Elsa Stott, 83, who had worked for 37 years at Trans World Airlines but seemed to family members to have won just as much money at riverboat casinos over the years, died Sunday, Feb. 10, after suffering a cardiac arrest in her home in Dupo, Ill. Mrs. Stott, who lived most of her life in a southern Illinois railroad town, enjoyed gambling on Mississippi riverboats, had luck on lottery scratch-off tickets and gave her winnings to the Humane Society, said her son-in-law Chuck Jordan. “I hate to use the word `character’ because that’s so overused, but she certainly was a one-in-a-million person,” he said. The former Elsa Smith was born, and died, in her family’s house in Dupo and graduated from Dupo High School in 1936. After high school, she went to work for TWA in nearby St. Louis and spent nearly four decades working for that airline’s reservation desk. She was a union steward for much of that time, her son-in-law said, and enjoyed taking vacations to Las Vegas. In the mid-1940s, she married Richard Collins, an East St. Louis postal worker. They had a daughter, Candace, and divorced in 1956. She remarried in 1958 to Donald Stott, a railroad worker, who died in 1996. Mrs. Stott retired in 1973 and moved to Chicago after her husband died. She is survived by her daughter and many nieces and nephews. A service has been held.
