Vince Gorguze - Still Landing the Big Ones

BY JOE HEININGER, WITH BILL CLAYTON

YOU'VE GOT TO WORK hard and be lucky - and the harder you work the luckier you get."

In saying that, Vince Gorguze (BSE Mtl '41) probably summed up his life because, by his own admission, he's been very lucky. And his resume attests to the gritty work he did to find some good fortune along the way - from those early years, working his way through Michigan Engineering as a melter in the heat of Ford's open-hearth furnaces, to today, when, at 90 years of age, he's the chairman of Cameron Holdings and still reporting to work every day because, as he said, "I'd rather do this than retire. That's not for me."

That ethic - never to let up, whether it be hitting the books as a young man or battling marlin for hours as a nonagenarian - sprang from a promise he made to his father: He'd work hard, get his degree and do something important with his life.

"It's vital to have someone good to follow if you intend to get somewhere worthwhile," he said. "I had great mentors. At the College, the professors were inspiring."

After graduation, his mentor was Uncle Sam. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, Gorguze joined the Naval Reserves, taking the tough road to become a Navy Specialist "A."

With the war behind him, Gorguze took his talents and energy to Ford Motor Company, learning the ropes in manufacturing and engineering before moving on to Curtiss-Wright, following his boss, Roy Hurley, who would become the company's chairman and Gouguze's primary mentor. "I worked on jet engines, there. And somewhere along the line we got into developing high-strength titanium tubes for Admiral Hyman Rickover's nuclear submarine program in the late 1950s."

In October 1957, wandering through his company's strategic materials exhibit at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, he found himself face-to-face with former President Hoover, a fellow metallurgical engineer, who later sent him a note that said, "You and your colleagues have made a revolution in metallurgy of the very first order."

Gorguze, restless for great challenges, joined Emerson Electric Company, meeting Wallace Persons, the company's president, chairman and chief executive officer. Persons nurtured Gorguze, who eventually became Emerson's president, chief operating officer and one of the executives who developed Emerson from a $150-million company in 1962 to a $2-billion enterprise in 1978, the year he retired.

But retirement "didn't take." He started acquiring companies, a pursuit that led him to Cameron Holdings. Its chairman since the day Cameron opened its doors, Gorguze oversaw the company's growth in a business arena that moves at breakneck speed in the rarified air of multi-million dollar acquisitions. His philosophy of management kept everything on the straight and narrow: "Get the best people you can find, then get out of their way and let them do their jobs." A good example of this philosophy in action is his daughter, Lynn Gorguze, who handles the day-to-day management of Cameron Holdings.

"I'm very proud of her," he said. Then, reflecting on the nature of her work and work in general, he said, "You have to do what you like to do - and do it as well as you can. There's no excuse for inferior effort. Do your best or get out of it."

In 1998, Michigan Engineering's Department of Materials Science and Engineering presented Gorguze with its Alumni Society Merit Award. Most recently, he was a prime mover in the campaign to finance the new Solid- State Electronics Laboratory.

At home, "just a sand wedge from the beach" in San Diego, Gorguze works out daily, lifting weights and doing laps in the pool. He plays with his grandchildren and dabbles in golf, but saves his strength for working and landing marlin. "It takes two to three hours to bring in a two-hundred pounder," he said. "It's exhausting but what a thrill." In sport as in business, Vince Gorguze is still landing the big ones. And loving every minute of it. -E

Joseph Heininger is a freelancer who writes about business, sports, fiction and poetry. Bill Clayton is the editor of Michigan Engineer.