Melissa Vaughn: At the Helm of WRIR

by Charles McGuigan 12.2024

Photos by Rebecca D’Angelo

It all started in a bathroom in the basement of a Richmond public library. That was about eight years ago, and it would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship between WRIR 97.3FM and Melissa Vaughn, who currently serves as president of theVirginia Center for Public Press, making her essentially the captain of Your Community Radio Station. Earlier this month, Melissa launched a $2 million capital campaign that will give WRIR a permanent, ADA-compliant home in Shockoe Bottom, with ample studio space and state-of-the art equipment, among other amenities, along with an endowment to ensure the station’s continuing success. Melissa is one of those inexplicable forces of nature who is committed to serving the entire Richmond community, every facet of it. She is a staunch defender of free speech and will not back down from a fight for justice.

It seems she was that way from childhood onward, thanks in large part to her parents, Kathleen and Michael Martin. 

In her Manchester high school days Melissa was a little bit grunge and a little bit goth, and she could not abide a tormentor, would kick their ass to the curb regardless of the consequences.

“I was the outspoken kid who had all the nerd friends,” Melissa tells me. “If they got picked on, I went for the bully. That was my thing. I had a really strong sense of justice. So I would get in trouble for that, but my parents didn’t get me in trouble for that. They were proud of me for sticking up for the little guy. My childhood was beautiful and special and my parents made it magical. I stood up against teachers and I got punished for standing up, but I didn’t give a rat’s patoot.”

Even before her teenage years, Melissa began developing a love for local politics. “When I was eleven I stumbled upon City Council on Channel 57 and that started my lifetime obsession with Richmond City Council,” she remembers. “It was like my soap opera.”

After high school Melissa attended Longwood College for a short time where she studied history and political science. “I hated Farmville because they’re racists,” she said. “The men I was around were gross, and I didn’t find anything fulfilling there, and I didn’t make any friends while I was there and that’s weird for me. So I was like, ‘I’m leaving here, I’m gonna reevaluate my life.’”

She ended up moving to Northern Virginia, where her parents had relocated, and went to work as the office manager of a temp agency where her management skills began to emerge. 

“I can tell people what to do, but in a way that doesn’t make them feel inferior,” Melissa says. “I learned that I was a really good manipulator, but the difference between me and other manipulators is I love to use it for good. I can get people to do things that benefit themselves and then benefit others. I don’t care about me. I’ll always be fine.”

At the age of twenty she married Jerry Vaughn (they just celebrated their 25th anniversary) and eventually returned to Richmond.  Melissa would work a variety of jobs over the years. She was employed by a maid service where her duties included working at hoarder houses.  “And the reason they put me on the hoarder team is because I’m low bulls**t,” Melissa says. “I could look at somebody and go, ‘Nah kid, it’s time for it to go.’ And folks would fight me on it. And I would say, ‘I’m not here to fight with you. You’ve got a doctor to fight with, you’ve got a therapist to fight with, I’m just doing my job, and this s**t has got to go. You’re gonna need to sit down and you’re gonna need to let us do our job because in the end you know it’s right for you.’ I did that for awhile until I just couldn’t take it any more.”

She also worked for a time in activities at a nursing home. There she learned what end of life looks like, and she noticed that the facility was not caring for their clients as they should have been.  “I noticed that people were going unfed, unchanged, uncleaned, un-medicated,” says Melissa. 

So she took careful notes and then notified the ombudsman with the state, and an investigation ensued. “And I got fired, but so did they, and so did everybody else there,” Melissa says. 

When I ask how she became involved with WRIR, she smiles broadly and laughs heartily. “By being a Nosy Nelly,” she says. “I was an early adopter of Twitter and, as you know, I really love local politics. I have a really strong interest in civics and I taught myself how our local government works.”

One thing that irritated her in the extreme was how politicians would place their campaign signs in public spaces, and then let them become litter after the election. “I started tweeting about it,” says Melissa. “And I had found other like-minded people on Twitter, and some ladies that were really into this live tweeting thing.” They began attending meetings and town halls and tweeting about them. People began following them, and they began teaching people about local government and how it really works. 

Melissa, and her friends and fellow political tweeters, Francesca Leigh-Davis and Jessee Perry, had just finished teaching a sort of civics class in the basement of the Richmond Public Library. Melissa went to the bathroom, and there was another woman in there. Her name was Kristi Albus, a long-time volunteer who worked side by side with Don Harrison on Open Source RVA. She approached Melissa and said this: “Hey, we really like what you’re doing on Twitter.  You belong at WRIR. We could translate what you do to radio, if you’re interested.”

So with her friends, Francesca and Jessee, the trio gave birth to RVA Dirt. The RVA Dirt Girls went on to create some of the most popular talk radio on WRIR. 

“I was asked if I wanted to be more involved and I started developing what became the Quick and Dirty City Council for Open Source,” says Melissa. “They were five to fifteen minutes long, telling you pretty much what happened in that council meeting, and skewering the folks a little bit because they deserved it.”

The day after some of these segments aired, overly sensitive local officials took umbrage. Recalling some of these instances, Melissa shakes her head and smiles. “I thought, you’re politicians, you signed up for this,” she says. “We’re supposed to criticize you, we’re supposed to let you know that we see you. People started calling RVA Dirt a political watchdog and I’m like, ‘Sure, I’ll take it. Don’t call me a journalist in that respect because my stuff is based on observation and opinion.’ This taught me so much about free speech and the importance of it.”

There was also Municipal Mania, a weekly show that ran for six years. “We had anybody and everybody on it,” Melissa says. “We had folks from the School Board all the way up to Jenn McClellan come on. I met some really amazing people through this, and through it all I realized that I was a civic engagement advocate and activist. I really think it’s very important that you exercise your right to free speech , that you have an audience with your elected official, that you feel comfortable in expressing yourself to them. It is your right, they work for you. You need to understand that the people who are in control of this city are sitting on City Council.” 

Melissa is the volunteer of volunteers at a one hundred percent all-volunteer radio station, and she seems to have the stamina of a lumberjill.

“I decided I needed to do more volunteer work because I’m a crazy person,” she says. “And somebody convinced me that I should be the volunteer coordinator at WRIR because I’m good at wrangling people. I did that for five years. And in that time I implemented all kinds of changes.”

She spoke with talk show hosts and DJs alike and asked them what the station could do to increase their volunteer satisfaction. “I am somebody who likes to know every facet of everything that I’m doing,”she says. “At that time volunteer coordinator was kind of like a de facto station manager. I was working thirty to forty hours a week for free.”

Melissa served on the board of the Virginia Center for Public Press as volunteer coordinator, and then became the board’s secretary. She began scrutinizing every aspect of the station, and came to several conclusions.

“I remember this really well,” she says. “It was in September 2019 and I presented my findings at the board meeting. This is what I said: We should move out of our current situation of renting, and buy our own building. My research also showed that to be sustainable we needed to move towards a different format which eventually included employees, because we are all volunteer.”

 Melissa also pointed out that some of the equipment and software being used by volunteers was outdated or broken. And anyone familiar with WRIR’s current location over The Camel on West Broad Street knows about the Victorian death stairs that lead up to the station. So here’s what Melissa had to say about that: “Our building, in no way, shape or form, is ADA accessible at all. If we are truly to be the community radio station that we claim to be, we must be ADA compliant.” That ruffled more than a few feathers, but Melissa did not back down. 

Two months later, at the November meeting, Melissa received some unexpected news. “I was informed that the executive board would all be stepping away and they would be nominating me for president,”   she recalls. “They told me that I could choose to do what I wanted, and go in the direction I wanted to go.”

On January 23, 2020, Melissa was voted in as president of Virginia Center for Public Press (VCPP) and hit the ground running, though she knew there would be obstacles. “How do I buy us a building?” she tells me. “How do I get everybody’s support in that endeavor because there’s a very warm feeling toward the building that we’re in now  and that is because of Christopher Maxwell, our founder, and because of the late great Alan Schintzius, who was our first landlord. We started in the basement and then we moved on up to above The Camel. It’s come so far and that building has a lot of memories for folks, but it doesn’t serve everyone in Richmond, and my goal and my whole team’s goal, is everyone should have access to tell their story without impediment. We needed to be ADA compliant.”

Melissa had girded her loins and was prepared to do battle, if necessary. 

But there was something looming on the horizon that not even an eagle-eyed seaman perched on a crow’s nest could have seen at the time.

Just two months after Melissa assumed command as president of VCCP, COVID-19 changed the world as we all knew it. 

“So my first year as president was figuring out how we were going to rotate our volunteers and DJs like two ships passing in the night so that they never came in contact with each other, so that everybody had everything cleaned and wiped down, and masks were worn and all of that” she says. Because of her fast thinking and implementation of protocols, WRIR avoided any kind of cross contamination. “We never had an outbreak,” she says. “We figured out how to do remote broadcasting. I taught people how to prerecord their shows. Every single shift they knew what to do. They’d play a couple of songs to take themselves out and clean while the other person was waiting off to the side. No contact whatsoever, and nobody got ill.”

And then hours after 2020 came to a close, on the very first morning of that new year, as Melissa stood in her shower, pelted by a warm rain, she performed a breast self-exam. Her fingers found a lump in the soft tissue of her right breast.  “What the hell is that?” she thought.

A couple weeks later her gynecologist order a mammogram and an ultrasound, which was followed up with a biopsy. On February 11 Melissa learned that she had an aggressive form of breast cancer. 

“I had a bilateral mastectomy,” says Melissa. “They did real strong chemo and radiation, and all while I was still leading at WRIR because that’s what I had taken on, that was my family. And all of those folks supported me, they never told me to step down. They were with me the whole way. They said you will tell us what you need, we trust you to be able to do this, and if you need help, we know you’ll ask for it.”

She was at one of her lowest points, just a couple days out of chemo, and something happened that solidified in her mind the absolute need for WRIR to become ADA compliant.

“There was a DJ that was supposed to come in and could not come in, and the DJ there had to leave,” Melissa says. “And I cannot suffer dead air. It’s a nightmare. It makes my heart stop.”

So she got into her car and headed over to the station. She pulled up on Broad Street and made her way over to the front door. “And I had to crawl up those stairs,” she says. “I crawled into Studio A and I put a show on. I did the announcements and then I sat on the floor and cried.  Nobody else was in the station. And I thought, we are moving. Nobody should have to do this. That was it. We had to be ADA compliant. We’re Richmond’s independent radio station, and we need to be truly independent and not have a landlord. We need a building of our own.”

In early 2022, Melissa and her past vice president found a building in Shockoe Bottom that would be ideal for a permanent home for WRIR. Located at 1806 East Main Street, the three-story building was a shell, and the station was able to purchase it for $430,000 (they are making monthly mortgage payments along with their rent for the space over The Camel).

Melissa’s eyes fairly widen when she begins talking about the new space where demolition has already begun. “It’s in a really amazing spot, historically, culturally,” she says. “All volunteer activities will be able to be done on the first two floors. On the third floor we will have storage and an office. And this building was a perfect fit to have an ADA compliant ramp with an automatic door, and we will have an elevator that can accommodate a large wheelchair.”

She takes me on a virtual tour of this new facility that has been years in the planning. From the storefront windows passersby will be able to see directly into the fishbowl Studio A, the main on-air studio which will also house the station’s local music collection. There will be break rooms and bathrooms (one on each floor, and both ADA compliant, of course). And there will be open editing bays, a talk studio, even a live performance studio, all furnished with state-of-the-art equipment. 

The planning for this new station has been exhaustive.  “Every inch of it,” says Melissa. “I’m telling you, every single inch was planned with care and love and respect for our volunteers.”

She mentions the re-branding of WRIR, and why it’s so important.  “It’s Your Community Radio Station,” she says. “We keep saying community because our community means so much to us. So instead of calling ourselves Richmond independent radio all the time we want to emphasize Your Community Radio Station. Because it does belong to you. It belongs to everybody in the City of Richmond. It is un-owned.”

Almost exactly a year ago, Melissa was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer.  She has tumors on her liver and lesions on her spine. But thanks to the remarkable team of doctors at the Virginia Cancer Institute and a new targeted therapy, the tumors are actually shrinking.  “It’s a miracle drug for me,” Melissa says. 

In about a year, when WRIR is up and running out of its new home in Shockoe Bottom, Melissa plans to retire from the station and settle into a quiet life out in the country where she will establish a refuge for miniature horses and elderly dogs. “I have a wonderful group of folks coming behind me that are gonna do amazing things,” she says. 

And this story kind of ends where it all began—in a bathroom. On the first floor of the new WRIR studios there will be an amazing bathroom that will be called the Melissa M. Vaughn Memorial Unicorn Powder Room. “I said please put memorial on it so that way when I do finally pass away you don’t have to buy a new plaque,” says Melissa Vaughn.  “I want this bathroom to be a reflection of who I am as a person, and also how I feel about my community. It’s going to be rainbow and neon and unicorns and disco ball and insanity.  I want it to be a safe space that is accessible to everyone.”

To learn more about WRIR’s capital campaign, please visit https://www.wrircampaign.org/  

And give generously. It is, after all, Your Community Radio Station.