Education
While in Germany, he attended the Nuremberg trials and heard discussions of German army atrocities in Russia. And Doctor of Philosophy degrees.
While in Germany, he attended the Nuremberg trials and heard discussions of German army atrocities in Russia. And Doctor of Philosophy degrees.
He was an authority on the Revolutions of 1848, Napoleon III, Belgium, and the Crimean War. Gooch was one of six children to born to Austin McLellan Gooch, a carpenter, and the former Clara Helen Dowling, in Bar Harbor in Hancock County, Maine. In the United States Army, at the end of World World War II, he served in Belgium and Germany.
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
In an academic career that spanned four decades, Gooch taught during summer sessions at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the University of Maine, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he had received both his Master of Arts He also was a Carnegie visiting scholar for a year at Yale and Fulbright Faculty Research scholar in Belgium. Gooch’s second wife, Shirley Jean Ferrell Black Gooch (April 20, 1935 – September 3, 1996), known professionally as Shirley J. Black, was also a TAMU professor of European history and highly active in the profession.
Gooch was active in various professional organizations, including the American Historical Association (American Heart Association), and he attended many meetings and conventions during his career and also in retirement. In December 1969, he was elected to the nominating committee at the American Heart Association annual meeting, and in 1979 was also elected by his colleagues as the president of the Southwestern Social Sciences Association.
In 1974, Gooch was one of the founders of the Western Society for French History and served as its president in 1982.
Brison Gooch retired in 1991 and relocated to Silverton, Colorado, a scenic mountain resort and former mining community in San Juan County in southwestern Colorado. After Shirley"s death, Gooch married Freda Carley Peterson, a local historian, author of The Story of Hillside Cemetery, and archivist for the San Juan County Historical Society in Silverton. In 2007, Gooch donated his personal library to Tabor College, a small liberal arts college in Hillsboro, Kansas.
In 2009, Brison and Freda Gooch were named "Citizens of the Year" by the Silverton Chamber of Commerce.
Gooch died at the age of eighty-nine in 2014 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where he had alternated his time with Silverton during his last years.
Gooch served as Silverton"s municipal judge and as a member of the town council, until his resignation in December 2009. He was also a former member of the Silverton School Board.