Obituary: Vaughan H. Totovian, Engineering Standout, Dedicated to Friends, Family

In 2001, he was hired as project lead engineer by the joint venture that the state hired to come up with the fix, and by 2005 the work was completed. The rotary that had stalled traffic for generations was discarded and two highways were able to pass one another on their own roads.

“The design Vaughan’s team worked out for it was perfect,” said Ferrante, Vaughan’s co-worker and friend.

Totovian exhibited such know-how from his youngest years. His wife, Lily, showed me a letter he had written in 1972 at age 14 to then Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent after noticing from volunteering at Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown that many of the students were fearful in crossing busy intersections along Arsenal street. or in Watertown Square.

As he told Sargent in his letter, Totovian had devised a fix. Set up devices at the busiest intersections that emitted loud buzzes and then metal tracks that would accommodate the tip of a blind person’s cane and allow them to cross safely.

That ability to use his technical skills to overcome everyday adversities was common for Vaughan. When technology first arrived with home products like Atari, Vaughan disassembled the equipment and told the company that its software would never develop beyond kids’ games unless the company figured out how to show images and type on the screen. The Atari executive offered him a job over the phone.

While he let that opportunity go by, Vaughan did get intrigued by developing a handheld device that used electricity to perform simple household chores while the occupant was out of the house. Think of Alexa before the internet. In fact, Vaughan developed the device to turn his television on and off at his Watertown home, open and close the shades and control the thermostat, all through home automation technologies.

Lily, who began dating Vaughan in 2004, said she started calling him “boy genius” soon after their marriage in 2007 because of the numerous inventive ideas he had when remodeling their Watertown. Or when he would stand back from the highway blueprints he had brought home from work to show her the progress that he and his team of engineers were making on a project.

Vaughan’s technical skills likely would have come from his father, Kayzag Totovian. Raised in Marseille, Kayzag became a builder of racing bikes as a youth. He joined the French Resistance at the outset of World War II, and upon moving to the United States in 1940, joined the US Army Intelligence Service.

And from his mother, Isabelle (Gureghian) Totovian, the first woman to become trustee of St. James Armenian Church, he would have inherited his confident manner and a passion for knowing right from wrong.

And from his brothers, James Totovian, who died in 2018, and Mark Totovian, Vaughan gained an enthusiastic love of sports, whether competing with friends or following Boston’s professional sports teams.

In addition to the friends he made in his profession,  Totovian shared his life with a rich circle of friends much built around his association with St. James Armenian Church and its ties to the ACYOA (the Armenian Church Youth Organization of America). It was also through the youth organization that he first became acquainted with Lily Tossounian, who was living with her family in Toronto, and again as adults at a sports weekend.

In his eulogy for Vaughan at St. James Church, Rev. Shnork Souin, retired pastor at St. Sahag and St. Merob Armenian Church of Providence, reflected on the large number of friends that Vaughan had maintained during his lifetime, and had come to his service.

“Such rich friendships are part of the miracle of the Armenian diaspora here in the new world,” said Souin, a lifelong family friend of Lily’s. “Faith and fellowship brighten our days and ease the pain from such a loss.”

(Stephen Kurkjian, a 40-year veteran reporter for the Boston Globe, was Vaughan Totovian’s first cousin.)