Frances Hester Downs Vaughn, M.P.H., R.N., Instructor in Nursing (Community Health Nursing)

Diploma, Cumberland Hospital School of Nursing, Brooklyn; B.S., Eastern Michigan University; M.P.H., University of Michigan, 1975.

Instructor in Nursing (Community Health Nursing), University of Michigan School of Nursing, 1975-1978. On leave, 1977-1978. In 1979 Frances H. Vaughn was working at the Nurse Employment Office. In the classified section of the Chicago Tribune one Sunday in July 1979 she is the contact person in a display advertisement for job openings at University of Michigan Hospitals.

Frances Hester Downs, the daughter of Harold James Downs and Mary Frances Hester Downs, was born in 1930 in Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated in 1948 from Girls’ High School in Roxbury. The caption in the yearbook by her senior picture reads, in part: “Frannie’s lifelong ambition is to become a nurse; therefore, she will enter the Nursing School, Cumberland Hospital, Brooklyn, New York.” About 1951 she was married to Joseph Ewing Vaughn, Jr., who was professor of kinesiology/physical education at University of Michigan, serving from 1970 to 1984. He was granted emeritus status, but reactivated and served another ten years.

From 1984 to 1986 Joseph E. Vaughn served as chair of physical education department at Grambling University, then returned to the University of Michigan. From 1986 to 1996 he held appointments with the Department of Gerontology, School of Education, Physical Education, and Literature, Science, and the Arts (LS&A). The Vaughns had been married fifty-four years at the time of his death in 2005.