Together in Life and Death, Couple Still Kept Individuality

Family, Church and Military Were Focus for Nearly 7 Decades

For 67 years, Bud and Emily Gore built a life together.

It began with a last-minute date. A midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy broke his ankle playing football and asked John M. "Bud" Gore, a Southern gentleman and fellow midshipman, to escort a lovely New Englander, Emily Finn, on a date on his behalf. The first midshipman never got a second chance.

The Gores' lives, like those of so many of the military couples who live in the Washington area, span periods of war and peace, the growth of a family, multiple transfers to big bases in small towns and, occasionally, a home in a glamorous setting. In retirement, they focused on family and church.

Last June, the Gores celebrated their 90th birthdays with a party that drew more than 100 friends, some of whom they'd known since the 1930s. Abundant food and drink, many humorous anecdotes and, typically for the couple, prayers of thanksgiving were the highlights.

On April 9, at the Vinson Hall military retirement center in McLean, where they lived, Emily Finn Gore had a stroke. Her husband called 911. "Dad -- who lives and breathes for Mom -- watched her being carried out of their apartment on a stretcher and then suffered a hemorrhagic stroke himself," their daughter, Suzanne Gore Reynolds of Fairfax, wrote in an e-mail to family members.

The couple shared a room at Inova Fairfax Hospital, but Capt. Gore died April 14. Mrs. Gore, who had dashed off crossword and acrostic puzzles in ink until the day of her stroke, died under hospice care May 6 at the Fountains at Washington House in Alexandria.

Their long lives together did not erase their individuality. His friends said the outgoing Capt. Gore had a hard time deciding, in his college days, between the poop deck and the pulpit. Mrs. Gore was an introvert with a sterling intellect.

Born in Guam, the daughter of a Navy captain, Mrs. Gore was raised in China and the Philippines until her family settled in Newport, R.I. She loved sailing, at least until she was 21 -- when a hurricane veered unexpectedly into the path of her 40-foot sailboat.

"We streaked across Narragansett Bay under bare poles faster than we ever did under canvas," she said later. As the boat was dragging anchor but about to slam ashore, she fell into the raging water. She could never quite remember how she scrambled back onto the foundering boat and later climbed a bluff to safety.

She graduated from high school at 15 and from Wellesley College with a degree in chemistry. By then, she had met the Navy ensign she would marry at their first opportunity, which, under Navy regulations of the time, meant two years after his 1939 Naval Academy graduation. Wedded aboard a Navy ship as it arrived in his home town of Norfolk, the couple snatched a one-night honeymoon before duty called.

Pearl Harbor interrupted Ensign Gore's studies at the Navy's Supply School, sending him to sea with the British Home Fleet and later aboard the battleship USS Washington at Guadalcanal.

During World War II, Mrs. Gore taught chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and worked as a nurse's aide with the American Red Cross.