Remembering Kay

By T.W. Burger

Kay Scoggins was tall, blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful, kind, affable, tough as nails, really country, and sort of a force of nature.

She served as a patrol officer and state trooper for decades and even ran for president at least once.

She got 13 votes.

In an interview a few years later she said she had not made a lot of promises during her campaign except to ensure freedom of speech and maybe put a doublewide mobile home on the front lawn of the White House.

Even if that had happened, it would have had to be moved to make room for Donald Trump’s UFC Fight Cage.

I first met Kay in grade school in Athens, back in the Jurassic Period and kept in loose touch through high school. After, we mostly lost track, except for during the 10^th reunion of The Class of 1967.

Somewhere I have a photo of her standing with me and some of my friends that night.

Our sports teams were called “The Trojans,” oddly enough, which triggered an endless stream of condom jokes and engendered quite a few post-game fistfights.

I had a huge crush on Kay in school, but back then I was even more shy than I am now. Also, social divisions were a lot more prevalent than they are these days…She did not fit well into my gang at school, and that made socializing awkward.

Yeah…stupid, I know.

Today, less shy after about 40 years of being a reporter, I would eagerly hunker down with Kay at a table over some beers and catch up with how our lives have gone. 

I never hog-tied anyone, but I’ve had my moments.

Too late for that, though. Carpe Diem, the scholars say: Seize the day.

I have a lifetime full of experiences like that: conversations I did not have, bonds that missed reaffirmation.

They say that Time flies.

What they don’t tell you is that the SOB hauls ass.

Unlike me, Kay was not shy. She played sports and was not bashful about standing for – or against – others.

A possibly apocryphal tale says Kay was part of a school group that went skating at a rink some 15 miles from Athens. The story goes that a local boy got a little too “handsy” out on the rink and lost several of teeth.

More verifiable is the tale of what may have triggered Kay’s entry into law enforcement,

According to the story, in 1968, Kay was working as a hostess at a restaurant in the Georgia Center for Continuing Education when a football player did something inappropriate to one of the waitresses.

I would love to have seen it, or at least a video. According to the media, when the police arrived, Kay greeted them and presented the gridiron hero bound on the floor with a tablecloth. The officer asked who had tied the fellow up. Kay stepped right up. She explained that she was from the country, and the technique was called “hogtying.”

The officer laughed and asked if she had ever thought about being a police officer, She said she had not.

But not long after, Kay went to the UGA Police Department and became their first female officer on patrol.

It was the beginning of a pattern.

She eventually moved on to the local county Police Force, where she developed a specialty in sex crimes against kids and in domestic abuse. She apparently played a role in passing laws for child advocacy and safety that remain in the books.

Just before the dawn of the 1980s, Kay applied for a chance to become the first female Georgia State Patrol trooper.

The GSP had a height requirement for its troopers of 6’2”.

Kay met it.

A senior GSP official told her she was wasting her time…that there would never be a woman patrolling with the force.

He was wrong. She became one of the first of four females to be accepted as a Trooper with the Georgia State Patrol. She was posted in the Athens barracks, where she stayed for the next 22 years.

Though she never finished her degree in Criminal Justice, Kay said in an interview that she had completed 5,000 hours of specialized police training, had been a driving instructor and could fill in as a firearms instructor.

She had to retire from the state patrol after a 1995 knockdown-drag-out fight left her with severe shoulder injuries that made it difficult to user her gun arm.

In her later years, she was commonly seen driving a raised Ford F-150 pickup and often carried a firearm and kept her memberships in several institutions, including the American Association of State Troopers and the National Rifle Association.

Damaged shoulder or not, it would have been a bad idea to mess with her.

Kay was married twice, once to a guy I knew slightly from school, but who has also drifted out of my universe. That’s happened too often.

She also had a daughter.

Nancy Kay Scoggins Pickett, 70, died June 7, 2017, at Piedmont- Athens Regional Medical Center, her obit read.

T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks,

He is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.