Twenty-two years ago, Stanford brought an undefeated, No. 1-ranked men’s basketball team to the state of Washington in March, and barely escaped Pullman with a 63-61 victory over WSU. The game turned on a late five-second call on the Cougars that led to a winning three-pointer by the Cardinal.

Dick Fry had been retired almost two decades, but he never really retired. I got an email from him the next day, bitter at what he thought was a quick five-count by the officials. I responded innocently (and maybe a little naively) that I thought the call might have been correct.

The fiercest proponent ever of WSU athletics got back to me, spitting sparks at the injustice of the judgment, with the unmistakable inference that it’s the little guy, the underdog, that always gets screwed in such a situation.

That was Dick, a WSU hall of fame member died last week following a stroke, three months after he had turned 103.

Nobody ever loved a school more, and he didn’t even go there. His alma mater was San Jose State. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, he came to WSU in 1952 to edit the alumni publication, became sports information director a few years later until 1968, and then chief of the school’s news bureau until retiring in the mid-‘80s.

His work was hardly done. In the late ‘80s, for the centennial celebration of WSU, he authored “The Crimson and the Gray,” the definitive history of athletics at the school. It’s rich in people and personality, while recognizing the place of scores and statistics.

“He was a walking archive,” said Mike Price, the former football coach whose daughter married Fry’s grandson. “There’s no one ever who’s a more important Cougar than Dick Fry.”

I first knew Fry a little while a student, stringing for the Seattle Times, and for a year or so, he was my boss at the news bureau. When two WSU broadcast students somehow landed the rights to Cougar football and basketball games, Fry assigned me the story. I have only the vaguest memory of it, but an appreciation for the trust he showed a 21-year-old kid.

Turned out, that was in character. A few years later, he hired Rod Commons, an Oregonian who had taken a working detour to Brown University in Providence, and Commons was naturally wary of Fry’s direction.

Instead, “He never, ever made a suggestion of what I should be doing, unless I asked him,” Commons said last week. “To have him there as a resource, but not trying to help manage unless I asked for it, really endeared me to him.”

That resource part, Commons came to learn, was invaluable. Fry had a steel-trap mind for facts.

“I learned right away, he had a fantastic memory,” Commons said. “I’d say, ‘I don’t know if that’s right.' And he’d say, ‘You could look it up.’ He could remember every game when he was SID. I don’t know how he did it.”

Or for as long as he did it. Earlier this decade, he was fussing over his latest book, “101 Re-Fry’d Cougar tales,” a compilation of pieces he had written for Cougar football programs over the years. And if he was exacting with sportswriters about WSU, he held himself to the same standard.

“He kind of crossed swords with university publications,” Commons recalls.

Seems that Fry wanted to include some works that encompassed his wartime service.

“They wanted it to be a sports book,” Commons said. “They wanted to take out stories he had done. He finally just said no. ‘If they’re not gonna do it the way I want it, we’re not gonna do it.’ ” (The account of his war experiences reached publication last week just after his death.)

They finally took "Re-Fry'd" to a local printer, and Fry birthed it at 101 years old. He didn’t figure age was an excuse for mistakes, unforgiving about small errors he thought he should have caught.

“He was his toughest critic,” Commons said. “I remember when the centennial book came out. You didn’t want to be around him too much when he was looking at it.”

Fry’s first wife Bea died of cancer 55 years ago. Several years later, he married again, to Marilyn, widow of Spokane Daily Chronicle sports columnist Bob Johnson.

They lived on Southwest Shirley Street in Pullman, and it was there where, a decade or so ago, an angel appeared in his life. That was Jane LaRiviere, longtime women’s rowing coach at WSU, who happened to move into a home behind the Frys.

They became friends, and when Marilyn died in 2021, LaRiviere found herself helping Fry fill a void in his life, taking him on drives, on errands, on sojourns to visit others from the Cougar athletic family.

“He was my pal,” said LaRiviere. “I’d see him weekly and sometimes more.
I’d take him to the (Snake River) boathouse. He made me laugh and I made him laugh. That was going right until the end.”

Sometimes they’d arrange to meet up with Marcia Saneholtz, or drive over to Ken Casavant’s place, seeing old Cougar officials. Other times, it was nothing more than getting gas and going to Wal-Mart.

LaRiviere came to know Fry’s quirks. He was a prolific letter-writer, and he treated those letters like stories that needed to go to press. After all, he'd started as a wire-service reporter.

One day, he finished his letters and told his caregiver, Joyce, that they needed to get them to the post office. How about lunch first, she suggested, and went to the kitchen to fix it.
In the time that took, Fry was out the door and down a steep hill, ferrying the mail on foot to the post office. He was finding the uphill a struggle when Joyce, frantic at his absence, finally buzzed his alert and a police car picked him up.

He was 100 then.

You won’t be surprised to know that Fry regarded today’s college-athletic scene disdainfully.

“He hated it,” Commons said. And that was because everything is in motion, players staying for one season and leaving, coaches continually moving on to pursue the next big thing. That was so unlike the world Fry embraced, and would share with LaRiviere in the final years.

“It was never work,” she said, looking back. “My heart was full.”

I think Dick Fry, born when Warren G. Harding was president, would look at his life the same way.