Scott Douglas Vaughan

First Baptist Cumming, GA Worship  Bulletin - Sunday, May 26, 1968 On Sunday, May 26, 1968 - 50 years ago - I was baptized during the morning worship service at the First Baptist Church of Cumming, GA by Pastor Troy Acree, who was more lovingly referred to as "Preacher Acree." I was baptized with the sisters, Rita and Lisa Ingram; Lynn Raines; and Stephen Wood, who is today a pastor. Lisa and Lynn were in Kindergarten with me, and I still call them dear, dear friends today. (The worship bulletin from that Sunday morning is pictured. I was known as 'Scotty' then, and inexplicably the church office misspelled my last name. I've forgiven them). I was 8 years old. We like to think that times were simple, but they weren't simple at all. Sure, we didn't have microwave ovens, social media, and mobile telephones, but our country was only six years removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and worldwide tensions were still high. We were deeply involved in the V...

In 1994, I left the newspaper business to pursue vocational ministry. That led me to join the staff of the South Carolina Baptist Convention. Within 18 months, I was director of marketing - one of the few department heads who was not an ordained Southern Baptist minister. In those days, it was not unusual for South Carolina Baptist pastors or churches to contact the convention and request "pulpit supply" or "substitute preaching" for a given Sunday. The requests were then matched with the available staff for that particular Sunday. One May Friday, I was minding my own business when I got the call. I was asked to go preach at a smaller membership, rural church. The pastor was retiring, and it was his last Sunday, and, well, he just didn't want to preach that last day. Go figure. I can't imagine how many others on the convention staff turned down that opportunity before it came to me, but it came to me more as an order than a request. I was at the bottom...

Dr. A.Y. Howell Jr. 1923-2018 I was fortunate to grow up in a small town just north of Atlanta. In the rear view of my life, I realize what an idyllic place it was - this place I still think of as home. It was a place where a boy could open a thin county telephone book, searching for the telephone number of a friend from school, and his mama could deduce the number based on the last names and mailing addresses in the telephone book. People just knew one another (and about one another) and lives crossed from school to church to sports to band to the doctor's office and, as I was reminded this past week, the dentist's office. Dr. A.Y. Howell Jr. was my dentist until I left Cumming, GA to attend the University of Georgia in the fall of 1977. He retired the next year, 1978. For my first 18 years, he oversaw the routine polishing of my teeth, filled more than one cavity, and always made me feel like I could tackle the world. Dr. Howell died on April 30 at the age of 95....

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 ...