BY CINDY LANE
Tom Vaught was the kindest, funniest, most humble person I ever worked with in the news business, and he and his wife, Darcy, and I became instant friends.
Tom worked for the Island Free Press and The Dolphin before they folded, then The Bradenton Herald, where I first knew him. He joined The Anna Maria Island Sun as a reporter more than 25 years ago, shortly before I did, and worked there until his retirement.
I hated saying goodbye to him then, and I hate it even more now.
Almost 10 years ago, former Channel 8 News anchor Bob Hite, a fellow U.S. Marine, helped me talk Tom into telling his war stories about Vietnam for a multimedia Veterans Day piece in The Sun.
It started with a photo over his desk of a scene from “Apocalypse Now” where Robert Duvall tells his troops, “Charlie don’t surf.” As a surfer, I asked Tom what that meant. He said that it reminded him of when he surfed at China Beach in Vietnam while on leave. The enemy never took a break to surf, he said. Then he joked, in his self-deprecating way, that surfing was the closest he came to dying during the war, and that his epitaph could have been, “He surfed his country well.”
Classic Tom, like his signature Hawaiian shirts and his impression of DJ Adrian Cronauer saying “Good morning, Vietnam!”
One Fourth of July, Tom and Darcy came to my home for a fireworks display. We had a great view from my porch overlooking the Gulf, where the fireworks were being launched from a barge. Sometime during the Jimi Hendrix version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that was playing on my turntable, he went inside. I thought he wanted to hear the song better, but it turns out the fireworks reminded him a little too much of the war.
It’s no surprise that Peace Day at Anna Maria Elementary School became one of Tom’s favorite annual assignments. He also looked forward to covering the Easter sunrise service at Manatee Beach every year, and playing Santa Claus at Island Christmas events.
He loved the movie “Network,” and often declared in the newsroom, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” He also never got enough of the movie, “All the President’s Men,” because it showed that even rookie reporters can shine when a good editor stands up for them.
Tom and I were both radio news reporters back when we had to disassemble pay phone receivers and hook up the wires to a tape deck to transmit interviews back to the control room. He told me once that in Colorado, working in radio news, “I was in heaven.”
Now, he undoubtedly is.
