He grew up on hard work and play, milking three cows twice daily as a child, and later playing semi-professional baseball. Born in Galion, Ohio. Dr. Goorley entered The Ohio State University, working eight hours a night in a drug store, and graduating in 1925 with a bachelor of science in pharmacy. After earning masters and doctorate degrees from Purdue University by 1934, he was hired by Burroughs Wellcome Pharmaceutical Company in Tucco, New York, as chief of its analytical department. In 1938 Dr. Goorley set up a pharmaceutical business in Cuba where he was chief chemist. An officer in the reserves, he entered active service in the U.S. Army in November of 1942 as a first lieutenant. Quickly the army put his scientific skills to work at Camp Lee, Virginia, where he studied the nutritional effects of the African Ration of canned and dried foods for troops in North Africa. Later, he tested typhoid vaccines in the Surgeon General's Office and as a bacteriologist at the Army Medical School in Washington, D.C. When the war ended he was working as a biochemist at Camp Atterbury near Edinburgh, Indiana, on a paraplegic project, studying how to re-establish the spinal nerve. He was discharged from active service on January 6, 1946. He worked for Ben Venue Laboratories, Inc. in Bedford, Ohio, where he developed and patented bacitracin, an antibiotic. When Ben Venue closed, he went to Argentina in 1948 where he developed a cure for peptic ulcers from the urine of pregnant mares, and also extracted pure digitoxin from the digitalis leaf. He later was employed at a new School of Pharmacy at what is now The University of Louisiana-Monroe in 1958. He also served in the reserves for twenty years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.