Christmas this year will be a little less merry without Naturally Santa’s Billy Gooch.
Gooch, who was diagnosed with cancer and hospitalized about a week ago, died Monday at age 80.
Gooch was born in Oklahoma in 1936, moving with his wife, Alma, to Colorado Springs in 1971 to work for the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper. It wasn’t his day job that Gooch was best known for, though.
Gooch was beloved for his role as St. Nick for Naturally Santa, the business his wife founded in 1992 to recruit wholesome Santas who didn’t reek of alcohol or cigarettes, who didn’t need to stuff a pillow under their red suits and whose white hair and beards were real.
In 1994, the company placed two Santas; by 2002 it had 70 Santas in malls in 33 states.
The most famous of them all was Gooch, whose travels as Santa took him from Colorado Springs to Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York and the White House.
“When he was doing Santa there wasn’t a person that didn’t believe it 100 percent,” said Frank Martinez, a fellow Santa who described Gooch as a second father.
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