Obituary for Frederic Gooding, Jr. ’71
Frederic Gooding, Jr., age 83, of Madison, died Thursday, Sept. 8, 2016, at the Middleton Village Rehabilitation Clinic. A memorial service for him was held at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Shorewood Hills on November 3, 2016.
Born October 28, 1932, in Concord, Massachusetts, he was the son, with two sisters, of Frederic Gooding, Sr., of Concord, and Julia (Papin) Gooding, of St. Louis. He attended the Fenn School and Middlesex Academy. In the summers, he learned to love the outdoors at Keewaydin Camp in Maine, becoming a counselor in later years.
Fred attended Harvard University and Naval ROTC, becoming a happy photographer for the Harvard Crimson. Graduating in 1954, he served in the U.S. Navy for several years as a Lieutenant, JG and in the Naval Reserve. After returning to the United States, he taught at several preparatory schools including the Moses Brown School and Concord Academy, then pursued a course of studies culminating in a 1971 Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, with a dissertation in number theory, supervised by J. Roderick Smart. He married Sarah Stout in 1959, at her home in Lowell, Ohio, and they settled in Madison from 1966 to 1975, then moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he became a teaching professor of mathematics and computer science at multiple colleges on the East Coast, then returned to Madison on retirement in 1999.
Fred was an accomplished amateur photographer. He was an avid bicyclist, a member of the League of American Wheelmen, and the newsletter publisher for Madison’s Bombay Bicycle Club. A member of the Sierra Club, he hiked and climbed in the mountains of the U.S., Italy, and Yugoslavia. He was a devotee of classical music, the works of H. L. Mencken, digital typography, woodworking, and a host of other interests. He had a raucous sense of humor and a skeptical mind.
Fred is survived by his first wife, Sarah Stout, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, two children, Frederic Gooding III of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and Tim Gooding, of Silver Spring, Maryland, his sister Eleanor Hallowell, nieces and nephews, and his partner Katharine Blumenthal, of Madison and Portland, Oregon.
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