Chloe Scott

Chloe Scott lived in our neighborhood for decades, a native of England, she enjoyed a life of dance, as a choreographer, dance teacher, Feddenkrais movement therapist, and founder of the Dymaxion Moving Company dance troupe.   Chloe passed away  at the age of ninety-four at her home in Lake Oswego, Oregon on September 9, 2019.

Earlier this year Chloe published an extraordinary post-war memoir, The Walking Trees, a true-life tale of romance and adventure set amidst the unspoiled splendor of life in the backwoods of Florida.  She and her husband were just past their teens and had accepted an assignment from the Audubon Society to spend a year on a rickety boat guarding and protecting hundreds of thousands of birds in the Everglades.  Protecting wild life from some very sketchy characters that did not want the birds protected.

The book is a fantastic read set on the edge of the Ten Thousand Islands of southwest Florida in the mangroves that rise out of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico where a hundred thousand herons, egrets, ibises, spoonbills and many more inhabit the leafy tops of the protecting branches and raise their families.   The book is available on Amazon and more information is available here. The Lake Oswego Review has an informative article on Chloe pertaining to her book

The Lake Oswego Review has an informative article on Chloe pertaining to her book

There was a big celebration 14 years ago when Chloe turned 80 and a wonderful article in the Palo Alto Weekly was written:  Dancing Queen  Her family has given us permission to show the video from the celebration and it can be seen on the ‘A Celebration Video‘ webpage.

There is a lot of local neighborhood history associated with Chloe. In the late 1950’s early 60’s, when many writers were attending Wallace Stegner’s Creative Writing Program at Stanford, Chloe was living on Perry Lane. She later moved to Stanford Ave. She knew many of the writers: Gurney Norman, Ken Kesey, and Ed McClanahan all were attending the Stanford program. She also was friends with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neil Cassady, and others that eventually formed Kesey’s now famous rag tag collection known as the Merry Pranksters. She played a role in the historic travels on Furthur, the bus that hosted the Merry Pranksters trip from California to New York when Ken Kesey celebrated the publishing of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Chloe met the bus in New York. Tom Wolfe’s Electric KoolAid Acid Test has an accounting of the trip.

Her house on Stanford Ave is historic, having been originally an officer’s building of the Camp Fremont pre WWI. She added a dance studio for her students.  She contributed to the local newsletter, University Park Temblor, back in the 1990s/early 2000s.  Her house is still here, albeit it was added onto several years ago.  Many of you remember the successful effort to ‘save Chloe’s tree’, that magnificent heritage redwood that hosts hawks and owls and is visible from almost all parts of University Park.

About Chloe:  (from her obituary)

A native of England, Chloe began her dance training at age two and later continued with ballet study in Malta, where she performed as a child in the Royal Opera House, while her father, a captain in the Royal Navy was stationed there. While attending a boarding school in London, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from age nine to fourteen.

At fifteen, Chloe participated in the rescue of the British military in the retreat from Dunkirk during World War II, helping with the reception of the soldiers on the western side of the English Channel. Soon afterwards, she was sent to America to escape the dangers of the London bombing and a feared invasion, where she lived with a foster family in New York. 

She married amateur naturalist Peter Scott when they were both nineteen. The following year, they took up residence alone together on the Audubon, a boat provided by the National Audubon Society, when Peter was hired to protect birds and other wildlife in Florida’s Everglades, an adventure related in her memoir The Walking Trees published in May of 2019.

After their time in the Everglades, the couple moved to New York, living for a time in East Hampton. In New York City, where the couple’s daughter Jennifer was born, she discovered modern dance, joining a dance company and choreographing at the 92nd Street YMCA.

In the late 1950s, then divorced, Chloe moved to Northern California with her daughter, studied experimental dance with Anna Halperin and taught dance to children and to adults, out of a firm conviction that “dance is for everyone, not just an elite few.” Her adult students included writers Richard Alpert, Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey (who had written One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while living in the cottage next to hers on Perry Lane, the bohemian enclave described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Test), and Kentucky novelist Gurney Norman, to whom she was married during much of the 1970s.

In his 2003 book Famous People I Have Known, author Ed McClanahan wrote this description of the scene on Perry Lane:

Chloe’s developing choreographic style grew to incorporate elements of tai chi, yoga, Indian and African dance, and Feldenkrais movements which she learned while studying the Feldenkrais Method with founder Moshe Feldenkrais. In the 1960s, she formed the Dymaxion Moving Company with her friends in the Palo Alto area. The many dance productions she choreographed with them included elaborate concerts on the occasions of her seventieth and eightieth birthdays, and her full-length evening production of The Way of the White Clouds, which she regarded as her magnum opus. Conceived and choreographed following her two-hundred-mile trek in Nepal at the age of fifty-six, the concert depicted a pilgrims’ Himalayan trek and the life of the spirit in their quest. The concert drew large audiences at two performances on the Stanford University campus in 1983.

Chloe continued to study Buddhism, following the leadership of the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Than, and led meditation groups. She also worked as a practitioner of Feldenkrais Method and trained many others in the US and abroad until she was well into her eighties.

In 2006, Chloe moved from California to Lake Oswego, Oregon to be with Jennifer and her family, but the Dymaxion Moving Company has continued to meet in California in fond recollection of its founder ever since, with many of its members visiting Chloe in Oregon during her final thirteen years.

In California and Oregon, Chloe joined writing groups, and authored numerous pieces in the Lake Oswego Review prior to the publication of The Walking Trees shortly before her death.

Chloe Keighly-Peach Scott is survived by her daughter Jennifer Scott Teton and Jennifer’s husband John Teton and their daughters Sage and Zoe of Portland, Oregon and their son Ben and his wife Toree, the parents of Chloe’s great-grandson Wylder of Felton, California; her brother Peter Keighly-Peach and his wife Dee of Norfolk, Virginia and their children David, Katie, and Tracey and her husband Tim Adams of Louisville, Kentucky; Peter Scott’s son Jonathan and his family of Provincetown, Massachusetts; many in-laws, nieces, and nephews in the Scott and Norman families; and her former husband Gurney Norman of Lexington, Kentucky.