Richard Joseph Scott

Richard Joseph Scott, who sold and repaired televisions for more than a half century as the owner of Scott TV and served in the Army during the Korean War, died on April 18, 2021, at Allied Skilled Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Scranton. He was 87 years old. 

Known to everyone as Dick, he saw the inside of tens of thousands of homes on service calls in the Scranton area from 1957, when he joined his brother Sam’s new TV shop on Mulberry Street, until 2015, when he closed the business at its longtime location on Blakely Street in Dunmore. 

Dick was born in 1933 to George and Charlotte Scott in Scranton and attended Scranton Tech before joining the Army at age 17. He was a corporal operating a radio in battles in Korea in the early 1950s in the 58th Field Artillery Battalion, 3rd Division, and he lost hearing in one ear during intense shelling. After the war, he was stationed in Washington, D.C., where he served in a unit that escorted President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, to the Capitol and Camp David. 

Dick attended Georgetown University and the University of Scranton before taking over Scott TV and marrying Margaret Joan Strasburger, a registered nurse, in 1961. 

The couple had four sons, all of whom worked as teenagers at “the store,” helping to deliver TVs. Over the decades, Scott TV ushered customers through the evolution of television hardware, from black and white sets to solid state, from color to clicker remotes, from VCRs to flat screens. He was the Scranton area’s major RCA dealer and in 1980 started Great Scott Video, taping hundreds of weddings and scores of high school graduations. 

He also recorded many of his sons football games at Scranton Central High School and when they were young was an assistant coach on their East Scranton Apollos junior football team. 

Dick and Joan enjoyed traveling to visit their sons, and Dick played the piano by ear, spending many a night at his baby grand after work and during house parties and holidays. He liked to golf and he was a longtime member of Immaculate Conception Church in the Hill Section. 

Health setbacks put him in Allied Skilled Nursing in 2015, and he remained there until his death, praising the food and staff, but eager to join Joan, who died in 2017 and whose ashes he kept in an urn on his dresser. 

The family sends its deepest thanks the dedicated health care workers at Allied for their kind and compassionate care. 

Dick is survived by sons Richard, Jr and his wife, Amy, of Portland, PA, Michael J. and his wife, Kim, of Fernandina Beach, FL, and Patrick R. and his wife, Susan, of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and 12 grandchildren. 

He was also preceded in death by his son Brian who died in 2020.

Services are private, due to the pandemic.