The deceased: Norman Vaughan

Born: December 19, 1905 Died: December 23, 2005 Cause of death: A century’s-worth of bold living and grand adventures

By Claire Walter

Norman Vaughan was the last survivor of Admiral Richard Byrd’s 1928-30 expedition to the South Pole, and, come April, he had hoped to reach the North Pole by dog sled. He was young when he dropped out of Harvard to handle sled dogs for Byrd, and he would have been almost one hundred and a half when he set off for the North Pole this spring. When he passed away just after his hundredth birthday and just before Christmas, he had led a life of adventure that is arguably unsurpassed in this era. In fact, one of his autobiographical books is called “My Life of Adventure.”

Born when Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House and raised in Massachusetts, he was captivated by tales of the courageous overland expeditions of Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, Robert E. Peary and others during what is called the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration. He was drawn to cold, snowy and wild northern New England, where he learned to handle sled dogs. In 1925, he delivered medical supplies to isolated Newfoundland villages by dog sled. These mercy missions, known as the Serum Run, were the East-Coast equivalent of the Anchorage-to-Nome run now memorialized with the Iditarod.

Impressed by this experience, Admiral Byrd hired Norman as his chief dog-team handler. Byrd himself wasn’t planning to slog across the frozen continent. He planned to reach the Pole by air, making his the first mechanized polar expedition. Norman was a member of the support team that created a trail with dog teams and skis for Byrd to follow from aloft and also as a safety measure in case of an aircraft mishap. Admiral Byrd honored Norman by naming a beautiful 10,302-foot peak “Mt. Vaughan.” Norman competed in the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York, where dog sled racing was a demonstration sport. During World War II, he commanded a Labrador-based military search-and-rescue dog sled squad that famously rescued 26 fighter pilots and bombardiers after their P-38s were forced down on Greenland’s ice sheet. Norman returned alone to retrieve top-secret Norden bombsights before the Germans, whose U-boats were patrolling offshore. Half-a-century later, he helped salvage one plane of what had become known as the Lost Squadron. As an Army Air Corps colonel during World War II, Norman, 209 dogs and 17 drivers also evacuated wounded soldiers from the Battle of the Bulge, and after the war, he headed North Atlantic search-and-rescue operations for International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations’ air wing. In between he made and lost fortunes — one distributing

Canadian snowmobiles in New England. Ironically, in Alaska, where Norman resettled at the age of 68, penniless and thrice divorced, snowmobiles have largely supplanted dog sleds for winter transportation in Native communities. Still, sled dogs were in his blood in ways that snowmobiles never were. He made friends and rebuilt a dog team, mushed down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue in three inaugural parades and took Pope John Paul II for a dog sled ride. He and his team raced in 13 consecutive Iditarods, the first when he was 72 and his last in 1990 at 84.

Meanwhile, in 1985, during a summer in Atlanta, Norman met Carolyn Muegge. When he was readying to return to Anchorage, he uttered the irresistible pickup line: “I need a dog handler this winter. Can you come?” She did. They married in 1987, and Carolyn now says, “I fell in love with Alaska, with the dogs and with Norman.” Norman noted, “When a younger woman marries an older man, people say, ‘She married him for his money.’ No one said that about her, because I didn’t have any.” On December 16, 1994, three days before his 89th birthday, Norman and Carolyn climbed namesake Mt. Vaughan, with National Geographic filming the ascent. They had hoped to celebrate his 100th birthday at the summit, but were unable to raise enough money to hire a suitable airplane for the flight to Antarctica from Chile. In addition to their planned North Pole excursion, they were looking toward his 101st birthday atop Mt. Vaughan when he passed away, surrounded by family and friends.

Carolyn always said of her optimistic husband, “‘Can’t’ is not in his vocabulary.”



Boulder-based freelance writer Claire Walter had dinner with Norman and Carolyn Vaughn in Anchorage in May 2005.