Patrick Vaughan

Early life[edit]

Vaughan was born in Seattle, Washington. Vaughan's father was a member of Al Brightman's Seattle University nationally ranked basketball teams led by the “Gold Dust Twins” of Johnny and Ed O’Brien.^[1] In 1952 that team defeated the Harlem Globetrotters in what has been called the most memorable event in Seattle sports history.^[2] Vaughan's father missed that game due to military service and heard the news while serving on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean. His uncle Daniel Vaughan also served in the Navy during which he married Courtney Sprague, niece of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the daughter of Admiral Clifton Sprague, hero of the WW2 Battle off Samar, which the author of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors has called "the greatest upset in the history of naval warfare".^[3]


Vaughan spent his childhood years in the small petroleum town of Oildale, California. In grade school the children's novels Escape from Warsaw and The Endless Steppe provided an early interest in the history of Poland.^[4] He gained an informal education listening stories told by Los Angeles sportscasters Vin Scully and Chick Hearn. Vaughan gained an early lesson in the power of positive thinking as a Little League catcher taking pitches from teammate Patrick Lencioni who in later years became a best-selling author in Silicon Valley.^[5] Vaughan's older sister could not compete because there were no girls' sports programs; she became an early Title IX pioneer and set a high-school girl's long-jump record that has stood for over forty years.^[6]


In 1980 Vaughan's father accepted a new job in a geothermal energy company north of San Francisco. In Santa Rosa, Vaughan became an All-Northern California selection on the first of Coach Tom Bon Figli's Cardinal Newman basketball teams.^[7]


He was recruited by Bill Trumbo and played summer league for Steve Patterson who was the UCLA center after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and before Bill Walton. Patterson emphasized the teaching of John Wooden, especially the idea that college basketball is four years of your life-so you better know how to do something else.^[8]


Patrick Vaughan studied History and Business Organization at California State University, Chico. He hosted a popular morning show on the influential KCSC radio station. Spin magazine selected it as the best alternative radio station in the United States. KCSC was a cable station, allowing it a creative air play while serving as a midpoint for then-obscure bands such as the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana traveling between Seattle and San Francisco. KCSC staff member Amy Finnerty (host of the show after Vaughan) has been credited with successfully pushing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video on MTV executives, helping to spark the popular grunge music era of the 1990s.^[9]


The writer Matt Olmstead hired Vaughan to write a weekly column for the university newspaper. That column achieved a popular campus following and was awarded for excellence by the California Intercollegiate Press Association.^[10] Olmstead went on to successful career as a Hollywood producer for Prison Break and NYPD Blue where he would insert Vaughan's name into his scripts. In one episode, Detective Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) investigates an incident at Vaughan Construction and in another Detective Diane Russell (Kim Delaney) aggressively interrogates a suspect regarding the suspicious use of his alias “Pat Vaughan”.^[11]