Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

In tribute: Buddy Vaughan criss-crossed the country

PLEASANT HILL — You can take the cowboy from the country, but you can’t keep him away forever.

You might say as much for Buddy Vaughan, who was raised in Roosevelt County and returned to eastern New Mexico after decades criss-crossing the country with his trucking business and training race horses in California.

The equestrian affinity goes back to his upbringing on a ranch near Kenna. His brother Dale said they had no electricity in the home most of those years. Still, those were good times.

“Old times are the best times,” Dale Vaughan said. “Everything (today) moves at 90 mph.”

Family members said Buddy Vaughan loved to tell stories about those days, about his traveling days as an adult, and about all the days of his adventurous life, all the way to end, socializing at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church just north of his birthplace in Clovis.

“He was a really good guy to talk to, because he always had a story,” said his son Jimmy Dale Ward, of Elida. “There was nobody he didn’t have a story for.”

Vaughan passed Aug. 30 at age 79 and was buried last week in Portales, the same city where he wed Janice Hartley in 1962. The young family went west by the next decade after Vaughan got a contract hauling oversized items with the Los Angeles County water department, about the time his son Billy Wayne Vaughan was a small child.

“He was well-liked. He’s one of them ones, if you called him he would have given you 15 different stories and he lived every one of them. He’d been around the country 15 to 20 times and met all kinds of different people,” said Billy Wayne Vaughan, of Shallowater.

“And he knew everything. He could build a truck from the ground up, knew how to train a horse and could tell you the breeding of a race horse all the way back to its grandma, half the horses related to them and the speed index on them. His mind was very sharp.”

Vaughan also knew how to rope a steer and ride a bull, skills tracing as far back as 1956 when he won Elida’s “All-Around Cowboy” belt-buckle. His son recalled a testament from the owner of a saddle shop in Levelland who said Vaughan was the best bull rider he’d ever seen.

“He wasn’t scared of nothing, man. There wasn’t no fear in Buddy Vaughan,” said his son. “That’s kind of how he was. He was an all-around cowboy.”

Along those lines Vaughan also knew how to break a horse, keeping a barnful of 40 to 50 of the animals at a time during his 20 years training them in California. He brought eight or nine broodmares along when he returned to New Mexico in the late 1980s, said Billy Wayne Vaughan, and continued breeding them in years following, along with hauling cattle and other work.

Billy Wayne Vaughan said he didn’t have the patience as a young man to follow that particular path of his father, who always seemed to keep a cool head.

“Even when it was tough and rough, Dad never got excited, never worried. Calm, cool, collected — that’s just the way he was. Probably one of the most patient men you’d ever meet,” he said. “I like to think that’s probably what made him such a good truck driver. Never got riled, for sure.”

A cool head must have helped with one of the tasks Vaughan faced in just the past few years, when he went to the Department of Motor Vehicles for a new driver’s license and found the agency wouldn’t issue him one with the nickname he’d used his entire life.

“He ended up going down and getting his name legally changed to Buddy Vaughan,” said his son. “Dale (his older brother) gave him that nickname when he was just a little guy.”

The right license was important to Vaughan because he was still busy then with his trucking business; he had stayed busy until almost the end of his life. And that’s without a racino in Clovis or Tucumcari, the prospects for which seem ever more likely as the state’s Racing Commission approaches a decision by year’s end.

“He would have been right in the middle of that. He probably would have been there and tried to be lead trainer,” said Billy Wayne Vaughan.

 
 
Rendered 03/26/2024 17:22