Together in Life and Death, Couple Still Kept Individuality

After the war, the Navy sent the couple to Boston, Annapolis and Norfolk until he was assigned as a supply officer on the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany during the Korean War. His wife drove their children cross-country in the family's Ford to see his ship off, then settled for 18 months in Coronado, Calif., until he returned.

They spent the next three years in Philadelphia and Norfolk, but the highlight of his assignments came in 1960, when the new Navy captain, his wife and three children were sent to Paris, where he worked at a NATO agency. Settling in a suburb away from the American military enclaves, the Gores immersed themselves in French life.

"There was, for example, the day Jackie and JFK visited Paris," Capt. Gore wrote in his 1998 memoir. "A Frenchman at our dinner table in a familiar restaurant bought a bouquet of flowers from a woman vendor walking among the patrons. Handing them to Mom, he said, 'These are for you, Madame. Today is your day.' "

Capt. Gore retired in 1967 as chief of logistics for the National Security Agency. The previous year, he had received a master's degree in education from American University. His wife wasn't far behind: Her graduate entrance exam score was just short of perfect, and, with a friend, she decided to get her master's degree in library science at Catholic University. After receiving her degree in 1972, she wrote medical abstracts for a government contractor and "spurned all threats of promotion," her children said.

The Gores' son, John Bryan Gore, a Navy pilot, died in 1985 in a C-131H crash. In addition to their daughter Suzanne Reynolds, survivors include two other daughters, Jane Ramos of Baltimore and Anne "Nancy" Eakin of Durango, Colo.; four grandsons; and a great-grandson.

The couple, active in several Episcopal churches, were generous with the area's homeless and with Christian missions around the world. They also sponsored the immigration of Vietnamese refugee David Phan and his wife. Phan, a Southern Vietnamese army lieutenant, had been arrested and put into a labor camp when the Northern Vietnamese swept into the South.

Phan and his wife later escaped South Vietnam by boat, floating for 17 days in the South China Sea before being picked up. The Phan and Gore families remained close through the years, which was reflected in a saying that Capt. Gore frequently told his children.

"When you're young, you have a broad mind and a narrow waist," he would say. "When you're older, that reverses."