Here's looking at you... Rockie and Jeff Vaughan

                        By Bobby and Nancy Spottswood - Navarre Press

The lady who opened the door of the Vaughan home bore a striking resemblance to Bette Midler. “Hi, I’m Rockie,” she said as her husband, Jeff, (he reminds me of Tex Ritter) cracked, “I’m Bullwinkle.” And she spells her name R-o-ck-i-e, she said. Not R-o-c-k-y, like the fighter. “But I’m tough,” she added. “I betcha,” I agreed. “Where you from?” “Port Arthur,Texas. Daddy worked for Texaco and he fished, too,” she said. “That’s where I got my love of fishing, but after leaving home, I didn’t fish ’til I went with Jeff.” “Who caught who first?” I asked. “Don’t ask; gets his blood pressure up,” she whispered, laughing. “But he’s had more experience.” “Yeah, I chased her ’til she caught me,” Jeff added, a grin splitting his suntanned face. Rockie said she grew up with a brother and two sisters, Carl Avila of Toledo Bend,Texas, and Rosemary Bolte of San Antonio,Texas. “And ‘Judy the Brat,’ ” she added, eyes flashing mischief. “The Brat’s last name is Doyle and she lives in Oklahoma … Tulsa, really, Sapulpa.” “Go with Tulsa,” I said. “Easier.” “No! We don’t ‘go with’ Pensacola when somebody asks where we live, we say Navarre,” she said, voice reaching screech level.“They’re from Sapulpa, say ‘Sapulpa.’ ” “Sapulpa,” I yielded. “Why call her ‘The Brat?’ ” “ ‘Cause she is,” she snapped with a “whaddayathink” grin. “Carl was the king, ’cause he’s the only son. He never did anything ’cept take out the trash,” she added, with a feigned, jealous little sister sneer. “But we’re all crazy and had a wonderful childhood,” she continued. “Fishing, camping, playing, didn’t have money, but had everything we needed.
    “We went to church every Sunday, but Saturdays, we didn’t go anywhere ’til the house was cleaned.That’s when Carl had to mow the lawn and wash the cars,” she added, reliving the impish glee of her brother working.
    Warm memories reflected in her eyes as she recalled their childhood.
    “I slept with my little sister and you could sleep on the inside with a pillow, or sleep on the outside without a pillow, but I always had my Pekingese in the middle,” she chuckled. “She always said, ‘She had that damn dog.’ ”
    Pretending scorn, she added, “But Carl always had his own room.”
    In high school, Rockie was bugle sergeant for their drum and bugle corps, and I asked, “Can you still toot a tune?”
    “Yes indeed,” she replied. “Last reunion, all the Red Hussars played, but we couldn’t remember some of the songs.”
    “Red Huzzers, that’s y’all’s band?”
    “H-u-s-s-a-r-s,” she barked. “And it’s drum and bugle corps.”
    I tried to hide behind my notebook, and Rockie told me she attended North Texas State College to study elementary education. “But I didn’t stay. I went to business school and got married,” she said.
    After moving to New Orleans, La., Rockie worked as a teacher’s aide and a preschool teacher while Julie and Joy, her two children from that marriage, were in school.
    “You didn’t have to have a certificate back then,” she explained. She also taught kindergarten and worked for Caterpillar Tractor Company.
    Her next job as manager for International Freight Forwarder brought her in contact with U.S. Customs Chief Inspector Jeff Vaughan.
    Jeff and his wife soon formed a friendship with Rockie and her husband that lasted 15 years, even when both marriages came on troubled times.
    Their friendship also included Jeff’s mother.
    “Mother fell in love with Rockie,” he said. “She said she was like the sister she never had.”
    And when Jeff’s mother went into a nursing home, he visited her every day, but when his job took him out of town, Rockie said, “I’d go see her and take her to church or wherever she wanted to go.”
    “Our friendship turned into a love affair,” Jeff summed it up in typical “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” fashion.
    They started dating in 1992 and married in 1995.
    During that time, Rockie also worked in accounting and as executive secretary to the vice president of marketing at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans.
    Jeff grew up in Slidell, La., on his family’s eight acres, which they farmed for family use. He told us about getting up at 5 a.m., milking cows and feeding chickens before going to school, then coming home and working until dark.
    “We killed and smoked our hogs, mother canned a lot … my father was also a commercial fisherman on the Pearl River, and since I was 8, I’d go with him, catching bait , putting out trot lines … we ate a lot of fish,” he added, laughing.
    “Do you miss farm life?” I asked.
    “I had cancer and I miss farming about much as I miss cancer,” he said with wry humor. Although he had eight siblings, they “didn’t have time to get in trouble,” Jeff said. “I was 12 when my parents separated and I moved into town with Mother and had to go to work to help take care of three younger brothers.
    “I went to work at Abney’s Grocery delivering groceries on a bicycle and when I was 13, I got my driver’s license so I could use the delivery truck,” he continued.
    He worked until he graduated high school, enrolled at Louisiana State University on a legislative scholarship to study petroleum engineering, but mandatory freshman year ROTC and its inherent military rules interfered with his studies.
    “They wake you up for an inspection at 2 or 3 a.m.,” he said, naming one of the many antics upperclassmen dream up to harass lower classmen.
    “I just told ’em I could go in the military and do this stuff and get paid for it,” he added.
    Good as his word, he joined the Army and was assigned to the Army Security Agency Intelligence Branch as a Morse intercept operator.
    Composed primarily of soldiers with the very highest scores on Army intelligence tests, these guys monitored and interpreted military communications of the Soviet Union and its allies.
    “I went to Turkey at the time Russia was firing off intercontinental ballistic missiles and we were intercepting their launches, and we also transmitted to our U-2 spy planes,” he said.
    Jeff was transmitting to Francis Gary Powers when Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union.
    Discharged from the Army and offered a football scholarship to Southeastern Louisiana State University, the former standout tightend declined.
    “I didn’t want to get strapped down in school, so I joined the border patrol,” he continued.
    “In 1963, I transferred to the U.S. Customs stationed in New Orleans,” and after a year as customs entry clerk, he was promoted to inspector and started boarding ships and planes and working with passengers.
    At one point during his career, he was assigned to the Cabinet Committee for International Narcotics Control in Washington, D.C.
    “We trained foreign customs officers, trying to stop the flow of illegal drugs from their countries to the United States,” he explained.As an experienced field officer, Jeff traveled to more than 20 foreign countries as a training officer. He even trained FBI agents.
    A week after Jeff retired in 2000, he was rear-ended on the interstate and underwent operations to repair ruptured disks in his neck and both rotator cuffs.
    “This put me out of commission for two years, and I was just getting over that when a prostate biopsy revealed cancer cells,” he continued. “We decided to do the seed implants in ’03, and in August, I’ll be cancer free five years.”
    I asked Rockie about serious illnesses.
    “Nothing,” she waved a dismissive hand. “I’m fixing to have bladder surgery, but everything’s a repair on me … I don’t have illnesses … I just fall apart.”
    Navarre won these genial folks from Louisiana in 2004 when Joy, Rockie’s youngest daughter, married and moved to Navarre.
    “Our children and grandchildren are our lives, so when Joy said she’d have a baby if we’d move here and help take care of it, we did.”
    Rockie jokes about falling apart, but she holds together while she and Jeff work part-time at DL Installations, a security company in Fort Walton.
    Jeff takes care of their manicured yard and is chief cook when they, as Rockie says, “spend the majority of our time entertaining family and friends, babysitting, fishing, gardening, working and cooking.”
    Rockie has two daughters from her first marriage. Julie and Tim Rogers-Martin live in Decatur, Ga., and Joy and Kevin Anaston live in Gulf Breeze.
    Grandchildren are Brian, Jared, Jacob and Savannah.
    Jeff has three daughters from his first marriage: Janine and Jules Ursin and Jeflyn and Dennis Mire of Metairie, La., and Joline and Mike LaCoste of Kenner, La. Grandchildren are Jeffrie, Julie, Lindsey, Lacey, Luke,Tyler, Dylan and Dawson. His siblings,Alice, Imogene, Kitty Lou,Wyatt, and Roland are deceased, and Rosemary lives in Metairie, La., Donald in Shreveport, La., and Charles in New York. Former members of Navarre Presbyterian Church, they now attend Gulf Breeze Presbyterian Church “Laissez les bons temps rouler” is alive and well in the Vaughan home. So is “les joie de vivre.”

                              

The Vaughans met and became friends long before  they become a couple and married.                                                   .

Rockie and Jeff on their wedding day