Family, Church and Military Were Focus for Nearly 7 Decades
By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 25, 2008
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.
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."