{"id":433,"date":"2011-08-25T09:00:25","date_gmt":"2011-08-25T13:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.emory.edu\/historynews\/?p=433"},"modified":"2011-08-25T09:00:25","modified_gmt":"2011-08-25T13:00:25","slug":"update-from-vaughn-davis-bornet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/emoryhistorynews\/2011\/08\/25\/update-from-vaughn-davis-bornet\/","title":{"rendered":"Update from Vaughn Davis Bornet"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Vaughn Davis Bornet on Memorial Day 2010.<\/p><\/div>\n

Vaughn Davis Bornet<\/strong>, B.A. 1939, our oldest living undergraduate alumnus, will turn 94 on October 10, 2011. Enjoying normal health, he attends Rotary routinely on Thursdays. He shared many memories of Emory faculty. He writes, \u201cGarland Smith is mostly responsible for my later editing skills, I should think.\u00a0 He gave F’s on a paper for ANY misspelled words, including AND without the N and THE without the H.\u00a0 In another single course he transmitted a lifelong love of poetry (exercised now and then).\u00a0Gaty Workman in Abnormal Psychology took us to Milledgeville to what was then a genuine insane asylum. Much memorialized Dean Rece transmitted in one course more comprehension of the King James Bible than years of Sunday School.\u00a0 No, those books are not in chronological order, and Isaiah in addition to being spelled \u2018that way\u2019 is two books with vast time between them.\u00a0Tom English offered his tour de force in the English Language, and the American Literature course introduced Walt Whitman in all his eccentricities (and beauty of phrasing).\u00a0 While I found vital qualities in Southernist Hayward J. Pearce and English history lover Ross McLean, my favorite, and friend, was youthful Mose Harvey of UC Berkeley whose concentration on Russia probably detoured him to a lifetime in the State Department. I remember him waving airily toward a pile of unbound documents and saying something like \u2018Here in this office I have more information than the whole Harvard History Department!\u2019 I believed. We used that Candler Library instead of textbooks in those Depression years (1935 to 1940); we didn’t even have texts in US and Western Civ courses. No offense to the History Department, but I did get a huge boost from several Journalism courses back then.\u00a0 And I’m so glad I sweated through International Law and Constitutional Law under Cullen Gosnell, heavily and routinely using the Law Library and those huge law books; again, no text.\u201d\u00a0 He also remembers Leroy Loemker in the Philosophy Department.<\/p>\n

Since earning his Honors degree in History at Emory, he has had an eventful life and written a long list of books in United States history.\u00a0 Just this year, he published Speaking Up for America: In the Rogue River Valley during the Vietnam War<\/em> (2011), a collection of speeches and essays reflecting on those decades in US history, and Leaders and Issues at Southern Oregon College, 1963 to 1980<\/em> (2011).\u00a0 During World War II, he entered the Navy as Yeoman First class and then earned his commission. He retired as Commander from the Naval Reserves.\u00a0 He received his doctorate from Stanford University in 1951. He held a number of university positions; most notably, he was Professor of History and Social Sciences and the Chairman of the Social Sciences Division of the Southern Oregon University.\u00a0\u00a0 For twenty years, he served on the Oregon Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.\u00a0\u00a0 His articles have been published in many journals, including The American Archivist<\/em> and The Historian.<\/em> Dr. Bornet held a number of research positions at prominent institutions, such as the RAND Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the Commonwealth Club of California and the Institute of American History at Stanford University.\u00a0 His books cover a very wide range of important topics in twentieth-century United States History: Welfare in America<\/em> (1960); <\/strong>Labor Politics in a Democratic Republic<\/em> (1964); Herbert Hoover, President of the United States<\/em> (co-authored, 1975); and The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson<\/em> (1983). He wrote the long summary\u00a0appraisal article ‘United States’ three times for encyclopedia yearbooks.\u00a0His sketch appears in several Who’s Who<\/em> publications of the Marquis Company, and he has the Distinguished Service\u00a0Medallions of the American Heart Association and Oregon Heart Association.<\/p>\n

Since 1963, he has called Oregon home.\u00a0 Still by his side is his choice for a mate:\u00a0 Beth W. Bornet, who was at their meeting in 1944 the 20 year-old\u00a0President of the senior class at University of Nevada, Reno and hailed from tiny Susanville, California.\u00a0 She has been a leading volunteer\u00a0honored by\u00a0many organizations. They live in Ashland, Oregon. Their two children live in California and Connecticut.<\/p>\n

This past Memorial Day, he spoke at the <\/em>Mountain View Cemetery in Ashland. <\/em>In his speech, he drew connections to Emory\u2019s losses during World War II: \u201cThere were deaths from my own fraternity\u2014my catcher when I pitched; the editor of the Emory Wheel newspaper; the dear son of the professor who mentored us Sigma Chis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Bornet\u2019s autobiography appeared in 1995, An Independent Scholar in Twentieth Century America: The Autobiography of Vaughn Davis Bornet<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vaughn Davis Bornet, B.A. 1939, our oldest living undergraduate alumnus, will turn 94 on October 10, 2011. Enjoying normal health, he attends Rotary routinely on Thursdays. He shared many memories of Emory faculty. He writes, \u201cGarland Smith is mostly responsible for my later editing skills, I should think.\u00a0 He gave F’s on a paper for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1282,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/emoryhistorynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/emoryhistorynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/emoryhistorynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/emoryhistorynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1282"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/emoryhistorynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/emoryhistorynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/emoryhistorynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/emoryhistorynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/emoryhistorynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}