OBITUARIES : Mary Routt; Member of 1st Scripps Board, Columnist

Mary Patterson Routt, the last surviving member of Scripps College’s original board of trustees, is dead at age 96.

Mrs. Routt, one of only six women to cover the White House during the first administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, died June 19 at a rest home in Claremont, not far from the college she and her late husband had helped support since its inception as a women’s liberal arts institution in 1926.

The author of “The Life and Times of a White House Correspondent; 1933-45,” Mrs. Routt first went to Washington in 1933 for Roosevelt’s inauguration and stayed there until the end of World War II, writing a nationally syndicated column “Washington Close-Ups.” She covered Roosevelt’s twice-weekly press conferences before and during the war and was among the small group invited to attend Eleanor Roosevelt’s briefings “for women only.”

Born in Iowa, she graduated from Grinnell and Wellesley colleges, before beginning a career in journalism for the Beverly Hills (Calif.) Citizen. It was that newspaper that assigned her to cover Roosevelt’s inauguration, thus beginning her 12-year stint in the capital.

Her husband, who died in 1972, was a well-to-do Hollywood businessman who, with his wife, in 1970 gave $100,000 to endow a professorship in writing at Scripps. After his death, she continued to support music and drama activities at the school, founded by Ellen Browning Scripps of the newspaper family, and helped fund restoration and maintenance of the campus.

She is survived by a son, Robert, and a grandchild. There will be no services.