Scott Douglas Vaughan

I always enjoyed when my elementary and junior high classes had guest speakers. A guest speaker was always better than the alternative, which was classwork or a test. Some of the speakers were funny - like the garbage collector who started telling stories of his dog encounters and never got around to telling us anything about the garbage collecting business. In seventh grade health, we were visited by a chiropractor from a neighboring town. My family didn't use a chiropractor, and so I didn't fully understand what they did. Our teacher knew this particular guest speaker, but she had not really shared a lot of information about chiropractors. She explained that our speaker wasn't a medical doctor, but he was in the healthcare business, which didn't really matter to a bunch of seventh-graders. We were just glad for a guest speaker. A guest speaker was one notch better than a film strip or a television show on Georgia Public Television. Between the garbage collec...

Dear Jim: Vicki and I saw The Eagles in concert last night in Columbia. Don Henley is the last original member though  Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit are still around. Vince Gill has joined the band. Glenn Frey died in 2016, and his son Deacon is now front and center. For 2 1/2 hours, they played all the hits. Joe Walsh had a mini-concert in the set. Vince Gill sang one of his songs. I sang "Take It to the Limit" as loud as I could for you. I confess the eyes were misty, but I also laughed. I miss you, Scott ***** In the blazing hot summer of 1974, I rode a white 10-speed bicycle for almost three miles, up two massive hills, and past several barking dogs, toward a goal of getting a job at my hometown newspaper, The Forsyth County News. I had just turned 15 and was unemployed after a failed opportunity at a local pizza restaurant. Arriving from Warner Robins, GA, Jim Cosey was the brand new publisher-editor of the newspaper. His wife Wynelle was the office m...

I have rolled my eyes, and I am sorry. Until this winter, I had never in my life experienced vertigo - other than the movie featuring Jimmy Stewart - and now I have. I now understand what 35 percent of Americans over 40 have or are experiencing. When someone tells me they have vertigo, I will never roll my eyes again. It's real. Vertigo, oversimplified, is a balance disorder. There are different flavors, but there it is. Over New Year's Day, as the Georgia Bulldogs were defeating Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl, Vicki and I came down with the bronchial infection from hell. I'm completely sure the devil himself cooked it up and delivered it to us personally. For the month of January, Vicki and I hacked around, snorted and swallowed medicines, crawled out of bed later in the morning and collapsed in it earlier at night. But, we kept chugging along at work because there's no real sympathy for a bronchial infection whenever everyone else has one, too. In late Januar...

The first kiss between my Vicki and me was after midnight on Sunday morning, Dec. 6, 1981. How's that for memory? :) It was the kiss that solved all mysteries - I had found the girl for me. This December, we will have been a faithful couple for 37 years. But, that December night was not my first kiss. My first kiss - not counting the game of spin-the-bottle in ninth grade or a stolen kiss on a porch step - was in February 1976. I was 16. It was a game-changer. I am completing the first rewrite of my new book, Hickory Trail . This book is the last in the three-book series that chronicles the life stories of our main character, Frank Wilcox, and his boyhood in 1960s and 1970s small-town Georgia. The stories are based on my own memoirs but written as fiction. I have had the best time writing a chapter titled, "The Long Kiss Goodnight" about Frank's first real kiss. I've written and rewritten it a dozen times, and last night I rewrote parts of it again. The ...

Most of you are not going to like me. I am a morning person. My own sweet Vicki doesn't like me . . . first thing in the morning. She is not a morning person. I go to bed early and I get up early, and I get up singing - usually something from Marvin Gaye or The Four Seasons. I often dance, too, which Vicki finds especially annoying because I dance whether she joins me or not. Aside from all this, I'm my friendliest and my most creative early in the morning. What I consider my best writing often occurs before Noon. Almost every morning, on the way to the office, I stop at one specific convenience store. I like this one store because traffic around it is never too bad, and it's on my way which means it's on my right and easy to enter and exit. I stop for coffee. "Slim" - my nickname for the nice guy at the counter - is the skinniest man I've ever seen. He calls me Shake because they used to have a counter where they made chocolate shakes. I was thei...

Terry Thompson during his baseball days It's been 35 years since that telephone call from Terry Thompson. ***** A good friend of mine, Bob McMillan, called last week and invited me to help him coach his Spring baseball team. I couldn't help him because his team plays on the weekends, and those are precious real estate for me with a mother in Georgia, a son in Ohio, and another son in western Tennessee. Bob's call, however, inspired me to call my friend, Chris Davis, who continues to coach in our local recreation league. I volunteered to help Chris coach his team this Spring, and by coach I mostly mean keep the scorebook at games, encourage the players, and help with some practice drills. Chris's team doesn't play on the weekends. Helping Chris - and his gifted assistant, John Bush - this Spring means wobbling out of retirement. I was a head coach in our local baseball league from 1996-2012, and one season was the head coach of two teams in two different l...

Facebook Live makes me think of a Mad Scientist This Thursday, March 8, from 8-8:45 p.m. ET, I'm going to read a chapter from my new book Hickory Trail. This is the third and last in a three-book series about my life - fictionalized to make it more interesting. The chapter I've chosen is one that I had a lot of fun writing. I've also referenced it in, well, in a sermon or two preached along the way. Neither of those churches invited me back, which is probably just as well for everyone involved. The chapter has nothing to do with a Mad Scientist, pictured at right, but Facebook Live makes me feel like a Mad Scientist. Incidentally, the chapter I'm going to read has nothing to do with Science of any kind - regardless of emotion (mad or not). You will need to visit my Facebook Page on Thursday night for all this fun. If you already 'Like' the page you may get a notification when the Live gathering starts. Click here for the page . The actual ...