By Steve Neavling
Natalie Gore, who made history as one of the bureau’s first female agents, died Wednesday after a battle with colon cancer.
Gore, 77, died at her home in Mission Hills, Calif., The San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
Gore’s first assignment was at the FBI’s Seattle Field Office, where she became Washington’s first female agent. Two years later, she would marry her supervisor, Bill Gore, who eventually became San Diego sheriff.
“She wanted to be the best agent she could be, but it wasn’t about pride,” said Jan Caldwell, a former agent. “She knew if she did a good job, it would make it easier for the women who came after her. So she did.”
She resigned a decade after her first assignment to take care of her son, with plans to return to the bureau. But the FBI didn’t take her back because she had previously had a radial keratotomy, a corrective eye surgery for near-sightedness, while working for the bureau in Hawaii.
Because she would have been a new hire, the bureau thought it was too risky to take her on with the surgery, even though she had already been an agent.
“That was a true and utter heartbreak,” she told the Union-Tribune in a 2010 interview. “I fully expected to retire with the bureau.”
Gore was born on May 4, 1945, in a small lumber town in Northern California. She received a degree in zoology at UC Davis.
After a stint as an elementary school teacher, she joined the FBI academy in April 1976. She shared a dorm with three other women, and all of them would go on to graduate and become agents.
