GOSHEN — Goshen attorney John Ulmer said he originally thought he wanted to become a veterinarian, and since Purdue did not have a program in the 1950s, he went to Michigan State University.

He entered the school in 1956 and was an assistant manager in football and basketball that first fall. When the head manager of the basketball team dropped out of school, Ulmer was promoted as a freshman to head manager.

That year Michigan State was in the final four, but lost to North Carolina in triple overtime. Then North Carolina went on to beat Kansas in another triple overtime. Ulmer explained that Michigan State was also in the “Elite 8” in 1959.

Seven years ago the school authorized members of the team to receive a Final 4 ring and John bought one. In 2007 he attended a 50-year reunion with his teammates.

“It was a great experience,” he said.

At Michigan State, he worked toward a business-accounting-economics degree. He said in his junior year he took a business law course and “it just hit me,” so he changed course to pursue a law degree. He returned to Indiana and attended the IU Law School and earned his degree in 1963. While in law school he worked as a milk tester for the Department of Agriculture in southern Indiana.

He had a background in agriculture, as his grandmother was a dairy farmer in Geneva, while John grew up in Bluffton. His father was a butcher and ran a grocery store in Bluffton. He said his father’s butcher block is in the kitchen of their Goshen home.

“I delivered groceries for about seven years,” he said, and learned how to deal with customers while working with his father.

“It’s no big secret. It is how you treat your customers. Like you want to be treated. That’s how we treat people here,” he said of the Goshen law practice.

After completing law school, John said he wanted to work in a small town, after growing up in Bluffton. He applied for a law clerk position in Chicago, but did not take it. Instead, his future partner George Buckingham took that job for two years before Ulmer recruited him to the Goshen firm.

“I didn’t want to go to the big city. I wanted to live in the country,” John said.

After completing his law degree, John came to Goshen and joined the firm with George Pepple, Frank Yoder and Charles Ainlay. About six months after Ulmer joined the Goshen firm, Pepple died suddenly and Ulmer was assigned the duty of being a litigator for the firm. He served four or five years as a deputy prosecutor and in 1978 was named a special deputy prosecutor as Prosecutor Michael Cosentino sued the Ford Motor Co. over the design of the Pinto, after a crash and fire on U.S. 33 west of Goshen claimed the lives of two young women.

The case went to a trial that lasted 10 weeks in 1980. While Elkhart County lost the case against Ford, “we stopped them from making the Pinto,” he said.

John said after Buckingham completed his two-year commitment in Chicago, he called his parents in Milford to invite him to join the Goshen firm. He did so and became a partner in the Goshen firm in 1965.  

John also taught business law at Goshen College, a position now filled by City Judge Gretchen Hess-Lund, he said.  

John married his wife, Carole, in 1968 and they moved into their home they built on C.R. 17 in 1970. They raised four children, Natalie, Chris, Gretta and Kathy. They have nine grandchildren. “I have always loved the outdoors and hunting,” he said.

John waited until their children were out of college before pursuing his interest in hunting around the world. He has been on five continents and brought trophies home from many hunting trips. The breathtaking collection of mountings decorate his Goshen office.

A couple of his favorite countries to visit are New Zealand, which he calls “absolutely beautiful,” and Iceland, where he bagged a reindeer. He has a musk ox that he shot in the Artic Circle and one of his proudest mounts is the rack from a large moose.

One of his newest mounts is that of a turkey.

He said Carole accompanied him on one hunting trip to Spain.

It was in 1987 that John got a red stag in Scotland, but that trip nearly cost him his life.

“They drive on the wrong side of the road,” in Scotland, he said, and he was in a car crash Oct. 1 on that trip. He spent seven or eight weeks in a hospital, with Carole by his side.

“I had fantastic medical care,” he said. After returning home and recovering, he said, “I had to go back and see my guide and doctors.”

He said he did return in 1989, met and thanked the medics and doctors who cared for him. And he explained that when he was out in the countryside, in a fog near Inverness and Loch Ness, he experienced a feeling of relief as the fog lifted. That experience helped him heal from the tragedy he experienced two years earlier, he said.

John has helped build the Goshen law practice to the current staff that includes 16 lawyers. After working in the practice for 49 years, he recently changed to “of counsel” but still comes to the office every day, working on projects of his choice.

“I just enjoy it, working and helping people,” he said. His practice includes personal injury, business and environmental litigation.

Other public service includes when John served as a state representative in the General Assembly from 1998 to 2008.

Most recently, he has been elected to a seven-member state judiciary commission to review applicants for judge appointments and complaints of misconduct. That term is for the next three years.

He commented that as soon as he took the state post, Chief Justice Randall Shepherd announced his plan to retire, so the panel will now seek applicants for a state supreme court judge.

In his spare time, John enjoys spending time on his “farm” west of Goshen, where he has planted thousands of trees over the years.

He still enjoys college basketball. “I love to watch college basketball. I watched three games last night,” he said one day this week.

He said his immediate future will include practicing law and working on his farm.