The Landises

Scott is descended through his paternal grandmother Ruby (née Frye) Carpenter (b. 1864) from Hans Landis, a Mennonite martyr (d. 1614) and patriarch of a prolific Swiss-German clan that migrated to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century; some descendants migrated west into Iowa. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge and the first baseball commissioner, was Ruby’s first cousin.

Ruby Carpenter’s Ruby grandparents were among the first American settler in Madison County, Iowa—in the 1850s—and family accounts say William Ruby cultivated the region’s first apple orchards near Winterset. Martha Ruby Frye and her husband, Jacob Frye, migrated to Great Bend, Kansas, with their children and then to northern Colorado in the late nineteenth century, where they became Routt County homesteaders and educators in Denver. Traces of Mennonite pacifism are evident in Ruby Frye Carpenter’s World War II correspondence with her son (Scott Sr.) as her grandson Scott prepared to join the U.S. armed forces.