Jerry Luoma

Growing up in Calumet, Jerry Luoma ‘65 ‘67 didn’t have to travel far to get a quality education—or to begin a lifetime of service. As a student of Calumet High School, Luoma was already involved in Junior ROTC and serving as commander of his battalion before coming to Michigan Tech. He joined the Army ROTC program immediately upon arriving on campus. 

After earning his BS in Mathematics in 1965, Luoma was commissioned into the Army. That summer, he married and applied for a deferment to pursue graduate studies at Michigan Tech, where he completed his master's degree in 1967 while working as a graduate teaching assistant. His first teaching experience started even earlier.

“I was asked by the math department if I'd be interested in being a student teacher, and so I started teaching math for my entire senior year while I was here, which was also a way of actually earning a little bit of extra money.”

After his commissioning and while in graduate school, Luoma joined the 107th Engineer Battalion of the Michigan Army National Guard. He was among the first National Guard members deployed to Detroit during the 1967 riot.

“Well, it was the first time I was under fire, truth be known,” Luoma said. “I was escorting a squad from another unit. We'd pulled off the side of the road, and I was lying on the sidewalk behind my Jeep with a map spread out and with a flashlight just cracked enough that I could see it to try to read the map. I heard cars roaring past, gunfire, and then my driver flipped over backwards and landed on top of me, screaming, ‘I've been hit. I've been hit!” 

Luoma’s Jeep took five bullets.

“With my Jeep driver, a bullet—one of these cartoonish things—went through his helmet, traveled around the back of the helmet, and exited 90 degrees the other direction. All he had was a small cut on his head and nothing more.”

“And in the meantime, I'm lying there looking at this map, hearing these things in slow motion, sparks in front of my eyes, and then things hitting my face, which turned out to be concrete chips from bullets striking the concrete in front of my face. Chipped my glasses in multiple places, but didn't hurt me at all,” he said. “That was part of my National Guard experience, which is a little different.”

After completing his master’s degree, Luoma continued teaching in Tech’s math department until he was called to active duty in February 1968. His service began with the Engineer Officer Basic Course at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, followed by additional training as an engineer equipment officer. Luoma's first overseas assignment took him to Germany in 1968, where he served for two years before receiving orders for Vietnam.

In Vietnam, Luoma was stationed in the Mekong Delta, where he took command of the 523rd Port Construction Company.

“My first assignment was commanding officer of the 523rd Port Construction Company. 280 men, small Navy, maybe. I had landing craft, dive boats, hard hat and scuba dive platoon. We built piers, and docks, and bridges, and whatnot,” he said.

After six months, he was reassigned to the 36th Engineer Battalion, where he took command of A-Company for the remainder of his tour.

Following his military service, Luoma returned to Michigan Tech as a mathematics instructor and rejoined the 107th Engineers. However, shortly before resuming work, Luoma had a conversation with his wife that would change his career path entirely.

“I said, ‘I think what I'm going to do is I’m going to go to medical school. I want to be a doctor instead of getting my PhD.’ And her response was, ‘Are you crazy?’” Luoma said. “But I liked people. I liked dealing with people. I enjoyed teaching, and it’s an opportunity to educate others. I like living in a small town, and if I'm a math professor, I'm going to be where there's a big university in a big city, very likely, and it could be a place like Michigan Tech, but that's a minority of the jobs that are out there.”

Luoma spent the next year and a half completing 45 credits of prerequisite courses and was admitted to the University of Michigan Medical School, leaving Tech for the second time. With sadness and trepidation, Captain Luoma resigned his military commission during his third year of medical school, having served three years of active duty and five years in the Guard.

When it came time to choose where to practice medicine, Luoma said it was another conversation with his wife that offered a clear answer.

“I was sitting down at the table surrounded by options. I wanted recreational opportunities, community size, the climate, all of these things,” Luoma said. “And so I'm kind of thinking about New England states, the upper Midwest, the Pacific Northwest of the mountains or something, and then my wife looked over my shoulder and read all of these things and said, ‘Oh, that's easy. There's probably only one place on Earth that meets all of these criteria, Jerry. You have written, in detail, a description of Calumet, Michigan.’ So, we ended up coming back here.”

They returned and never left. Luoma spent the next 35 years serving the community as a family practice physician, teacher, and medical director of Aspirus Keweenaw Hospital.

At his retirement party in 2014, Luoma, aged 70, said, “If you look back on my life, in the first 35 years, I lived in 35 different locations. In the next 35 years, I lived in one.”

A teacher at heart, Luoma said his time at Michigan Tech prepared him well, not only reinforcing his work ethic but providing him the opportunity to educate others, whether in the classroom or the exam room.

Interview conducted as part of the Oral History Collection during Military Service Appreciation Weekend, hosted by the Office of Alumni Engagement, May 2–3, 2025.