At 10:30 am, the annual Alumni Weekend parade will kick off in downtown Sayre. High School classes, student organizations, businesses, and civic groups have been working diligently on floats.
The day, of course, will be packed with numerous other activities. The Easter Egg hunt will start at 3 pm sharp at the Sayre High School Football Field. Children will be bunched into different age groups. The hunt is open to infants to 11-year-olds.
The Sayre Golf Course will host a golf tournament. The annual basketball game will take place at the gym and the alumni softball tournament will be at the softball complex.
“The alumni softball game is the best,” said Sayre Public School Board member Bandy Silk.
Silk graduated from Sayre High School in 2000. His wife Amy graduated two years after him in 2002.
And in between the pair’s graduating year, their future brother-in-law Colter Jake Vaught walked Sayre’s graduation stage in 2001.
On Saturday, Vaught will be honored posthumously as the honorary parade marshal. Silk believes this is a fitting honor for a man he calls “the biggest hero I ever knew.”
Since Vaught’s tragic and untimely death on January 11, 2024, Silk says the Delhi Fire Department has struggled to fulfill the numerous tasks that Vaught volunteered himself to do.
Silk, who serves as Delhi’s fire chief, says Vaught was a one-of-kind fireman who served the region selflessly.
“I’ve done this twenty years, and I know that I won’t probably ever have another Colter Vaught,” Silk added. “I probably won’t ever even see another one. Since he died, it seems like everyone has gotten to know ‘Pistol Pete,’ the big semi that he put together himself, in his shop, on his own time. We don’t have the budget to pay for that kind of man hours, so that was just him giving to the department and people we serve. Another time, he was on an oilfield job near El Reno when that big tornado came through. I think it was in 2013. Anyways, Colter called me and said he was jumping in the truck with the El Reno Fire Department to go help. He just showed up at their fire house and, of course, they were more than happy to have him. So, he geared up and went out to rescue because that is who Colter was. He lived his life giving to others in this community and elsewhere.”
