Gordon Puls

Before his passing on Thursday, April 16 at Aultman Hospital in Canton, Ohio, due to complications from COVID-19, Gordon Puls lived life to the upmost for 79 years.

Many of those years passed blissfully on the shores of Chautauqua Lake and in the halls of Southwestern Central School, of which Puls was a graduate and where he eventually became a teacher.

“He taught geometry at Southwestern Central for 10 years,” said Gordon’s wife Laurene Puls. “Then he moved out to Ohio. He wanted to pursue a Ph.D. at Kent State. He had gotten a counseling degree at Edinboro State University in 1972.”

Puls earned a bachelor’s from Union College and a pair of master’s degrees, the other from Fredonia State University, which he used to pursue a career in teaching and vocational guidance. His passion for helping students extended beyond those who were academic superstars.

“He felt that they were more motivated to find careers and get the skills they needed to get a job than your general population,” Puls said of her husband’s time with vocational students.

Born in Buffalo, Puls and his family made the move to Lakewood early in his life. It was there that he and his family spent many summers on Lakewood beach, and Gordon grew to love the family pastimes of hunting and fishing.

“I moved from Brooklyn to Lakewood when I was nine years old,” cousin Michael Fitzgerald said. “My dad died very suddenly and my mom and I moved to Lakewood so she could be closer to Gordon’s mother, my aunt. I was a kid from Brooklyn who knew nothing about boats, fishing or the country really. To me everything was about living in Brooklyn, living in the city. I went to work at the beach in Lakewood. Gordon’s older sister Barbara had worked there and Gordy worked there. My cousin Kathleen worked there and then I worked there too. We used to joke it was the family business.”

Now splitting his time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Central New York, Fitzgerald keeps in touch with his friends from the Southwestern Central School class of 1966, and recently wrote a column on Gordon’s passing for the Finger Lakes Times.

“I wrote about how this was the first time this (virus) had hit close to home,” Fitzgerald said. “I know that he was pretty well-liked by his students because I’ve gotten quite a few emails from some people who would have been a couple years younger than I am, who learned about his death from my website.”

Fitzergald credits Gordon with helping him adjust to life outside of bustling Brooklyn, and described his cousin’s life as somewhat of a ‘medical miracle.’ At 13, Puls underwent life-saving open heart surgery at the Division of Pediatric Cardiology at Johns Hopkins University, where friends and family can now make contributions in his memory.

“When I was like five or six years old, just in elementary school, we were living in Brooklyn and my mother took me to Johns Hopkins,” Fitzgerald said. “He got one of the first open-heart surgery operations that was done in the United States. I can remember all of the aunts and uncles and everybody sort of clustered around the hospital when that was going on. The fact that he lived to be 79 was pretty miraculous, but that Covid-19 was the final blow, was just historically tragic.”

Throughout his life, Puls enjoyed spending time on the water and in the woods. He preferred stream and fly fishing over angling from a boat because it allowed him to get out and explore nature. His passion for big game hunting took him to forests around the country.

“He was an avid hunter and fisherman,” Laurene said. “He particularly like hunting big game. He spent time before we were married going out to Wyoming and hunting out there. He always had licenses to hunt in the three states around, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. He did a lot of fishing, he particularly like fly fishing. He grew up on the shores of Lake Chautauqua so of course he liked the muskie fishing and bass fishing there.”