By age 14, he was boxing in front of men-only crowds, known as "smokers." "Everyone was smoking Roi-Tan cigars. We were fighting in a purple haze. It was $5 if you won, $3 if you didn't. The events featured three or four semi-pro boxing matches and one fairly professional striptease. If there was no striptease, they brought in the wrestlers." Occasionally, he'd train in Detroit, which is how he wound up sparring with boxers like Sugar Ray Robinson. That athleticism, in turn, would one day put him in good stead with Sargent Shriver, first director of the Peace Corps, who sent Vaughn back to Latin America in 1961 to serve as Peace Corps regional director. They first met in Senegal, where Vaughn was serving with USAID. "There were 4,000 volunteers signing up a day for the Peace Corps, and countries weren't asking for them. So Shriver came over to meet the Senegalese. I was the only one who spoke French. "I went up to meet Shriver and his lawyer in their hotel room. They did not have on a stitch of clothing. We all sat down and had a conversation. They said they had never seen heat like that. It was 120 degrees and no air conditioning." After three years in his first Peace Corps job, in 1964 Vaughn became ambassador to Panama, where he is credited with smoothing the way for the eventual negotiation of a new Panama Canal treaty. In 1966, he took the top job at the Peace Corps after Shriver became head of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. As director, Vaughn shifted the Peace Corps toward environmental needs. "Countries needed people who could train their people — how to run a nursery, do contour planting."
Bonnie Henry writes: Jack Vaughn: Once a Fighter, Always a Fighter
Opinion by Bonnie Henry : Once a fighter, always a . . .
Champion boxer, ambassador, Peace Corps volunteer, then its director, Tucsonan Jack Vaughn has tale upon tale to tell
Opinion by Bonnie Henry
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 02.07.2008
Caption: Peace Corps Director Jack Vaughn served in the US Marines in WWII.
He's sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta, fought in the Pacific and lunched with Che Guevara.
"I met him seven or eight times. Each time I liked him less," says Tucsonan Jack Vaughn about his tête-à-tête with the late Latin American revolutionary. "My final meeting, I gave him a University of Michigan T-shirt. He wore it backwards."
Golden Gloves champion, second director of the Peace Corps, ambassador to both Panama and Colombia, Vaughn, 87, sits in his sun-dappled Tucson living room and recounts tale after tale.
Many are no doubt slated for the book he's working on: "Kill the Gringo." And, yes, there's a tale behind that title.
A member of the boxing team at Michigan and later its coach, Vaughn took on a few boxing matches in the summer of '42 in Mexico to get some professional experience.
"My first fight was down in Juarez. I was in the first of a four-round preliminary match. My second (assistant) was a high school kid from El Paso. The crowd began to shout, 'Mata al Gringo!' "
"I asked my second what they were saying. He said, 'I think they're saying, "Welcome to Juarez." A week later I found out what that meant."
Vaughn would find much tougher battles ahead as a Marine in Eniwetok, Guam and Okinawa, earning a Purple Heart. "I was wounded three times, all in the rear end," he says.
Back at Michigan after the war, Vaughn earned a bachelor's degree in Romance languages and a master's in economics. "I wanted to be a professor of French literature."
Meanwhile, to augment his salary as a classroom instructor, he kept on fighting professionally. "I ended up losing the sight in my right eye in 1948. So in 1949, I went to the State Department."
His first job, with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), sent him to Bolivia. Other jobs with USAID would follow, everywhere from Panama to Senegal.
"It was mainly agricultural reform. I had a lot of training," says Vaughn, whose father managed a cattle farm.
Born in Montana, Vaughn moved at age 12 to Albion, Mich., with his family. There, he started boxing in a makeshift gym on the third floor of his father's clothing store.
By age 14, he was boxing in front of men-only crowds, known as "smokers."
"Everyone was smoking Roi-Tan cigars. We were fighting in a purple haze. It was $5 if you won, $3 if you didn't. The events featured three or four semi-pro boxing matches and one fairly professional striptease. If there was no striptease, they brought in the wrestlers."
Occasionally, he'd train in Detroit, which is how he wound up sparring with boxers like Sugar Ray Robinson.
That athleticism, in turn, would one day put him in good stead with Sargent Shriver, first director of the Peace Corps, who sent Vaughn back to Latin America in 1961 to serve as Peace Corps regional director.
They first met in Senegal, where Vaughn was serving with USAID. "There were 4,000 volunteers signing up a day for the Peace Corps, and countries weren't asking for them. So Shriver came over to meet the Senegalese. I was the only one who spoke French.
"I went up to meet Shriver and his lawyer in their hotel room. They did not have on a stitch of clothing. We all sat down and had a conversation. They said they had never seen heat like that. It was 120 degrees and no air conditioning."
After three years in his first Peace Corps job, in 1964 Vaughn became ambassador to Panama, where he is credited with smoothing the way for the eventual negotiation of a new Panama Canal treaty.
In 1966, he took the top job at the Peace Corps after Shriver became head of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.
As director, Vaughn shifted the Peace Corps toward environmental needs. "Countries needed people who could train their people — how to run a nursery, do contour planting."
When Richard Nixon was elected, Vaughn lost his job. "I was the first bureaucrat fired," he says. But he soon rebounded as ambassador to Colombia.
Unlike his previous stint in Panama, this job, says Vaughn, was mainly focused on goodwill. Then again, maybe not.
"To get out of the cocktail parties, I was a boxing referee."
In 1970, he returned to Washington. That same year he married Peace Corps volunteer Margaret "Leftie" Weld.
A variety of new job titles would follow, including director of international programs for "Sesame Street" and president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
In 1992, the Vaughns moved to Tucson, where Jack still keeps in shape by shadow boxing and running in place.
Four years earlier, The New York Times reported how Vaughn, then 67, wiped up a would-be mugger on the streets of New York, kneeing him in the groin, hitting him in the jaw and leaving him face down on the sidewalk.
It would not be the last time. "On several occasions I've had to straighten people out," he says.
We don't doubt it for a minute.
