I spent a lot of time camping in the Sierra Nevadas, fishing, skiing, hiking and traveling to other places in the United States. We seemed to move a lot, but that was due to changes in finances, schooling, family responsibilities (I was given custody of my brother Jack when I was 20). Bill and I divorced in July 1976 in San Diego, California.

Education and Work Life

I had returned to school to obtain a college degree while I was still married to Bill taking a few classes at a time, but by 1977 I was able to take a full load of classes at San Diego State University while working at the University of California San Diego in La Jolla. I was working with the art department in the library and obtained a BA in that field with a minor in psychology. I Continued to work at UCSD for a number of years. For me, that combination of art and history were perfect.

Second Marriage

In 1989 I married Dr. Dennis Fetko, an animal behaviorist. I had switched to selling real estate in order to get ahead financially, but we discovered that he and I worked well together in his field; so I became his assistant, wife, office manager, and his co-host on our radio program about animals. Dennis and I did a lot of community service work that involved the animal-people bond and relationship. We traveled the world, mostly working. New Zealand, Australia and Italy are my favorite places and Saudi Arabia the least favorite. He was hired as the Director of the National Wildlife Reserve based in Taif, Saudi Arabia, under the auspices of the San Diego Zoological Society, to facilitate the reintroduction of the Arabian Oryx into the wild. The Oryx are a reclusive animal that had been hunted to extinction. Not the brink of extinction, extinction in the wild. The few living animals had been in zoos and preserves. The herd in Saudi Arabia had contracted Tuberculosis. ^[1] Humans didn't know much about the animal. Our job was to study them and put together a program that would allow animals to be successfully introduced to the wild. I spent most of my days with the young animals of the C herd, taking notes and making suggestions based on my observations of their natural habits. For instance, the Wildlife personnel had been having difficulty in transitioning animals from the very small protective holding areas where newborns were kept to the larger areas where they would be able to graze. It was interesting and rewarding work. Most enjoyable were the interactions with the Bedouin tribesmen who would eventually be their caretakers. For them to have to deal with women under any circumstances was problematic at best. Many adventures were had by all! Dennis implemented procedures that eventually led to a successful reintroduction. I got to be a cog in that wheel and found it one of the most rewarding experiences in my life in spite of the difficulties with the culture. We lived on the Wildlife Reserve with an International staff. I made friends with some of the Saudis and had many a long discussion on the differences in our cultures. I absolutely owe my life to the quick thinking of my brave Bedouin driver on one memorable occasion.

Arabian Oryx in Israel

^[2]

The good memories of my time in this horribly prohibitive culture are the wonderful smell when you walk through the spice souk (market place) and the peculiar feeling of knocking aside gold chains and belts and other beautiful things hanging from the ceilings in the little gold shops walking through the gold souk. There was a prince who befriended us because we helped him get medical help for his precious horses. On many occassions we went to his horse farm and were served dinner (which went well into the early morning when it was Ramadan) often sitting outside on gorgeous huge Persian rugs with banquets for your back. Very tall black Sudanese slaves (it's supposed to be an illegal practice there, but they openly admit to doing it) served our food and drink. Our discussions with the prince and his brother were open and enlightening.

We were there a little less than six months. The longest six months of my life. I don't think it's probably wise to go into my thoughts on the treatment of people let alone women in Saudi Arabia. Let's just say it isn't on my list of places to return to ever. Boy do we have a lot to be grateful for in this country. And we need to guard it with our last breath of life. We who are interested in genealogy have it driven home to us every day just how much our forefathers and foremothers had to sacrifice to give us what we have. I guess this is particularly poignant as I write today, Thanksgiving 2013.

Third Marriage and Retirement Years

My best friend since we were 14 and 15 years old is Terry Ruth Kerr. Her brother, Lt. Col. Michael Scott Kerr, was a 19 year old in the United States Marine Corps when I met him. We have been friends forever it seems like.

Michael at Air Command & Staff College in 1978

We got together late in life and married in Washington state in 2001. I gained two stepdaughters, Nadia Kerr Palmer and Tovah Kerr Whitesell and Michael gained a stepson, Scott and a grandson, David Scott Cobb. All in all not a bad deal. We moved from Washington state to Nevada where we reside with our Japanese Spitz, Suki.

Suki Kerr.

We both love to travel and have been to England several times, Scotland, Germany and to Hawaii more times than I like. Michael loves it there. He was a POW in Hanoi (a reconnaissance pilot in the United States Air Force by then and later a fighter pilot) for over 6 years. Due to the greater number of physical problems that he faces each year from all of that starvation and torture, we travel less these days. I must say that he is one of the most cheerful and upbeat people I have ever known and I really don't know how he manages it after all of that. Having met some of his fellow "jailbirds" as they call themselves, their ebullience and joy in life seems to run rampant throughout their ranks.

Sources

• California Birth Certificate.
• Nevada Marriage License.
• San Diego, California Divorce Decree.
• San Diego Marriage License.
• San Diego, California Divorce Decree
• Washington State Marriage License and Certificate.
• San Diego State University Degree.
• Don't need 'em. I was there!
• First-hand information. Entered by Darlene Scott at registration.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Please see explanations of situation below.
2. ↑ Photo was taken by Tamar Assaf. The Oryx is a medium sized antelope with long, straight horns. They were extinct in the wild, but saved by various zoos and private preserves. The small herd that was sent to Saudi Arabia contracted tuberculosis. Ordinarily any animal with tuberculosis would be euthanized, but these were some of the most valuable animals on earth because the gene pool was now so small. Talk about genealogy! You wouldn't believe what they had to do to make a strong genetic balance with such limited resources. A team of scientists from all over the world devised a plan to save them by putting medicine that would control the disease in their feed. TB is never gone. It hides in the spinal column for the rest of the animal's life whether or not they are symptomatic, but the medicine controlled the disease enough to allow them to lead useful and comfortable lives and most importantly, to breed. The problem was that if the mother so much as breathed on the newborn calf, the calf would probably get TB. The calves were pulled from the mother in the A herd (herd with TB) before she could lick them or nurse them. These calves were the B herd. The C herd were from breeding B herd members. The reason for this is the incredibly contagious nature of Tuberculosis. No risks could be taken with these valuable animals. So, you can see, those infants didn't really know much about being Oryx without parents teaching them the ropes. If humans interact too much, the animal imprints and will never be successful on its own. There was a fine and very interesting line that had to be drawn and it was our job to figure it out and then implement so that their Bedouin caretakers would be able to understand and take over the process. During my many long hours with the C herd, I figured out that if I didn't feed the babies or do any of the fundamental care taking, I could sit with them reading or writing for a short time and they found enough comfort with my presence that they would venture out into their bigger lodgings and adjust faster; so at a very young age certain people did hands-on care and others made their presence known as they did other clean-up or chores in the pens. They didn't imprint. I was like a fixture that was familiar. The elderly male Saudi royal family members would just about faint when they saw a "woman" in with the animals because of the long horns. They really had a lot to say about the fact that I was in my work clothes without the obligatory abaya (black tent) covering myself. Fortunately, they couldn't do anything to me as we were under the protective wing of the late Prince Saud al Faisal, the Saudi Foreign Minister. He understood that I was part of the package and assisted my husband in his work and could do things that he didn't have time to do.

Acknowledgements

Darlene Scott Kerr created this profile. All of the information here is directly from her, added bio and sources.

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Some WikiTree cousins:

Name	Relation	Degree
President George Washington	8th cousin	6x
President John Quincy Adams	6th cousin	8x
President Chester Alan Arthur	6th cousin	3x
President John Calvin Coolidge Jr.	8th cousin	2x
President Hiram Ulysses S. Grant	7th cousin	3x
President Herbert Clark Hoover	9th cousin	1x
President James Madison Jr.	8th cousin	3x
President Richard Milhous Nixon	9th cousin	1x
President Ronald Wilson Reagan	14th cousin
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt	7th cousin	2x
President Harry S. Truman	11th cousin	1x
Louisa May Alcott	6th Cousin	2x
Mary Richardson	12th cousin	2x
Paula J.	10th cousin	3x
Philip Smith	9th cousin
Mags Gaulden	10th cousin	1x
Ray Domanski	10th cousin	2x
Al Adams	4th cousin	1x
Nae Lockhart	10th cousin	1x
Vic Watt	9th cousin	1x
Abby Brown Glann	9th cousin	3x
Kitty Cooper Smith	8th cousin	1x
Keith Hathaway	8th cousin	2x
Ronnie Lee Wheeler	1st cousin
Col. Harvey Carroll Copeland Jr.	14th cousin	POW
Col. Willard Selleck Gideon	11th cousin	POW
Orvon Grover Autry	1x
Lucille Desiree Ball	10th cousins	1x
Robert Lee Frost	8th cousin	4x

Wiki Will

In the event of my death or inability to continue, I would like to make the following provisions for the future of the profiles I manage. I would like my stepdaughter, Tovah Briana Kerr (Whitesell), who is a member and on each of these Trusted Lists now, to be the PM on the following:

Michael Scott Kerr, my husband

Darlene Scott Kerr, myself

William Scott Cobb, son

William Warren Cobb, son's father

David Scott Cobb, grandson

Nadia Shauntel Kerr (Palmer), stepdaughter

In the event of my death or inability to proceed, I would like all other profiles, public or private, that I now manage to be handled by:

Terry Wright

Paula J

Mary Richardson