Cause of death Helicopter crash | Name Del Vaughn | |
Born December 9, 1942 ( 1942-12-09 ) Died June 26, 1972(1972-06-26) (aged 29)
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
while covering Hurricane Agnes flooding Residence Hometown: St. Petersburg, Florida
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Alma mater University of Florida
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Occupation Television journalist with CBS News
United States Navy journalist Spouse(s) Christine R. Vaughn, later Christine Hilsky | ||
Odell Wallace Vaughn, Jr., known as Del Vaughn (December 9, 1942 – June 26, 1972), was a reporter and correspondent for CBS News who died at the age of twenty-nine in a helicopter crash in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, while he was covering the flooding resulting from Hurricane Agnes.
In addition to Vaughn, two other newsmen, Sid Brenner and Louis Clark of WCAU in Philadelphia, and the pilot, Mike Sedio, perished in the crash. The helicopter lost its rotor some three hundred feet above the Capital City Airport in Harrisburg, crashed, and exploded on the runway.
Vaughn had previously worked at several radio and television stations, including outlets in his declared hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida, Havre de Grace in Harford County in northeastern Maryland, and Philadelphia. From 1965 to February 1966, he was a journalist in the United States Navy, in which capacity he prepared world news broadcasts and had his own radio show, "Music for an Afternoon". He studied at the University of Florida at Gainesville, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Vaughn was the only son of Odell Vaughn, Sr. former Deputy Director of the US Veterans Administration (born c. 1921), and the former Virginia Louise Blackwood (1922-2010), formerly of Washington, D.C., and residing at the time of her death in Boiling Springs in Spartanburg County in northern South Carolina. Vaughn has two sisters, Patricia Vaughn Wootten and her husband, Bradley, of Woodbridge, Virginia, and Jo Vaughn Peavey and her husband, Marion, of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Vaughn with his wife, Christine, had two sons, Stephen Vaughn and Matthew Vaughn. Now Christine Vaughn resides with her husband, Robert Joseph Hilsky, in Belleair Bluffs in Pinellas County, Florida.