Scott Behoteguy says he was "predestined" to attend The College of Wooster. His father, mother, older brother and two aunts were all Wooster graduates. His grandfather, Henri Grandpierre Behoteguy, taught French at the college from 1892 to 1920.

But despite all those family connections, or perhaps because of them, Scott did not go quietly. "My senior year in high school, I let a recruiter from Wittenberg in the house," he says. Scott told his father, an executive with B.F. Goodrich in Akron, that the Wittenberg catalog seemed to have a lot more practical courses leading to a business career. "He just smiled benignly and said, ’Yes, but the liberal arts are useful to a businessman, too.’"

So Wooster it was. Asked about his academic career, Scott says he "backed into" an English degree, "But I majored in Howard Lowry. If he’d been teaching Sanskrit, I’d have majored in Sanskrit."

He also minored in speech, participated in intercollegiate debate and the Congressional Club, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

After graduating from Wooster, Scott earned an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. He joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1942 and served in both the South Pacific and Washington, D.C. In 1945 he was assigned to a temporary State Department agency set up to dispose of surplus war materiel around the world. Transferred to Paris in the fall of 1946, he left the Navy and joined the Economic Cooperation Administration, one of the chief agencies overseeing the implementation of the Marshall Plan.

After several years in Paris, where he met and married Marguerite de Teramond, Scott says he "hoped my government had forgotten me and I could stay forever." But it was not to be. His expertise and judgment were needed elsewhere, and over the next 20 years he was tapped to run aid programs in Cameroon, Turkey, Tunisia and Haiti for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In 1977, Scott retired to Sarasota, Florida, where he quickly became involved in a fledgling program called the Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning. In typical fashion, he threw himself whole-heartedly into finding speakers for the international portion of the program, and spent the next 25 years bringing scores of former State Department colleagues to address the topics of the day.

"He’s just relentless in getting community dialogues going on foreign affairs," former Sarasota mayor Kerry Kirschner told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune last year. "What Scott loves to do is make people stop and think past the 30-second sound bite of international political affairs coverage."

"My late wife used to say, ‘You never really retired. You just continued doing the same thing without pay,’" Behoteguy says. For his efforts, he received the American Foreign Service Association’s first National Alumni Service Award in January 2003.

"Sometimes I think I’m a missionary, not of the cloth, but of public service and foreign service," Behoteguy observes. "I picked that up at Wooster and never lost it."