Not even pit bulls live forever.
Not even one who survived hand-to-hand combat during the brutal island-hopping campaigns of the South Pacific and later battled bureaucrats to enhance Colorado’s trout fishing resource.
Leo Gomolchak died following a lingering illness Saturday, just two days before Memorial Day and a little more than a month before his 82nd birthday. Whenever you draw a breath of freedom or catch a trout in a clear mountain stream, you can mumble a little thanks to Leo.
Gomolchak was a shrapnel- carrying member of that Greatest Generation, earning a Purple Heart during the invasion of Mindanao on Douglas MacArthur’s celebrated return to the Philippines.
The fact that he contrived to enter World War II well before his 18th birthday and kept fighting after being wounded perhaps was the first measured indication this tough kid from Pittsburgh later would turn terrier for Trout Unlimited and the cause of coldwater conservation.
No one quite can remember whether it was friend or foe who first gave him the tag “The Pit Bull” during those early resource battles. Little matter. Leo loved it, reveled in it, carried it like a banner while sinking his teeth into confrontations over clean water and trout. Like his namesake, he never let go.
Having once acquired a venerable bulldog as a pet, he considered parading it to a meeting of the Colorado Wildlife Commission – not that the canine prop really was necessary to make the point.
“Of all the people I knew during my 30-plus years with the Colorado Division of Wildlife, he was the most dedicated and persistent volunteer I ever met,” said retired state fish manager Eddie Kochman, sometimes the target of Gomolchak’s bite. “We argued more than once, but there never was any doubt what we thought of each other, about the respect we felt.”
A retired army major who settled in Colorado Springs more than 40 years ago, Gomolchak teamed with the late Jim Belsey to bring a fledgling Trout Unlimited into the forefront of Colorado wildlife affairs. At a time when the notion of resource protection had little standing, legal or otherwise, in Colorado’s water management scheme, Belsey and Gomolchak worked a perfect good-cop, bad-cop routine that gained many of the concessions we enjoy today.
“You knew if you got by Belsey, there always was Leo to deal with,” joked Steve Puttmann, former senior biologist for DOW’s northeast region. “Leo was always the bulldog, but he never was so strident that he didn’t realize the balance in resource management.”
Puttmann said he realized later in his career that the TU perspective of keeping trout in the water to be caught over and over again largely was correct. Kochman made a similar observation regarding another Gomolchak crusade, that against the stocking of trout that tested positive for whirling disease.
“The whirling disease debate when we continued stocking those exposed fish probably was the biggest issue,” Puttmann said. “Leo said it was wrong and he was correct on that one.”
Dave Taylor, a former Colorado TU executive director who worked closely with Gomolchak, remembers him as a “tireless and selfless worker in his years of effort to promote and save wild trout and their habitat. His commitment was fierce. Even those who disagreed respected him.”
This year, Colorado Trout Unlimited recognized his contribution by establishing a “Gomo Grant” program to seed money grants for chapter projects.
Leo Gomolchak loved his country and Colorado’s wild trout. Both are better off because of it.
A memorial service will be 11 a.m. Friday at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, 2111 Carlton Ave., Colorado Springs.
