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Robert W. Scott learned a lot growing up in a political family on their Alamance County farm.

"I once heard my father say that he had been taught that a man could never go to heaven if he was not a Presbyterian, a Democrat, and owned a Jersey cow, and he had all three," Scott told an interviewer for the Southern Oral History Program in 1986. "I kept a Jersey cow around there for a long time just to be sure."

Bob Scott, who died Friday at 79, originally didn't intend to follow in the footsteps of his father, Kerr Scott, a governor and then U.S. senator. After college and a tour in the Army, he returned home and meant to manage the farm, which once included a dairy herd in the hundreds. But it wasn't long before he, too, was drawn to politics. Despite advice that the position was "a dead end," he ran for lieutenant governor in 1964 at the age of 35 and won. Four years later, he was elected governor.

Scott was an affable populist who wasn't afraid to take political risks for causes in believed in. One was establishing public school kindergartens.

"I went to the legislature and asked for a tax on cigarettes and a tax on soft drinks," he said, recalling that the debate left "blood all over the floor.

"It took, well, I guess you had to be stupid to do that in reflection," he added. In reality, he never regretted it.

Other accomplishments during his administration were consolidation of the University of North Carolina system and expansion of the community college system. Scott later headed that system for a dozen years, helping to build it into one of the nation's best.

Scott left office in 1973 at age 43 at a time when North Carolina's governors were barred from serving a second consecutive term. That changed a few years later, during fellow Democrat Jim Hunt's term. When Hunt ran for re-election in 1980, Scott opposed him in the primary but lacked the money and party organization to win. It was his last bid for elective office.

He previously had taken a position in the administration of President Jimmy Carter as chairman of the Appalachian Regional Commission but didn't stay long. He said he "didn't like all the frustrations of the federal bureaucracy. I thought it was bad enough in North Carolina but it's nothing compared to what it is up there."

Scott was a bold, energetic and youthful governor who moved North Carolina forward in some important ways. Public service took him to Raleigh and Washington, but he loved rural Alamance County, where his ancestors had settled in the 1700s.

Services for the lifelong Democrat will be held at Hawfields Presbyterian Church in Mebane on Tuesday, and there are bound to be at least a few Jersey cows grazing somewhere not far away.