Hello, my name is Fletcher Vaughn and I’m a Journalism major at the University of Alabama. My hometown is a little place by the name of Quincy, located on the outskirts of Tallahassee, Florida.
The town’s only claim to fame would have to be the fact that it was one of the key places that helped Coca-Cola become such a big company. During the Great Depression, a Quincy banker by the name of Pat Munroe urged people in my hometown, including my family, to invest $40 or less into a share of Coca-Cola stock. Even though Coca-Cola was not a household name at this time, a good portion of the population in Quincy took his advice and by the time it was 1997 that $40 share was worth $5 million. This caused the small town of Quincy, Florida to become the home of the most millionaires per capita in the country. Now that’s not the case anymore, but a lot of those “Coca-Cola millionaires” still reside in Quincy. My mom’s side of the family happens to be one of the few original families.
On my dad’s side of the family, everybody came from either northern Georgia or southern Louisiana. My dad was raised in Lafayette, Louisiana and he went on to play football at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. So growing up I was taught to love the game of football and I too ended up with the chance to play football in college. Along with one of my close friends, I was going to sign a football scholarship with Georgia-Southern University, but we both backed out at the last minute. Instead, my friend decided to take a year off from school and move out to Breckenridge, Colorado with a group of our other close friends. As for me, I decided football was not what I wanted to do in college, so I enrolled at the University of Alabama.
I started my freshman year majoring in Business Management because I had always felt that I wanted to establish my own business. Once I got through my first year of college, I quickly realized that my true passion was writing. I had always been strong in writing, so I changed my major to Journalism. One of my favorite journalists was the late Hunter S. Thompson, who was a famous writer for the popular magazines Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone. Yes, he is also famous for being the ultimate trouble-maker, but his style of writing was so unique that people couldn’t help but be intrigued when reading his work. My dream is to one day be a journalist for magazines, such as Rolling Stone or Sports Illustrated, and I plan to do whatever it takes to reach that dream.
I’ve always been a pretty strong willed person and I’ve done my best to not let negative things slow me down. Also, I’ve always been the guy who was close with everyone, but at the same time, never considered a member of certain cliques. I try to keep an open mind when listening to anyone’s opinions and sometimes my opinions aren’t as widely accepted as others. I don’t let that change who I am though, and I guess that’s why I like to live by my favorite Hunter S. Thompson quote. “Too weird to live, but too rare to die.” -Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
Fletcher Vaughn 