Archive - November 4, 2012

The New York Times obituary notice reads:”Jack Hood Vaughn, who led the Peace Corps at the height of its volunteer enrollment in the late 1960s, died on Monday at his home in Tucson. The cause was cancer.” The notice included this photograph of Vaughn taken in 1966 with President Johnson and Shriver. It’s a lengthy obituary, but does not tell the story of Vaughn at the Peace Corps. Only a novel could do Jack Hood Vaughn’s life full justice. Born and raised in Columbus, Montana, where the Yellowstone River pours out of the Rocky Mountains, Johnny Hood, as he called himself back then, felt an early attraction toward Mexico. “I was bumming around Mexico,” he told me later in his life, “and I ran out of money.  I decided I would take my boxing skills and turn pro, but I didn’t know enough Spanish at the time to tell whether . . .