Garland ESY/Raytheon Retirees

We have very sad news to pass along today: Dottie Vaughn has passed away on Sunday, June 8, 2025.

From Bertha Hall:

Brenda called me tonight and Dottie passed away in her sleep Sunday night at 11:11pm.  She was still active with whatever was going on at her residence. She was sill playing chair balloon        volley ball.

We will all miss her and remember all the good times we had with her as our leader.

Funeral services for Dottie will be 11:00 AM, Wednesday, June 18, 2025, at the Oak View Baptist Church in Irving. Dr. Jim Gerlach will officiate, burial will follow at the Moore’s Memorial Garden in Arlington, TX. Friends and family may visit from 5:00 PM until 7:30 PM, Tuesday, June 17th at the Colonial Funeral Home in Irving.

Dottie retired from E-Systems/Raytheon in Garland, TX. She was a devoted and active member of her community. She founded the E-Systems Women’s Club and was very active within the E-System & Raytheon Garland Retirees. Dottie was deeply involved with the American Ex-POW Dallas Metroplex Chapter and proudly served as the Past Grand Worthy Matron of the Arlington Order of the Eastern Star Chapter. Her dedication to service and fellowship left a lasting impact on all who knew her.

Click Here to read her obituary

Terry Gaus posted on our mail subscription service:

I received word this weekend that we lost another one of our long-time institutions … Dottie Vaughn passed away on June 8th at the tender age of 97.  Some of you may remember Dottie as the person who emcee’d our Retiree lunches for many years – from 2000 until 2015, in fact.  She was not our first moderator; by the time she took on that task, our group had already been meeting for a decade, but she was a steady hand on the tiller until she passed the baton to Eileen back in 2015.  That was Dottie’s nature, though … she loved interacting with people and was a “connector” as well as a “fixture” at the Jupiter Road campus.

In addition to managing the Garland Division mailroom and DoD classified Document Control functions from the beginning of time until her retirement many years later, she also started up and led the E-Systems Women’s Club (back in the days when such a gender-exclusive organization was politically correct in the corporate world).  She spent her entire career on the first floor of Bldg 552, immediately behind the lobby entrance on the building’s main hallway.  From that central location, she probably knew every employee on a first-name basis.

One memory from my early days at the “Big Easy” still sticks with me today, many years later:  Few people at the Garland Division endured the impacts of our massive growth throughout the 1980’s as much as Dottie and her mailroom staff, as we went from a headcount of about 1500 to over 5200 in a few short years.  The growth in mail volume associated with that increase in personnel finally led her to issue a memo to all employees requesting them to have their routine subscriptions sent to their home address instead of the office.  When I jokingly pushed back to her on this suggestion, she did not miss a beat in responding that it would give me a reason to spend less time at the office.  Wise words!

Dottie’s passing is particularly poignant since we recently posted the 27 April loss of Tom Peterman, who for many years was Dottie’s chauffer as they trekked to the monthly Retiree lunches from their homes in Irving to Garland and back again.

Additional information (and a photo of Dottie from back in the early days of her career) can be found here:

Dottie Vaughn passed away – Garland ESY/Raytheon Retirees

Her obituary and details of her memorial service (Wednesday, 18 Jun) and visitation (Tuesday, 17 Jun) can be found here:

Obituary information for Dorothy “Dottie” Vaughn