Happy 100th to WSU legend and goodwill ambassador Dick Fry
By Greg Witter, Cougfan.com Feb. 12, 2023
RICHARD BRUCE "DICK" FRY, a
beloved member of the Pullman community for 70 years and the great historian of
Washington State athletics, turns 100 years old today. He was born in Oroville,
Calif., Feb. 12, 1923. But for WSU partisans, the key date is March
1, 1952. That's when Dick joined the Washington State family, as editor of the
alumni magazine. He never left Pullman and proceeded to blaze a trail of
professionalism and goodwill that's still going strong 71 years later.
"I'm going to sound like an old Cougar here," he said
early this month when asked for a capstone to the last century. "What a
wonderful life it's been in this wonderful town and all the crimson and gray
that surrounds it ... every time I turn around I think of someone who helped me
along the way."
His 33-year-long WSU career included 13 years as sports
information director and 15 as manager of the WSU News Bureau. In the process,
and in the years that followed, he won friends and influenced people at a rate
that would put Dale Carnegie to shame.
After retiring from the university in
1985. Dick wrote the bible on Washington State athletics — The Crimson and the Gray: 100 Years
with the WSU Cougars — that was published in 1989
and remains the go-to for anyone exploring WSU's colorful sports history.
The ultimate bridge builder, his lasting
presence on the Palouse landscape is captured succinctly in a 2012 Cougfan.com story that
began this way: "Dick Fry never completed a pass for Washington
State. Never made a basket. Never hit a baseball. Never coached. Never ran the
athletic department. That said, it may not be far off to say Fry is one of the
most memorable — and important — people ever to come through Washington State's sports scene."
He was inducted into the WSU Athletics Hall of
Fame in 2009 and remains a Pullman fixture, as sharp and friendly as
ever. In a 2005 interview with
close friend and former WSU colleague Pat Caraher, Dick was
asked if he considered leaving Pullman upon retirement.
"Never a thought ... For all the wonderful things in this
community, why would you want to (leave)?" he marveled. "It has
almost all the advantages of a big city and none of the disadvantages ...
first-class sports, first-class education, first-class entertainment ...
everything. I can go into the library and check out a book for a semester ...
It's a fantastic place to live."
He added, with emotion in his voice, "My mom used to come
up from California and visit. Mom lived to the day before her 93rd birthday ...
every time she'd come up here she would say 'aren't you grateful that you had
an opportunity to come here and work here?' And all I can say is, "Mom,
you're so right, so right."
Asked about the unique spirit in Coug Nation,
Fry told CF.C in that 2012 interview, "I'll tell you what: Once a
Cougar, always a Cougar. The feeling that these people have for the school is
really something. It's very warm and very genuine. Not only is it a very
warm and very genuine, but the location; it's kind of one for all and all for
one here … the community feeling here is wonderful."
Rod Commons, a fellow WSU Hall of Famer and
retired sports information director, counts Dick among his closest
friends. Asked last month to describe Fry in a sentence, he didn't hesitate.
"He really is beyond description. First and foremost, Dick is a consummate
gentleman. He is so gracious. I don't care what the situation is or where it
is, he is such a gentleman."
He adds, "His recall and knowledge of
history and events is uncanny. Not just about WSU or sports, but his time in
World War II and growing up in the Bay Area. And his storytelling ability is
unmatched -- his skills are from an era before mass communication, when
stories were the way you communicated."
WHEN COUGFAN.COM TOOK FLIGHT in
1998, we asked Dick if we could reprint a few of the great features he had
written over the years for the game-day football magazine. By week's end, he'd
mailed us an inch-high stack of clippings. A cover note came with the
delivery: "If you find anything legible, use as you see fit!"
Here is a sampling from that trove:
·
Two-way terror Clancy Williams:
WSU's finest-ever all-around player?
·
The Smilin' Irishman of WSU:
When Jim Sweeney roamed the Palouse
·
Don Ellingsen, a clutch Coug in
a small frame, one for the ages
·
Everybody's All-American, Bill
Steiger, returned to Cougs after breaking neck
·
Babe Hollingbery led a golden
age of athletics at Washington State
·
1917 Cougars one of best teams
never to smell Pasadena's roses
·
The name behind WSU's mascot
Butch is the stuff of legend
OROVILLE, WHERE HE GREW UP, is an
old gold rush town 70 miles north of Sacramento. His dad was a miner, dredger and
electrician, his mom a homemaker and one-time weekly newspaper correspondent
whose love of reading and writing clearly rubbed off on the
youngest of her four children.
He started working as a sports writer for the local newspaper
while still attending Oroville High, where he graduated in 1940. He spent three
years studying journalism at San Jose State before heading off to World War
II with the Army Air Corps. He was trained as an air traffic controller
("Ya land 'em if you can see 'em," he quipped.) and spent the
last year-and-a-half of the war as a buck sergeant stationed in China as part of
the massive Burma Hump air lift of fuel, supplies and troops.
"We were (based) at 6,000 feet and the
air clear as can be and the temperature very moderate," he told Caraher. That
was important, he noted, because the stress of keeping the steady flow of
C-46s, C-87s, C-109s and C-47s out of harm's way was, by itself, intense enough
without layering in the severe elements found elsewhere along the Hump system.
After the war, he returned to San Jose State
to wrap up his degree and there he met his future wife, Bea, a Marine Corps
veteran and fellow journalist. He told Caraher it was pretty much love at first
sight. They had three children — two girls and a boy and all WSU graduates. Bea died in 1971. In
the early 1980s Dick married another wonderful woman, Marilyn, who passed away
in the fall of 2021.
DICK WENT TO WORK FOR THE United
Press in San Francisco right out of college. He was stationed in the Reno
bureau when fate sent him north. United Press promoted him to manage the
capitol bureau in Olympia and he later became editor of the Chehalis
Advocate.
An old colleague from United Press, who knew a WSC
administrator, recommended Fry for a post in the Washington State College office
of information. He arrived eight hours late for his interview due to snow
clogging the railroad lines but it was smooth sailing after his train
pulled into the Pullman Depot. He started working for
the university in March 1952.
He took over the sports information
director's role in 1957 and proceeded to become a friend and confidant of
administrators, coaches and players, from Buck Bailey and Bobo Brayton to Keith Lincoln, George Reed, Gerry Lindgren and Jim McKean. He
became manager of the WSU News Bureau in 1970 but remained close to the
athletics scene.
Asked about all the coaching legends he worked
with, Fry said, "Talk about being lucky … Jack Friel. Buck Bailey. Marv Harshman. Jack Mooberry. John Chaplin at the
end (of Fry's SID tenure), the great track coach. Babe Hollingbery -- I wasn't here
when Babe was coaching, but I got to know him. Bobo (Brayton). It was marvelous
... Doc Bohler was still here (in Pullman). He didn't die until '60. Talk
about a legend. Oh man, he was something."
ASKED IN 2012 TO NAME THE MOST MEMORABLE Cougar
sporting event he witnessed, Fry didn't hesitate. "The Stanford (football) game in
1957," he said. "We were down 18-7 with 3:45 left, and we take over
(possession) on our 13. On the first play, Jack Fanning comes off the left
wing, and right over the middle, Bobby Newman hits him. He (Fanning) splits the
Stanford safeties and goes 87 yards to score.
"We onside kick with Gene Baker from
Buckley … and Phil Mast, one of three John Rogers (High School in Spokane) guys
who figure in this scenario, recovers the onside kick. Newman marches us down
the field and throws a touchdown pass to Ellingsen (a Rogers graduate like Mast
and Fanning). We go out front 21-18. Don't look now, but there's still a
minute five (1:05) left on the clock! It's just hang on for dear life."
The 1958 battle in Spokane between the Cougars
and Huskies -- dubbed The Mud Bowl -- is another game that rates high on his
list. The Cougars won it 18-14 and finished the season 7-3.
DICK'S CONNECTION TO COUGFAN.COM extends
farther back than the site's founding in 1998. My first week on
campus, as a WSU freshman in 1980, I walked over to French Ad — at my
dad's behest— to meet two people in the WSU News Bureau he said would be
great mentors: Dick Fry and Al Ruddy. My dad had known them for years and
they both welcomed me like a blood relative.
Dick and I have checked in on each other with
Christmas cards and periodic phone calls ever since. We had a fun conversation
the morning of the 2021 Apple Cup. Dick had just returned from his
semi-daily coffee klatch -- now in its third or fourth iteration going back to
the 1970s -- and assured that the entire gang was confident of a Cougar
victory. This past September, we broke bread at a Cougar Collective coaches
lunch, where Dick and Rod gave CF.C's Jamey Vinnick a fun walk down memory lane
you can read HERE.
He's been an incredible resource and support
for Cougfan.com since our founding, but more than anything, he's one of the
most thoughtful people around. The message he left when my dad died in 2019 was
so touching I have it saved and re-listen every now and then. Dick is just
a special guy. The mere mention of his name puts a smile on my face. And the
fact he's now 100 -- and sharp as ever -- makes that smile even bigger.
NOTABLE COUGAR NUGGETS FROM DICK FRY:
·
Pete Rademacher, the stout Cougar lineman from Yakima County who
won an Olympic Gold Medal in boxing in 1956 and later fought for the
heavyweight title, never once laced up the gloves for the Cougar boxing team.
He was ineligible to fight collegiately because he was an AAU boxer. He did,
however, receive private coaching from legendary WSU boxing coach Ike Deeter.
·
Asked by Caraher about
WSU's critical role in Title IX, which changed the face of women's
sports starting in the early 1970s, Fry said his conversations with WSU women's
coaching pioneers Dorothea Coleman and Carol Gordon as part of his research
for The Crimson and the Gray were illuminating about the
unfairness of the pre-Title IX era. He remembers Coleman telling him
she hoped she'd live long enough where a girl wasn't criticized for
throwing like a boy. "It was tear jerker," he said. "I'm delighted
to see how women's sports have come along; the progress is amazing."
·
Related story: Recounting Dick Fry's thrills and
chills in a lifetime watching the Cougars.
PHOTO: WSU Hall Famer Dick Fry at Cougar Collective luncheon
this past September. (Photo: Cougfan.com/Witter)
PHOTO: Dick Fry, at left as manager of the WSU New Bureau in the
early 1980s, and right in 1957 as WSC's Sports Information Director. (WSU
Photos)
PHOTO: Dick Fry (center) with fellow WSU Hall of Famer Rod
Commons (right) and Cougfan.com co-founder Greg Witter in September 2022. (Photo:
Cougfan.com)
