by Mark Naber

Bob Fritz, longtime SPCUG member and computer science instructor, was killed in an accident on Sunday, April 1, 2001, while sailing on Folsom Lake.

Fritz fell into the lake while sailing with a friend; the cause of his fall is still not known.

As a teacher at a number of local institutions, Fritz taught many of the area’s computer professionals, including a substantial portion of the SPCUG membership.

Fritz was born in 1936 in Albany, California. According to others, his grandmother played a large part in his life. Born into a family of limited means, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and was posted to Germany, where he played the saxophone in the USAF band.

After leaving the military, Fritz went to UC Berkeley for his undergraduate studies. He then continued to Stanford where he completed his graduate studies.

He began teaching computer science classes at American River College in 1966, and later pursued his doctorate in Education from the University of the Pacific.

Fritz met his wife, Joyce, on a blind date arranged by friends while attending UC Berkeley. As of the time of his death, Bob and Joyce had been married just short of 40 years, had two sons (Kevin and Kent), and a new grandson, Ashton.

Fritz was past president of the Orangevale Rotary, as well as the local chapters of the National Speaker's Association and the Stanford Alumni Association.

He had just retired from American River College, but was still teaching part-time. He also taught at California State University, Sacramento; U.C. Davis Extension; and National University.

He was faculty advisor for several groups at American River College.

Fritz was also active in the Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church, where he had served on numerous boards, and was an active member of the chancel choir.

A memorial service was held at Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church, attended by an estimated 1,100 people.

Bob Fritz was one of those rare professors who was known far and wide across the American River College campus, and not just within his own computer science department. His was a friendly face, always smiling, and he never passed up a chance to say hello and chat. Bob liked to talk about all sorts of things that were special to him: the college, our colleagues, our students, and, of course, computers.

He was a kind of perpetual motion machine at ARC, and everyone wondered where he found the time and energy to do everything he did, including teaching additional classes at Sacramento State. Bob's achievements were especially notable in the classroom, where students universally found him to be a caring, considerate, and enthusiastic teacher. No one who took computer science from Bob Fritz would ever make the mistake of thinking you can't have fun with computers.

Although Bob had taken retirement from ARC to pursue other interests, he was still teaching part-time because he wasn't quite ready to give up teaching. He just didn't want to leave yet. No one at ARC wanted him to leave either.

I was fortunate to have Bob Fritz for an instructor at American River College for several classes. He was always active in the class, and was always trying to find a new way to bring ideas to his students. He also wanted them to be able to know more than what was required of the course so that they would understand the concepts rather than just doing them by rote.

I took a COBOL course from him. One of the assignments involved taking some input data to create a report of repairs of equipment that was grouped by company and calculate costs based on a percentage. As was his practice, he put up a sheet from the book that showed the desired results for comparison.

When my program was completed, I found that my costs varied from the master sheet by a few points. I could not find out why it was happening, so I took my program to Bob for help. We went over it, and found that the authors (and almost all the students) were adding the raw data until a group change, then calculating the percentage for the group. I had developed my program to calculate for each transaction. After talking about it, Bob told me that I had actually done the program in a way that would be more accurate in the real world in terms of accounting practices!

Bob was very active. During breaks from the college, he frequently traveled as a representative for one of the several groups to which he belonged, and went overseas several times. As such, he wasn't able to attend the SPCUG meetings regularly, but we managed to talk each time he did attend. It was after one of these conversations that I got a call from Bob asking if I could help with teaching his students something that the normal curriculum did not cover.

Bob asked me to give a short overview to his class on COBOL’s Job Control Language, and show them a little bit of how it worked in the real world, so that they would have a little "extra advantage" at a job interview.

This typifies the way Bob worked to give his students that little edge on the competition. I gave this seminar for several semesters until the system progressed to a point where the students started to see JCL for themselves from the job listings.

For a man who considered himself "vertically challenged," Bob Fritz was really a person larger than life.