Wendy Vaughn is no stranger to dirt roads. She has run rescue calls on them, lives on one, and now as their county commissioner, represents her constituents who live on them.
Vaughn, 55, has lived in Jones County all her life, graduating from Jones County High in 1988. As a youngster, she enjoyed the country life, riding her horses on the dirt roads near her house on Pioneer Road, spending time with her grandmother, Jewell Brown, and walking the dirt road to the creek.
“Mama Jewell would get all of us grandkids who lived right here by her, and we’d walk all the way to the creek. We’d go swimming in the creek,” Vaughn recollected.
It wasn’t long after that when the teenager’s focus shifted to something more serious. Once she and best friend Tonya Coulter obtained their driver’s licenses, they took a course to earn a rescue specialist license.
“Off we went at 16 and ran rescue calls during the day, during the summer time when the volunteers that work for a living were at work,” Vaughn said. “So, we’d be 16 years old pulling up on whatever medical crisis there was in Jones County.”
She added that there were two particular instances she remembers.
One was performing CPR on a man for an hour waiting for an ambulance.
“We didn’t save him, but we began CPR, so we couldn’t end it. We had to wait for somebody to get there to call it.”
The other incident affects her still.
“I still hate the smell of diesel to this day because of a fatality that took the lives of two sisters,” she lamented.
The victims’ car hydroplaned and went under an 18-wheeler, sending the vehicles off the road.
“It just plowed up the side of the road, and we searched for body parts for about six hours. It was mud you were walking in, and it was mixed with diesel, so the smell of diesel fuel will trigger that sight.”
Following high school graduation, Vaughn went through several jobs before settling into her career field.
“I worked at Bank South during the day and Flaming Sally’s as a waitress and a bartender at night for about four months,” she recalled.
She later worked as a waitress in Milledgeville before joining Mid-Georgia Ambulance full-time — initially as a dispatcher and later on the road as a medic — while going to EMT school. She also met her future husband while working there.
Wendy Brown and Chris Vaughn had known each other during their high school years but never dated. They ran into each other at a Greyhound football game, started dating and married about a year and a half later, in June 1991. They have two sons, Storm and River, both of whom live in Jones County and have children.
She said he asked her dad, Johnny, for permission to marry her, “the old-fashioned way, out on the porch, just him and daddy. And my daddy told him two things: we had to have insurance, and he always had to support me. So,” Vaughn added with a chuckle, “34 years later, I carry the insurance in the family, and he supports us.”
The marriage and subsequent pregnancy played a part in her change of careers.
“I had actually even started paramedic school when I found out that I was pregnant with Storm,” she said, “and I made the decision that I did not want to, because I worked about 36 hours straight when I worked there, and because you would always pick up an extra shift. I made the decision that I wanted to be home more.”
Vaughn — who served as a medic at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and met Bruce Willis and Demi Moore as well as Shaquille O’Neal — credits a school principal with helping her start the transition.
“John Trimnell, knowing I was pregnant and that I would be out for maternity leave at some point in time during the school year, hired me as a parapro at Jones County High in the vocation department.”
Four years later, however, her desire to build her ‘dream house’ led to another change in employment.
“Chris said the only way I could do that was to get a real job that made real money,” Vaughn acknowledged. “So, I went to Central State Hospital, and I worked there for six years.”
Eventually the mother in Vaughn led to what proved to be the last move.
“I missed spending the time with my boys,” she reflected. “I missed being able to go to the schools. So finally, after six years, I left and came back to the Jones County school system as a bus driver because I knew it had the same insurance that I had at Central State.”
Vaughn started driving a bus in August 2005 and did that for three years before a new transportation director persuaded her to apply for an office manager position. She took it and served as office manager/route coordinator for six years. She then moved up to director of transportation.
“I supervised over 120 employees. That’s all the bus drivers, parapros, part-timers and mechanics.”
Vaughn said there was a definite rise in one category of routes during her 13 years as transportation director.
“The biggest rise we’ve seen in transportation is the special needs rounds. We only had four when I started. We had 10 when I left,” she said, pointing out that each of those routes requires at least one, sometimes two, parapros. The small number of pickups means longer time for the routes.
“It might be seven miles between the first pickup and the second pickup, and then you might go six miles to the next one.”
Vaughn was promoted to operations coordinator in January 2024, and at first glance, her current position seems mundane.
“I take care of workers comp, risk management, state and federal accounts. I pay them. I don’t do the ordering. I just simply pay those bills.”
Vaughn, however, pointed out she is charged with taking auditors around the county, showing them the various facilities, “showing them the stuff they need to find because I usually know where most of it is.”
Vaughn said school principal Dennis Woolfolk directed her last year to organize a tour.
“We took every high school teacher, six buses, around the county, showing the teachers the different social, economic neighborhoods that the kids come from.”
The operations coordinator credits a school social worker with inspiring her to run for county commissioner. Dr. Trevis Killen is not from Jones County, she said, and when he needed to make a home visit, he would frequently ask her to accompany him. She would talk to him about the history of different individuals and various places in the county, and he was impressed.
“He said, ‘Wendy, you ought to be the mayor of Jones County.’ I said, ‘I can’t be the mayor. The mayor’s in the City of Gray, and I don’t live in Gray.’ Killen kept telling her she should do something. ‘You know this whole town,’ Vaughn recalled him saying.
She decided to ‘do something’ and qualified in 2020 for the District 3 county commission seat. She ran unopposed. Vaughn ran again in 2024 and was opposed but won easily with 75 percent of the votes.
Vaughn, who served for several years on the state board of the PTA as a regional director while transportation director, said she ran for commissioner to try to do her part “to help make Jones County better, to keep some of the things that we already do great, keep them being great. I just want Jones County to be known as a great community for families, safe … I understand the importance of having a place to be proud to raise your kids in because I tried to be involved in everything that mine did.”
The commissioner believes the current board is doing a good job. She said all the commissioners bring something positive and helpful to the table.
“And,” she added, “one of our greatest things is that we do try to be as transparent as we can be. That’s what I want to be. I don’t want to be doing shady deals. I don’t want to be known as, we’re running people out of Jones County because they’re not from Jones County.”
While she understands many Jones County residents prefer otherwise, Vaughn has no desire for her road to be paved.
“I just think sometimes we need to take our shoes off and go walk down that dirt road and to get rooted back into Jones County a little bit more,” she reflected. “And I know simple times are gone, but I do try to instill that in my grandchildren.”
