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The Scotts fitted easily into Ottawa society—the society, basically, of a small town (despite its 154,951 population) that depends less on money than on knowing people and being of respectable family. The Scotts had little money, but they gave their daughter everything they could afford. She went to the Ottawa Normal Model School, got plenty of dolls, and a pair of ice skates when she was six. Until Barbara Ann was ten, her mother made all her clothes. She was the kind of little girl who was nev.er mussed or wrinkled. She kept dogs, cats, birds, rabbits and white mice, and played the piano. The boy who used to be a neighbor still proudly displays a scar over his left eye where Barbara Ann hit him with a shovel: it is one of the few unladylike acts ever recorded against her; and the boy is now convinced that he must have been in the wrong.
The Determined Girl. She was already devoted to ice skating by the time she was nine, and gave up going to school. For 2½ hours each morning she was tutored by Miss Seeley, who later also tutored the grandchildren of Princess Alice and the Governor General. As a French student, Barbara Ann was embarrassed by "masculine" and "feminine" for genders, and substituted "boy" and "girl."
She wa's a natural athlete. Her daddy taught her how to swim in two weeks. She climbed trees like a monkey and hung by her knees from the branches. She rode horseback and played golf. Skating was her own idea. From her father, who despite his invalid body worked 18 to 20 hours a day in the Department of National Defense, she learned tenacity. In the barnlike Minto Club, not far from her house, she practiced her first figures;—learning to do eights, brackets and counters ; to skate on the inside or outside edge of the runners (never on the flat of the blade); to avoid the "wobbles" which leave wavering traces.
Big kids used to tear-skate through the figures she was laboriously tracing. Sometimes they knocked her down. But she always got up and went carefully on. She never went home until she finished the required number of hours of practice, and when she did, it was often with chafed knees and dried tearstains on her cheeks. At eight, as the Spirit of the New Year in the Minto Follies, the Ottawa Journal called her "the darling of the show." At ten she became the youngest Canadian girl ever to win the gold medal,* and met Sonja Henie, who took Barbara out to tea and gave her an autographed picture of herself in a gold frame.
The Dedicated Girl. Sonja, ten times world's champion, was not very popular around Ottawa, after a visit in 1932 (as an amateur) when she demanded, but did not get, $2,000 expense money for herself, papa, mama, trainer, maid, dog and parrot. She was never Barbara Ann's ideal, but she represented her objective. At eleven, Barbara Ann took one big step toward that objective—by becoming junior champion of Canada. Two years later, in September 1941, Clyde Scott collapsed while watching a bridge game, and died. It almost broke his daughter's heart.