A Coke.

“He always had one in his hand,” Bill Miller said. “That was whether he was in the classroom or going to a game or keeping score.”

And a smile.

“He always had one on his face,” John Enrietto said.

Walter J. “Fitz” Fitzpatrick was known as much for his affinity to the carbonated drink as he was for his affability.

Fitzpatrick, of Butler, who passed away Jan. 25 at age 82, was a Butler County Community College faculty member for four decades who was inducted into the college’s Charles W. Dunaway Pioneer Hall of Fame for keeping the official score book at BC3 sporting events for just as many years.

The Johnstown native earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Pittsburgh. He was hired by BC3 in 1967 to teach courses in social sciences, and he retired in 2009.

Fitzpatrick won multiple teacher of the year awards and in 2007 received the outstanding service community achievement recognition award for his service to BC3.

“Fitz was a good guy, a good character,” said Miller, a former BC3 men’s basketball player in the late 1970s who would work 37 years as an administrator at the college. “He would always bring three or four pencils to cover the games.”

Enrietto, who served 26 years as sports editor of the Butler Eagle and retired in June, said Fitzpatrick was always there.

“When I think of ‘Fitzie,’ I think of dedication,” Enrietto said. “The guy was there all the time. I’d go to a men’s game at BC3, a women’s game at BC3 and he was there. He always had a can of Coke with him at the scorers’ table. All the time. He could have gotten a TV spot for Coke.”

Fitzpatrick also was “a hoot, really a hoot,” said Glenn Miller, who took a sociology class instructed by the professor and earned an associate degree from BC3 in 1981. Glenn Miller has served as a college trustee since 1998.

“If you were having a down day and you went to his class, at least for me, you would leave that class with a giggle,” Glenn Miller said. “It might have been something he said. Or something he said about what he was teaching.”

Fitzpatrick began to keep score of BC3’s men’s basketball games in 1968. In years to follow, he also kept score for women’s basketball and baseball contests.

He was once hit in the face with a basketball while sitting at the scorers’ table, and worked quickly to tape together the frames of his eyeglasses. He also is said to have hidden under the scorers’ table when a fight erupted during a game. Fitzpatrick once honored an unusual request from former BC3 men’s and women’s coach Dick Hartung.

“We were playing a team whose coach used a lot of profanity,” Hartung said. “So I’m telling the referee that the coach is swearing and that’s a technical foul. The referee said, ‘Oh, relax coach.’ So I tell Fitz, ‘Every time he uses that word, I want you to put a check on the top of the score book.’ So at halftime I said, ‘Fitzie, how many check marks we got?’ And he yelled ‘38!’

“He was just such a good guy.”

There is no question, Dunaway, the college’s first athletics director, said in 2017, “that Fitz has seen more BC3 sporting events than anyone else.”

The Charles W. Dunaway Pioneer Hall of Fame was established in 2015 to recognize individuals who have contributed significantly to the quality and success of BC3 athletics.

“I don’t know if there is a better summarization of contributor than what he did, which was to be there all the time,” Rob Snyder, BC3’s director of student life and athletics, said. “Baseball games, basketball games, traveling on the road with the teams. He brought a great energy and love of sports and love of BC3 that I think set a good example for the players and everyone around them.

“Dunaway was the founder and the backbone of athletics here and I think Fitz was the flip side. He brought the fan aspect. He just loved sports and was a great person to have around because of that.”

It was at a BC3 men’s basketball game in January 2017 in Beaver County — one of the 600 BC3 sporting events that Fitzpatrick estimated he had attended — that an employee with BC3’s athletics department hand-delivered a letter to him announcing his selection as a member of the Charles W. Dunaway Pioneer Hall of Fame’s Class of 2017.

“I was very surprised and shocked,” Fitzpatrick said at the time. “I’m certainly not an athlete and the like. To think that I would be inducted into an athletic hall of fame to me is mind-boggling. I was very honored.”

Those attending a visitation for Fitzpatrick are asked to wear their favorite Pittsburgh or Butler athletic wear, according to his obituary.

Visitation will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 29, and from 11 a.m. to noon Thursday, Jan. 30, at the Thompson-Miller Funeral Home, 124 E. North St., Butler. A funeral at noon Jan. 30 will be followed by a private burial.

In lieu of flowers, according to his obituary, memorial donations may be sent to the Butler County Community College Athletics Department.

Bill Foley is coordinator o f news and media content at Butler County Community College.