On a sweltering Friday evening not far from Cape Canaveral, Capt. Winston Scott waited for the signal from his cohorts before blasting off into the unknown.
A former astronaut, Scott is a master of improvisation. That skill served him well on a spacewalk wrangling a drifting satellite back to the shuttle.
And he can certainly shoot from the hip when it comes to public speaking, important in his position as a senior vice president of Florida Institute of Technology. It is a role that has brought him numerous times to Vero Beach.
Before his most recent audience, he hurtled not through space or a speech, but through a spectacular riff of jazz. Scott is a professional trumpet player, the leader of a top-flight band he calls the Cosmic Jazz Ensemble, which earlier this month played for the Eau Gallie Arts District’s First Friday celebration.
Scott, a former Navy test pilot, flew a nine-day mission on Endeavor in 1996 and a 16-day mission the next year aboard Columbia. Together, he logged more than 10 million miles in space, including three spacewalks.
In his youth, though, it wasn’t space miles he soared through, but the musical explorations of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. Jazz was his passion at Florida State University, where in 1968 he was one of only three African-Americans in the school of music. “And the only guy,” he notes.
That foundation in music has served him all his life. Today, along with playing professionally with his band, Scott teaches a select group of advanced jazz students at Florida Tech, and also plays in the faculty band.
Music for Scott was his calling card to the then-barely integrated FSU. It was also his entrée into Miami’s vibrant nightlife. Even in his teens, his playing earned him gigs with nationally-known acts including Betty Wright and Kool and the Gang.
After college, when jazz took a back seat to his fascination with engineering, Scott found music gave him a connection to new places. As he began military life on the move with his wife Marilyn, who teaches computer science at Florida Tech, church choirs and jazz bands welcomed his talent.
In Monterrey, Calif., while earning a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School, he took on the full-time role of directing a 100-member concert choir, including a 20-member band for which he arranged and wrote out music.
“I finally had to limit it,” he says. “I enjoyed it, but it was a lot of work.”
Even in Houston, after being selected for the astronaut program, his co-workers found out he had a music degree and egged him into playing again. “I got out my trumpet and oiled it up, and it sounded horrible. But the more I practiced the better it sounded. That was 20 years ago, and I’ve been playing ever since.”
Following his retirement from the Navy in 1999, Scott went back to FSU as vice president of student affairs. He returned to Cape Canaveral in 2003 to serve as executive director of the Florida Space Authority, an advisory board to Florida’s governor and legislature. While there, he taught as an adjunct at Florida Tech and in 2008 became dean of the College of Aeronautics.
Soon after he moved back to Brevard County, he started going to open mic nights at Heidi’s, a well-known jazz club in Cocoa Beach. Sitting in with bands at first, he eventually pulled a group of musicians together as the Cosmic Jazz Ensemble.
And since 2010, he has directed a student jazz ensemble, the Florida Tech Jazz Syndicate.
“This is complex music by sophisticated musicians. It requires a high level of musicianship,” he says.
Scott points out that engineering students often show a keen interest in music. But for him, the sequence was reversed.
Scott’s talent for music was already clear at Coral Gables High School, where he was one of some 200 students to switch from the all-black Carver High in the mid-1960s, when integration finally came to Dade County.
There, his trumpet playing flourished. He also learned bass guitar. His senior year, he formed a rock band called Sir Winston and His Court. His bass player, Will Lee, went on to play with Paul Shaffer on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” Will Lee’s father was the late Dr. William Lee, dean of the University of Miami School of Music, who tried to recruit Scott with offers of a scholarship.
Scott’s dream, though, was to go away to school.
It was his band director, Bill Ledue (later the director of the Orange Bowl Parade and half-time show), who suggested Scott apply to FSU. He did, but wasn’t accepted, and he was too embarrassed to tell Ledue. “Finally I couldn’t stall any longer. I told him I wasn’t accepted. And he said, ‘Come with me.’”
Scott took a seat outside Ledue’s office and watched through the glass as Ledue dialed the phone.
At one point, Ledue popped his head out of the office. “Have you still got a B average?”
Scott did. Three days letter, he got his letter of acceptance.
To this day, Scott is struck by Ledue’s fairness – a white teacher going out on a limb for a black student in 1968.
“He went beyond being fair – he didn’t have to make that phone call. That call got me into FSU and broadened my horizons and introduced me to other things.”
If Scott’s horizons were ever narrow, they were kept in sharp focus by his parents. His father was one of the first two African-American postal carriers in Miami; his mother went to school at night to become a high school office manager.
Though neither went to college, they drilled their children on the importance of education. They also pushed them to be leaders, and that push began at the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, founded in 1895 in Coconut Grove where the family lived.
Scott’s father was a deacon; his mother played piano for the choir; Winston and his brother often joined in with their instruments.
“Our parents always had us up in front of audiences. We were kids who had to participate. If there was a Christmas play, we were in it. If there was a speech to give, we would memorize it and give it.”
By 12, Winston was “acting superintendent” of the church youth group that met before each evening service. “I conducted the whole thing,” he recalls.
That meant knowing Roberts Rules of Order, and for that Winston was well-prepared. “My father had the book,” he says. The family would hold pretend meetings to make motions and vote over things like hot chocolate for breakfast; each would have to know exactly how to respond.
That sense of orderly process never left him, even in his days of student activism, where he once missed an exam to attend a demonstration – but not without asking the professor first. FSU was known as the “Berkeley of the South,” with protests over civil rights, women’s rights and the Vietnam War. Scott himself took part in the occupation of the FSU president’s office – with the National Guard posted outside with bayonet rifles.
FSU also introduced him to engineering. He wedged calculus and physics into an overload of courses hoping to double major, but then FSU closed its engineering college.
With a music degree, and burdened with student loans, Scott needed a graduate school to get the engineering degree he needed. He found it in the Navy.
“They gave me the tests and I did really well,” he recalls. “The Navy was wining and dining me with steak dinners and showing us films and field trips to the Jacksonville Naval Station. I said, ‘I’m sold.’”
Scott’s daughter Mary is a journalist with two master’s degrees and works with an AIDS research group. She has applied to a doctoral program in public health at Emory.
Scott’s son, also named Winston, is flying F-18s aboard the USS Harry Truman, about to become a commanding officer. Two months ago when he was interviewed in the online Guardian newspaper, the Truman was anchored off the coast of Saudi Arabia, sending its jets on bombing missions over ISIS-held territory.
“I’m very proud of him,” says the senior Scott.