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Bill Vaughan, a latecomer to the trade, became a paragrapher by chance. After three years of newspapering in Springfield, Mo., he joined the editorial staff of the Star in 1939, worked at various assignments until the paper's resident paragrapher. the late Clad H. ("Pip") Thompson, retired in 1946. Vaughan replaced Pip as custodian of "Starbeams," a column of paragraphs that has stuck to the Star's editorial page since the paper's birth in 1880. (The first Starbeam: "Modjeska [a prominent 19th century actress] is fond of onions.") In 1953, when the Detroit News's able paragrapher, Harry V. Wade, moved up to editor of the News, Vaughan took over Wade's syndicated column, "Senator Soaper Says." Soaper now bubbles in more than 120 U.S. papers and five abroad.
Firm Foundation. Like all good paragraphers, Bill Vaughan takes a whimsical view of his craft. "Paragraphing was always based on a firm foundation of mutual plagiarism," he says. "It may be that paragraphs are hard to sell because editors are accustomed to swiping them." Vaughan is proudest of one of his paragraphs that was widely plagiarized and wound up as a footnote to history: "One day I wrote that President Millard Fillmore had lent encouragement to Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, and that out of gratitude Morse had named the characters of the Morse code, dot and dash, after Fillmore's children, Dorothy and Dashiell. That turned up in a national magazine [Coronet] as a perfectly straight bit of historical fact. It isn't given to many men to louse up history."
Paragrapher Vaughan, also writes essays for the Star, and recently scored two solid hits in this new department: the Bell Syndicate is syndicating his essays, and Simon & Schuster will soon publish a collection of them, Bird Thou Never Wert, in book form. But once a paragrapher, always a paragrapher. Said Essayist Vaughan of his book title, automatically composing a paragraph: "It fits the two main requirements for a book title today—it comes from the classics and means absolutely nothing."