R.I.P.: Shelby Scott, Longtime Boston News Anchor

Shelby Scott

Shelby Scott was so famous for being battered by the weather while covering snowstorms for WBZ-TV that she found a way to tell viewers how to plan their day by the color of her headgear.

A red hat meant people should stay home. A blue hat advised exercising caution. And a white hat? Well, things weren’t so bad.

“I seldom wore a white hat,” she said in 2001, when she was officially retired, but occasionally was still called back into service, such as for 1997′s April Fools’ Day storm.

Scott, who spent three decades at WBZ Channel 4, where she formed the nation’s first all-woman anchor team with Gail Harris in 1977, died Wednesday in her home in Tucson, Ariz. She was 86 and her health had been declining, said her brother, Rick, according to The Boston Globe.

“Shelby, as much as she would not want me to say it, was a pioneer. She was a trailblazer in journalism,” said Peter Brown, who was Ms. Scott’s news director at WBZ. “She was a mentor. She inspired so many women and men who wanted to work in TV news. I saw her smile at the line from the young reporters: ‘Shelby, I grew up watching you on TV.’ "

A groundbreaking woman in broadcast news in Seattle and Boston, she arrived at WBZ from the West Coast and soon became one of Boston’s most recognizable faces behind an anchor desk and holding a microphone in the field, vanquishing gender barriers from the start. She was the only woman on Boston TV news in 1965, the Globe reported.

And though in later years her winter storm reporting became iconic, “Shelby was much more than a snow reporter,” Brown said. “She loved politics, and animal stories were her favorite. One day she came back to the newsroom after doing a story about tagging bears — she couldn’t stop talking about how she got to hug a bear cub.”

By the end of her career, however, those snowstorms had become the events by which she was most readily identified — by fans who brought her coffee and doughnuts when they spotted her on location, and by many who simply recognized her walking down a street.

For all viewers, seeing Shelby Scott brace herself as snow blew past her face horizontally was a sign that Boston was in for a memorable day.