He Won’t Fade Away WSU’s Veterinary Legend To Leave Research Post

Six years ago animal rights activists broke into John Gorham’s office at Washington State University and splashed hydrochloric acid over his records, believing they had ended the career of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and WSU virologist.

Gorham was finally ushered into semi-retirement this week at a Lewis Alumni Center reception attended by more than 200 people. They came to celebrate his half-century as one of the WSU College of Veterinary Medicine’s most prominent researchers, a caretaker of half its history and one of its warmest characters.

“I’ve been watching,” said James Pickrell, a 1953 veterinary school graduate who came up from Arizona to attend Gorham’s retirement ceremony.

“People see him standing there at the head of the stairs, and they just break out into a laugh.”

Gorham, 74, is leaving his USDA post as research leader in the Animal Disease Research Unit at WSU, but he is continuing his WSU faculty appointment. Since 1946, when he graduated, Gorham doggedly has sought to identify disease-causing microorganisms. But he had pursued them with no more vigor than he has chased quips, wry anecdotes, and a good yarn. He might be Mark Twain or Will Rogers in a lab coat.

He came to college in 1942, after all, from a job in a Western Washington box factory, after a girl dumped him for a musician. No matter how he’s risen in the academic world, he’s never forgotten how humbly he began.

Gorham was awarded the WSU veterinary school’s first graduate degree in 1947. He was named Distinguished Scientist of the Year by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in 1991, and he was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 1993, the same year he was presented the WSU Regent’s Distinguished Alumnus Award, the highest honor WSU gives its graduates. Two virus strains and a scientific procedure are named after him.

He dismisses it all. “Awards are like venereal diseases,” he says. “Those who really deserve them seldom get them.

“What drives any research worker worth his salt, he wants to be first. You want to win the game. Research is a game, and you want to be first.

“It isn’t a drive to get an award. That’s not it. I go to a meeting, and someone says ‘There’s old Gorham. That was a helluva piece of work he did.’ That means more than a piece of paper on the wall. That’s what’s fun.”

In 1950, Gorham and his graduate school major professor Don Cordy found neorickettsia helmintheca, the organism causing a disease called salmon poisoning in dogs and commercial mink and believed to be caused by intestinal flukes until Gorham and Cordy found its true source.

“Cordy looked at these little dots in the cells and said ‘What do you think they are?’ It was an example of serendipity. We had no work plan.”

In the late 1940s, Gorham described and named the disease steatitis that caused millions of dollars of losses on mink ranches. While researching that disease in coastal Alaska he met a man who arrived in a float plane burdened with tin boxes of photography equipment.

“I had a pickup, and I offered to drive him to the hotel,” Gorham recounts. “On the way, I said, ‘I know some pretty good places to take pictures,”’ so they spent part of a day driving the coastline. At every viewpoint Gorham suggested, the man politely took out a 35mm camera and snapped a few photos.

“We did this two or three times, and I said ‘Let’s go back to the hotel and have a drink.’ I was taking a shortcut through the woods back to the hotel, and he said ‘Would you stop your truck? I’d like to photograph something here.’

“Well, there was nothing but a stump.

“Now things get serious. The big cameras come out. The black cloth. He took two frames in about 30 minutes. Back at the hotel we had a couple of drinks. He gave me his card. I put it in my pocket and didn’t think a thing about it. I get back to Pullman, and my wife, Mary Ellen, says ‘You ought to see this issue of Life magazine. There are some beautiful photographs in it,”’ including a familiar stump.

“How many people,” asks Gorham, grinning, “can say they told Ansel Adams where to take pictures?”

Gorham recalls veterinary students sneaking into laboratories to heist alcohol to make the punch for their annual Hobo Dance in the 1940s. He remembers an eccentric faculty member, E.C. McCulloch, demonstrating inoculation techniques on a rabbit and inadvertently spraying students with a syringe full of anthrax.

McCulloch also had his classes conduct a clinical examination on him after he got cancer.

“We had to palpate his liver,” Gorham says. “He’d tell us ‘You can feel the lumps in there, class.’ He dies, and he wills his liver to the veterinary school with a note: ‘If your kids come to veterinary school and can’t say they studied under McCulloch, by God, they can say they studied McCulloch.”’

Gorham had a prominent role in WSU lore himself - “Butchgate” - as it was called by the WSU student newspaper.

Gorham was in charge of veterinary care for the last three live cougar mascots at WSU. In 1978, Butch VI marked the 61st year of the live mascot tradition, but he was 15 years old, in pain from arthritis and in failing health.

“I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going to have a committee meeting to decide when we’re going to put this cat to sleep.’ We were going to have the perfect crime. I called Dick Fry (WSU News Bureau director) and I told him ‘Dick, Butch is going to pass away.’ He says ‘How do you know?’ I said, ‘I’m going to put him to sleep. You’re a journalist, you better write a story about it,’ so he did, saying Butch had died in his sleep in his cage.”

The ruse lasted about a day. Gorham, heading out of town for a meeting, had detailed an associate to do the euthanasia. Instead of putting the cougar to sleep in its cage, he brought it to the vet school and did it there. The animal was seen being taken from its pen. Questions followed.

“I’m in Washington, D.C., and I call home and ask what’s new and Mary Ellen says, ‘The paper said you killed Butch.”’

At his retirement reception, people as diverse as former Montana and Michigan State basketball coach Jud Heathcote, a fraternity brother at WSU, and Jim Cook, a National Academy of Sciences member, lauded Gorham and good-naturedly skewered him. A theme was the support he has given students throughout his career - people like William Klontz, whom Gorham encountered scrubbing a raceway at a Bureau of Commercial Fisheries research station and enticed into veterinary school.

“Because of him, I was the first veterinarian in America with a full-time fish practice,” Klontz said. “I’m very proud of that.”

Gorham’s daughter Katy spoke. She praised her father’s “zest for life and love of the unconventional.” His son Jay recalled the 1991 break-in when members of the Animal Liberation Front destroyed $100,000 of equipment and freed laboratory animals. Ironically, Gorham was no longer doing research to benefit the fur industry but was using mink as models for Cruetzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human form of the “mad cow” disease that sent shocks coursing through the food industry in Great Britain this year.

The vandals, after dousing his records with acid had left a note, said Jay: “John, your career is over. Time to wrap it up.”

Gorham’s response was true to character, said his son.

“He … got a new set of empty log books and continued on.”