Several of us may have known some of the key chapters in what we imagined to be the book of Jack Scott’s life, a long one that has had such a dramatic impact on California; none of us could know the whole story without reading his actual new book, “For Everything There is a Season: A Memoir” (Abilene Christian University Press).

Reading it this spring — the really rather extraordinary autobiography of a boy from very small-town Texas who goes on to become a preacher, take a master’s at Yale Divinity School, then become a professor and administrator at Pepperdine, then the holder of a doctorate in American history from Claremont Graduate University, then a series of college leadership roles culminating in the presidency of Pasadena City College, then election to the California state Assembly and the state Senate, then the chancellorship of the entire California Community College system in Sacramento — made me think, at least, that I recall a conversation I once had with him: “It’s a good thing I remembered to keep a diary.”

Perhaps I’m making that memory up. Perhaps Jack has kept no journal at all through his more than 90 years of life, and when he sat down to write this book it was with no more strain than he had to take for the many op-eds he’s dashed off for me here at the paper in the almost 40 years since he came to PCC — that it was that easy to recall all that happened.

Perhaps.

In any case, if you’re interested in the history of higher education in the Southland; in San Gabriel Valley politics; in the influence of the evangelical church; in, even, the long interaction between the two most important states in the West, Texas and California, then this is very much a book for you.

Plus, for me, it’s a reminder that what I will call — fondly — the aw-shucks aspects of the way Jack Scott’s life has been presented to us down the decades are part of a more sophisticated creative background than is sometimes imagined.

Yes, Sweetwater is a small town between Lubbock and Fort Worth. But Jack was already a leader there — student body president at his high school. (I once had a boss who recalled Jack as a BMOC from their youth. Jack, um, had no recollection of my boss.) Yes, he was raised in the strikingly fundamentalist Churches of Christ. But his father was an elder in the church, a position of power. And then his father became a member of the Texas Legislature. And then Jack became the student body president at his church-affiliated college, Abilene Christian.

If you look at Jack Scott’s life after that through this lens into his early days, nothing comes as all that much of a surprise. He confirms this in a charming way on Page 53 of his book, after he has met and wooed Lacreta, the wonderful woman about to become his wife in 1954 just after his college graduation, after first securing a job as a minister: “If, by this time, you have surmised that I am an inveterate planner for the future, I plead guilty.”

Leaving Texas to become a minister in enormously sophisticated New Haven, Connecticut? A young person doesn’t head there without knowing Yale University is in town, and that a person might one day attend it. The arc of Jack’s life continues to rise and rise from there.

Two things are key to his next seven decades: Jack’s ability to succeed as an insider by being an outsider, even a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the way his empathy for others, even in the midst of personal tragedy, is channeled into his work for social change. In the early 1960s, Jack was recruited to California by Pepperdine College, an already Christian and conservative institution then based in South Los Angeles. But when his bosses built the Malibu campus, they tell him that going forward they are going to identify as explicitly Republican, and leave him to be provost of the dwindling L.A. campus. He moves on.

After having become pastor to a church specifically created to be a Black and White congregation, Jack’s politics become increasingly liberal. His Sweetwater drawl does not. I will never forget, in the period he was being recruited by John Van de Kamp and others to run for the Legislature, watching the master work the room at Pasadena Rotary every Wednesday noon. If ever there were a Democrat that the Burghers of the Crown City could feel comfortable voting for, this handsome, yarn-spinning Texan in the blue blazer, repp tie and gray flannel slacks was it. The rest is history, well-told.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.