From VOICES: A Tribute to Vaughn Ward

Volume 28
Spring-Summer
2002

Return to Table of Contents

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

The loss of Vaughn is devastating. She was the heart and soul of the community of folklorists in New York State. The work that Vaughn and her husband George did with Sara Cleveland, Larry Older, and other great upstate folk artists was exemplary—a model for us all—and she inspired us with her work with many communities. The Liars’ Club of tall story tellers was especially remarkable.

Vaughn had indomitable spirit to the end, and I’ll miss her terribly.

—Robert Baron

I was saddened by the passing of friend and teacher Vaughn Ward. As a native of the North Country, when I think of the folklife of northern New York State, I am keenly aware that Vaughn was an inspiration through her many efforts to preserve the folk arts, music, oral history, and storytelling traditions of our region.

I am reminded of the words that Vaughn shared with me nearly twenty years ago: "We’re all better talking than we are listening." We will miss Vaughn’s dedication in listening to, seeking out, and promoting North Country culture.

—Bruce Cole

I spent a short but very intense time working with Vaughn on community-based cultural and heritage tourism initiatives. We talked for about twenty-two hours a day during my stay with her and George. She was one of my "wild women" friends and role models. Her energy, intensity, intellectual curiosity, generosity, and indomitable spirit were simultaneously awe-inspiring, draining, and infectious. It was impossible to be neutral about Vaughn and equally impossible not to be changed in a positive way by encountering her. She really was a mother spirit of New York folklore.

—Pat Wells

As word about the death of our old friend Vaughn Ward spread through the folklore world of New York State, we were suddenly faced with the realization that a void had been created. In all my years, I haven’t known anyone in the field who cared more about the work she did, about the people she met, about learning and sharing. I have particularly respected and admired the warm relationships she generated with the many artists—ordinary people who learned from her how extraordinary they and their gifts were—she and George discovered and nurtured over the years.

Over the years, we had many chances to work together in these northern counties of New York. We planned and plotted many programs, frequently talked over mutual concerns in our work and in our lives, and really enjoyed each other’s company. Though she lived at the opposite end of our region and had to travel through good and awful weather to our meetings and programs, Vaughn had been a loyal charter member of the board of directors of Traditional Arts of Upstate New York and, long after she left the board, a very valued adviser. Recently, we both acknowledged that we had become the old-timers in our work, and I was looking forward to many more chances to work together.

Vaughn was strong, warm, gentle, forceful, caring—all of those things, and always with that wonderful laugh! What I will remember most is her dedication to the human side of what we do: the importance of remembering that although folklore makes our study, people make our friends.

Not long before she died, Vaughn traveled four hours to see her old friend, neighbor, and protégé, storyteller Catherine Charron, receive a North Country Heritage award. Sick as she was, she would not have missed that day, and she glowed with joy at seeing another of her "recommendations" fulfilled. She spoke then of her determination to keep going as long as she could. It was simply not long enough.

—Varick Chittenden

New York State has lost a strong, wonderful woman. Our field has lost a champion. We all have lost a good friend.

—Ellen McHale

News of Vaughn Ward’s decease reaches me through Voices in southwest Florida, far distant from her North Country environs and the Adirondack region folk heritage that drew us together as fieldworkers, authors, and public presenters over three decades. Vaughn’s publications attested to her skills as an accomplished interviewer-collector and an editor-writer ever mindful of plain, jargon-free prose and general public outreach. Vaughn had a wonderful sense of an audience.

I last saw Vaughn in fall 2001 at Canton, St. Lawrence County, for TAUNY’s annual Salute to North Country Legends. She said nothing of the cancer that soon was to claim her life, but that was typical of Vaughn, directing conversation instead to our families, and my recent retirement activities. She remained the Vaughn Ward who perhaps foremost—and underpinning her many notable heritage advocacy achievements—was insistently a caring "people person." For me, Vaughn always epitomized the best of a kind of 1960s and 1970s humanism and social consciousness, in combination. Her passing is a profound loss.

—Robert D. Bethke