"The Real Scott Westerman: 100 Years Later
My father, "The Real" Scott Westerman was born 100 years ago today. I often wish I could ask his opinion about the world we are living in. I expect he would say what he always said. "Do good things anyway."
This was his mantra, as a boy, during his military service with The Greatest Generation, as a student, and educator, a community icon and a father. He foresaw the need for positive change and pursued it, even when it was not universally popular. He was willing to risk power and prestige to "do what was right."
His accomplishments still echo today, wherever gifted educators enlighten, wherever compassion is the highest form of wisdom.
Dad spent his final years in assisted living, not fading, but somehow still illuminating Glacier Hills. When the time came to clear out his modest room, my sister and I assumed the task would be brief. He had moved in with the careful curation of someone who understood the narrowing of space that comes with aging. A bed, a desk, a few framed photographs. What could take more than twenty minutes?
We were wrong, of course. Not because there was more to carry, but because there was more to hear. As we made our way down the hallway, we were stopped—again and again—by staff, by residents, by quiet strangers with faces softened by emotion. They needed to tell us something. A story, a moment, a small kindness. A way, sometimes barely perceptible, in which my father had shifted the trajectory of their day, or their life. He had made a practice of this: doing good quietly enough that only in his absence did its outline become fully visible.
Dad had no interest in spectacle, yet he had a magnetism that gathered people all the same. It wasn’t charisma in the traditional, public sense. He wasn’t a performer. He was, instead, the kind of man who made you feel as if you were the center of the universe simply by looking at you. His friend, Dale Leslie, once said that my father’s face would light up “with great anticipation” when he saw you. That glow wasn’t performative; it was real. It was the visible signal of his belief that you, in that moment, mattered.
"I wish I could have told him about my recent 1,513 day streak of walking at least 10 miles a day," his friend Tom Jensen wrote me today... He was pretty active certainly well into his late 80s and thought that was key to his long and healthy life and wanted everyone else in his orbit to have a long and healthy life too."
He was fond of saying, “Strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet”—a phrase so worn by use it risks sentimentality, unless you happened to watch him live it. As superintendent of Ann Arbor Public Schools, he held a role that demanded vision and stamina. He had a talent for discerning potential where others saw liability. A teacher on the verge of being let go became, through his quiet intervention, a career-long asset to the district. A community on the brink of division found, in him, a bridge.
Diversity and inclusion are getting a bad rap these days. But dad built his professional life around it, elevating women and people of color long before such choices were fashionable, or even tolerated. His decisions were rarely radical in tone, but often radical in effect.
He understood the quiet power of steady leadership and how institutional change begins with the unglamorous work of seeing people clearly.
I remember visiting him for lunch at Glacier when a woman paused at our table to tell me he was “the best superintendent we ever had.” Her praise was warm, overflowing. After she left, my father leaned in, eyes dancing. “When I was superintendent,” he said, “she sued me.” I must have looked confused. He smiled gently and explained, “If you live long enough, people forget your mistakes and remember the good things you did. So do a lot of good things.”
It wasn’t a line. It was a philosophy. In his seventies, he became a court-appointed special advocate. In his eighties, he immersed himself in stem cell research. Even as his physical body slowed, his mind remained perpetually in motion, not simply seeking new knowledge, but new connection. He knew the names and stories of his caregivers. He asked after their children, their dreams. Not out of politeness, but because he was genuinely, endlessly curious.
Even in his final months, he was outward-facing. Visitors were greeted not with resignation but with joy. His humility was reflexive. He deflected praise like sunlight off a mirror, insisting that his accomplishments were merely the result of collaboration or luck. But anyone who watched him closely knew better. He made the tough calls. He walked away from organizations that excluded women.
He searched for common ground where others had staked out trenches.
He was a man of faith, but not of dogma. He and my mother once undertook a months-long pilgrimage across nearly every place of worship in Ann Arbor—mosques, synagogues, churches. Quite an experience for a teenager still pondering his own beliefs. It opened our eyes to the power of faith, however it might be interpreted, and the warm, welcoming embrace of community.
What remains now is not his résumé. It is his kindness, left like fingerprints on everything he touched. His legacy is the composite of these soft but indelible impressions—on students, colleagues, caregivers, even adversaries. He believed that kindness was not merely a virtue, but a form of intelligence, a way of navigating the world that acknowledged complexity without giving in to cynicism. A wise course for us in every season, especially today.
When I think of my father now, I think less of the man with a title and more of the man with a twinkle in his eye, whispering wisdom at a lunch table. “Go forth and do good,” he’d say. To live by that code is to live a life of daily, uncelebrated courage. It is to believe, always, in the possibility of better. It is to love the world not for what it is, but for what it can still become.
That was his gift to us. And on the 100th anniversary of his birth, it is one we are still unwrapping.