The Sunday Profile : By George : He’s a celebrity, a paperboy and a bit of a rogue. He’s George Scott--Catalina’s cankerous character.

The rusty Jeep in George Scott’s driveway is acting as irascible as its owner, a cantankerous old codger refusing to move at any speed but its own, sassing the world in a series of clanks, sputters and spits.

Everything about the gas guzzler looks shiftless, like a shell that’s left over after a hard night’s carousing. For one, its steering wheel is on the wrong side. Its body is white on top and a sick Rustoleum green down below, as though some blind man with a brush foolishly tried to gloss over its imperfections.

And while it may be another day here in paradise, the man who calls himself as the oldest paperboy on the planet has a real problem: The dailies have arrived late by air from the mainland. Down at the pier, anxious customers wander aimlessly, awaiting their news fix.

So Nelly here picks this day to act like the crotchety old pack mule that she is.

“This Jeep here fits right in with the guy driving,” Scott says, removing his signature cowboy hat with the sweat-stained band. “It does what it dang well pleases. I keep it looking this run-down for reasons of taxes and thievery. And frankly, sometimes I think it gets mad at me.”

Moments later, he rumbles down a pock-marked dirt road, his sometimes-loyal Jeep buried under a mountain of bundled newspapers--an Okie wagon headed for the Promised Land. As the contraption backfires its way down Catalina Avenue toward the newspaper vending boxes, onlookers stop to watch and smile. For nearly 50 years now, Scott, his newspapers, and his goofball humor and homespun philosophies have been familiar entertainment on this tiny island, making people laugh at themselves--but mostly at George.

A happy-go-lucky party boy who first landed in Avalon in 1947 as a semi-pro softball pitcher, Scott immediately found his spiritual home here, sticking to the place like a crusty old barnacle--each night shooting the breeze at his designated park bench near the town’s picturesque pier, engaging locals and tourists alike.

But just being a character has never been enough for Scott, who refuses to give his real age, insisting that he was “born in the year of Our Lord.” (Speculating locals pose wild, blundering guesses--from 55 clear up to the 80s.) He has put his gum-flapping to work, serving four terms as a city councilman and two as mayor of the island burg--26 miles and an entire world off the mainland. Now he’s at it again. Defeated in April in his bid for a third mayoral term, Scott is now eyeing the City Council seat vacated by the man who beat him, to be decided in the November election.

“Yeah, George is running. Again,” says a county sheriff’s deputy on foot patrol near the pier. “Running for office is just a normal thing for George to do. Everybody knows how he just craves the limelight. He thrives on it. We just thank God there’s only one George Scott around here. This island couldn’t handle two of them.”

And now, thanks to a series of quirky regional television commercials for Jeep featuring some of his classic one-liners and off-the-cuff nonsense, Scott has a newfound celebrity status--not only among locals but also the hoards of tourists who flock here each weekend. Shot on location in Avalon, the bits show Scott selling Jeep wagons with the panache of an island Cal Worthington.

Nowadays, tourists yell, “Hey, George!” and “Way to go, Georgie boy!” And while he has always considered himself a ladies’ man, Scott never anticipated this: Old friends--and girlfriends--have looked him up. Total strangers--many of them girls young enough to be his grandchildren--approach him on the street for a hug, a kiss, a back slap or high-five. People like Lin Forino, an Orange County tourist who hailed down Scott as he folded papers: “George, I’ve got to hand it to you, you’re your own man. I admire your spirit. When I saw you and your Jeep, I just had to take a picture. Do you mind?”

Dressed in a faded T-shirt with the words “Help Stamp out Footprints,” baggy blue jeans with rolled-up cuffs and, of course, that hat, Scott smiles his best campaign smile. “Do I mind?” he asks in a voice as gravelly as a Santa Catalina back road. “Hell, I love the attention!”

Some say Scott’s quest for yet another public office is all about just that--attention. Although some applaud his seemingly insatiable civic appetite, others believe he ought to let some younger candidates take a shot at local government.

“He’s loony, he’s a fruitcake, he’s crazy,” says one elderly woman voter parked on a downtown bench. “I wouldn’t vote for George Scott in a million years. Are you kidding?”

But barber Frank Saldana would: “We need politicians like George Scott, he’s a regular guy,” Saldana says. “He’s always frank with you. He doesn’t run and hide like the rest. George is comfortable with both paupers and kings. Hell, I knew him before he started drinking. And that was a long time ago.”

Scott acknowledges that he has made enemies as well as friends over the years. “Yeah, some people just don’t like me,” he says, shoveling down a plate of scrambled eggs at a waffle house. “It’s just that lots of folks don’t have a sense of humor. They look at you and just see a character. They don’t look deep enough to see who you really are, see what you stand for.”

In fact, if you’re a merchant, it may be inadvisable to let on that you back George Scott. Some who do have taken out anonymous full-page ads in the local paper rather than hang his campaign posters in their shops.

His critics include Councilman Keith LeFever, who doesn’t care much for either Scott or the way he burst into a recent council meeting, informing that members they were a clueless bunch of greenhorns.

“George Scott’s time has come and gone,” LeFever says after the pair ran into each other on the street, snarling as usual. “Every election he gets fewer and fewer votes. He’s just an old-time politician without an eye to the future to see what will make this city prosper.”

His supporters disagree. Scott, they say, has always represented Catalina’s common man--the island’s working-class bartenders and waitresses--not just the wealthy elite with homes in Avalon and Palm Springs.

As mayor, Scott helped paved the way for 80 middle- and low-income housing units. He fought runaway development and supported a plan to save residents money by converting the sewage system from fresh water to salt water--trying to preserve the Avalon he met all those years ago.

“George Scott is for the little man, the island family without the money and power of the big guys,” says resident Betty Stein. “And he’s always done it with a sense of humor. All I can say is that I’ve never seen the man when he hasn’t made me feel good, when he hasn’t made me laugh--even when we’ve come down on opposite sides of the issue.”

But Avalon is changing. The town of 3,000 people has a $12-million budget. Rising property values and rents have driven young working-class folks off the island. All the more the reason to seek office again and keep elitists from running the show.

“I just don’t want to see this place change,” Scott says. “Santa Catalina is such a romantic isle. People come here to get married. They write songs about the place. I want to keep it that way, to protect it from those who come and see this wonderful island with its quaint little houses and blue sea, a place where you can sit on a bench unmolested at 3 a.m. Because (the rich) are the same people who immediately want to change things here.”

Well, he says, they’ve got to get past George Scott first.

“Sure, you’ve got to have at least a little change,” he says. “But you can’t steal the soul of this beautiful place. You just can’t do it.”

*

George Scott’s in big trouble.

Heck, it’s not his fault the papers got fogged in on the mainland. The way Scott tells it, the bundles land regular-like at the inland airport every day: Between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

Try telling that to his 300 customers, many of whom gather at the news boxes like sea gulls for a feed, looking for the Long Beach Press-Telegram, the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times.

This is one thankless business. “It’s a lot of pressure,” he mutters, peddle to the metal--the Jeep slouching toward the boardwalk at 25 m.p.h. “No doubt they’ll assume I was out drinking again.”

It is nearly noon as the Jeep wades through a pierside crowd. Pastor Lopez, one of Scott’s elfin helpers, awaits him, knife drawn.

“Whaddya do George, go back to bed?” he says. Scott ignores him.

Lopez, who met Scott when he opened an Avalon bookstore called Scott’s Manor more than two generations ago, knows his friend better than yesterday’s news--insisting that it’s he who does the work while Scott runs his mouth.

Indeed, the Tom Sawyer with a 5 o’clock shadow has an army of helpers--most of them retirees, he says, with little else to do--who fold his papers, give out change and load his newsstands. All the while, Scott shares a laugh with a passing tourist.

“Give me a roll of duct tape and I’ll tape his mouth shut,” Lopez says. “Heck, I’m George Scott’s baby-sitter. See, he never really grew up mentally. He’s always been the comedian. Or, at least he thinks he is. He’s like a parrot, all talk. But I’ll tell you, George being George is a very funny thing to see.”

Scott’s humor is in-your-face, the kind that comes from years of sitting in bars trying to impress barmaids or being perched on the beach, cat-calling to two women lounging on the next blanket. Sitting on his bench each night, watching the world go by, he’ll grab the hand of a passerby and refuse to let go, saying, “Let go of me!”

And he always looks you straight in the eye, mainly because he can’t move his neck too well since an accident threw him through a car windshield. But things still work OK from there on up, he says.

Out of the blue, Scott will dream up some goofball line like: “When all is finally said and done, there’s nothing left to do or say.” Or, “I haven’t had a drink since Thursday. And I don’t miss it one bit.”

He cracks jokes to make himself laugh. “I do it all for fun--for the fun of me,” he says, “because I’m a fellow who loves laughter.”

That was obvious to the executives at Jeep, who chose Scott and a helicopter pilot over 300 others nationwide for their commercials.

“George Scott was the most likable person out of the entire 300--and it didn’t take us a lot of time to figure that out,” says Darrell Lomas, creative director of the California office of Bozell/North, an advertising agency representing Jeep.

“Some people magically stand out as characters, individualists. We just liked George’s homespun little jokes and observations about life. The man is a crackup. But don’t let him fool you. He’s smart, real smart.”

Scott has always been that way, friends say--ever since he first appeared in Avalon in 1947--a teen-ager who grew up in Phoenix, whose treacherous sinker-ball made him by far the best pitcher on the island’s softball team and in the entire league.

He spent those days chasing women, he says, as “a lipstick-taster for Max Factor.”

Eventually married four times--one of which he says lasted barely an hour--Scott became an instant character in watering holes such as the Attic and the Marlin, where he would show up in a top hat to expound on his iconoclastic philosophies.

After he knocked back a few Scotch and milks--his drink of choice back then--the boys would load Scott into a plastic garbage can and haul him door-to-door so the whole town could hear his words of wisdom.

Each Sunday evening without fail, dressed in his hat and a white suit, with an old suitcase in his hand, Scott would run down the pier, yelling, “Stop! Stop!” to the day’s last steamer--until he plunged into the salty drink.

He had a regular audience. “I was never drunk when I made the run,” he insists. “Of course, I’d been drinking all day.”

In 1968, after the bookstore closed and his second marriage ended, the father of three--two sons and a daughter--took over as Catalina’s sole newspaper distributor. Since then, he has tossed those papers rain or shine--through four Jeeps, through Watergate and the Reagan-Bush years, through his two mayoral terms in the 1980s and four terms on the City Council between 1970 and 1990.

It hasn’t made him rich. Earning $12,000 a year, Scott often relies on the generosity of friends and strangers for lunch and dinner. When it rains, he’s forced to wear those plastic-bag newspaper protectors for galoshes.

“Luckily, somewhere along the way I lost the value of money,” he says. “I make just enough to survive and that’s just fine with me. I stayed with the newspapers because I figured that, even in another Great Depression, people would always have the money to buy a paper.”

Scott didn’t enter politics on his own accord: He was drafted.

One day over drinks at the Marlin in 1970, a few of the fellows talked him into filing candidacy for the City Council. The rest is a colorful chapter in Avalon history.

In 1980, in his first act as mayor, he installed a park bench that faced down the boardwalk, giving him a better view of people coming and going. “It could well be my biggest stroke of brilliance as mayor,” he says.

“It’s the best place in town to people-watch and shoot the breeze. Whenever I go there, the guys will still move over and make room for me. That’s quite an honor.”

But that’s the gregarious George Scott. The other is decidedly more private. In recent years, he says, after a stomach operation, he drinks only an occasional glass of wine. He allows no one inside his home, calling it his one place for peaceful respite. “I may be a mean old man at home,” he says, “but I’m friendly as heck downtown.”

Debbie Coleman, Scott’s estranged wife who still lives in Avalon, met him years ago as he walked, loudly dressed, along the boardwalk with a woman on each arm. When someone told her she had just passed Avalon’s mayor, she said, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

Years later, the pair married. Coleman sees both sides of the gregarious Scott: “I love George. Everybody loves George. He’d do anything for anybody. Just don’t get too close.”

*

Now it’s late afternoon and the man who bills himself as “the world’s greatest paper-thrower” is finally finishing his route. With an easy flip of the wrist, he tosses the papers from the driver’s seat of his moving Jeep.

Calling his shots, he makes the papers bounce on concrete and slide under gates. Or sail in the air 100 feet, landing and staying put on the tiniest front porches. There are sinkers and curve balls--and the occasional wild pitch that sends a paper clunking into the grille of some parked car.

Mostly, though, Scott is on target. “It’s easy to brag after the fact,” he says. “The real bragging comes when you can do it first.”

It is on lazy Santa Catalina weekend afternoons such as this one that Scott looks back and laughs to himself over the stunts he’s pulled. He has no regrets.

Well, maybe one. If he had to do it over again, he’d have told fewer jokes to his children, especially his son Blake. Years ago, when Blake asked his dad how old he was, Scott told him he was 113. The next day, the boy got into several fights at school defending his father’s story.

The warhorse of a Jeep parked on a hillside overlooking the blue Pacific, Scott pauses, suddenly out of jokes.

“Sometimes, I think I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” he says. “I have at least a few good laughs every day. And if you don’t have that, no matter how much money you’ve got, you’re really a poor man.”

George Scott

Age: Anyone’s guess.

Native?: No; grew up in Phoenix, moved to Avalon in 1947.

Family: Separated from his fourth wife; three children.

Passions: Laughing and making people laugh.

On his meager income as a paperboy: “Luckily, somewhere along the way I lost the value of money. I make just enough to survive and that’s just fine with me.”

On why some people don’t like him: “It’s just that lots of folks don’t have a sense of humor. They look at you and just see a character. They don’t look deep enough to see who you really are, see what you stand for.”

On the growing pains of Avalon: “Sure, you’ve got to have at least a little change. But you can’t steal the soul of this beautiful place. You just can’t do it.”

Straight From George’s Mouth . . .

The following quips, true-isms and one-liners uttered by Avalon paperboy and former Mayor George Scott are known collectively on Santa Catalina Island as “George-isms”:

“I’m not getting old, I am old.”

“I was walking behind this woman on the pier the other day. She suddenly turned around and said, ‘I’m a mind-reader.’ And she slapped me.”

“I own three boats. All of them are in my bathtub.”

“Of all the people I’ve known in my life, the ones who stand out in my mind most are the ones I remember.”

“Everything comes to an end but the beginning.”

“One of my bettor days was at the racetrack.”

“Does your Mom have any children?”

“Keep your hands on me!”

“And don’t ever come back!”

“Boy, was I mad when I found out I was insane.”

“I’m feeling a lot better since my fingers grew back.”

“If it hadn’t been for my first wife, I would have never been married twice.”