Editing Vaughn Meader (section)

==Early life==
Meader was born in [[Waterville, Maine]] during one of the worst floods ever to hit [[New England]]: he often said he was born on "the night the West Bridge washed out". He was the only child of Charles Vaughn Meader, a millworker, and Mary Ellen Abbott. After his father broke his neck and drowned in a diving accident when Meader was only eighteen months old, his mother moved to [[Boston]] to work as a cocktail waitress, leaving Meader behind with relatives. A sometimes unruly and troubled child, Meader was sent to live with his mother in Boston at the age of five but she suffered from alcoholism, and placed him in a children's home.

After shuttling among several schools in Massachusetts and Maine, Meader eventually graduated from [[Brookline, Massachusetts|Brookline]] High School in 1953. He [[military service|enlisted]] in the [[United States Army]] and was stationed in [[Mannheim]], [[West Germany]] as a laboratory technician. He formed a country music band, the Rhine Rangers, with fellow soldiers, later adding impressions of popular singers to his repertoire. Meader married the German-born Vera Heller in 1955.<ref>John A. Drobnicki, Meader, (Abbott) Vaughn," in ''The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Thematic Series: The 1960s'' (Scribner's, 2003), Vol. 2, p. 68.</ref>