It turns out that Fraser MacDonald wasn’t a monster after all

Terror gripped my body when I was handed the slip that said I was to report to Fraser MacDonald’s office.

Fraser was the dean of boys at Butte High School, and his name was almost like a bad word. I had heard that name for years, and it was terrifying.

“Fraser gave me three nights of detention.”

“Fraser gave me five days in-school suspension.”

“Fraser won’t give me my report card until I serve all my detentions.”

My cousins, the D’Arcy boys, ran afoul of Fraser many times in their years at Butte High, and I heard about just about every time they got in trouble. Fraser, it seemed, was just some monster who could not be reasoned with.

When I transferred to Butte High from Butte Central following my sophomore year, I figured I would stay as far away from Fraser as humanly possible. Not one time was I late for school — like I was at Central all the time. Not once did I have an unexcused absence.

So, when the pink slip was handed to me by the student office aid, I thought for sure that Fraser was not going to believe that I didn’t skip. I was going to have face the unreasonable monster, and I was dead meat.

When I got to the office, Fraser was standing at the counter, dealing with a line of boys who had the same pink slip in their hand that I had.

“What, do you think you own this goddamn school?” I heard Fraser say to the first boy. “That’s five more nights.”

When the next boy handed him is form, Fraser started with, “You again, uh.” That boy’s conversation also didn’t end well. He, too, received a hefty number of nights of detention.

By the time I got to the counter, I think I was visibly shaking. I slid my pink slip to Fraser as if I was ordering from the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld.

Fraser grabbed the slip without looking at me. He held the slip with two hands for a what seemed like an eternity, and then Fraser shook his head.

“Billy,” he said as he finally made eye contact. “You didn’t skip. Get out of here.”

I had no idea how Fraser new my name. I was a golfer, and he was a golfer, but I was a Muni kid. Fraser played at the Country Club.

Fraser, though, was the executive director of the Montana State Golf Association, and he apparently paid attention to the junior and high school scores. He must have known that I was going to play golf for the Bulldogs.

Maybe he knew my grandpa Bill, who was the longtime president of the golf club at the Highland View Golf Course.

Maybe he knew my mom, who worked as a sign language interpreter at the school then.

Either way, I was thrilled that I wasn’t getting detention. I felt like I got the call from the governor at 11:59 p.m., and I was shocked that Fraser really wasn’t an unreasonable monster after all. 

Well, not if you were a golfer, anyway.

My next encounter with Fraser came during the golf season. I was in the annex in a shop class when a boy I knew came in with a pink slip for me.

“I’m not even an aid,” the boy told me. “Fraser grabbed me in the hallway and told me to, ‘Get Bill Foley down here right now.’ Dude, you’re screwed.”

This time, there was no line when I got to the counter. Fraser was standing there, waiting for me.

“Billy,” he said as he waived his arm for me to walk around the counter. “Let’s go talk in my office.”

I took a seat as Fraser made a phone call to Dillon golf coach Tedd Stanisich, a Butte guy whom Fraser used to make fun of for spelling his name with an extra “D.”

A couple of days earlier, I played in the Dillon tournament with a Dillon boy who had a lot of trouble counting his shots. One of my good friends was Dillon’s best player — and one of the best players in the state. I told him that his teammate was a cheater, and he told Stanisich.

For about 10 minutes, I sat there and talked on the phone with Fraser and Stanny as they gave each other their typical hard time over the phone.

Stanny also asked me a couple of questions about his cheater. I didn’t want to be a narc, but Stanny already suspected the boy couldn’t count.

I was able to be a part of similar conversation a couple of times years later when I was covering MSGA tournaments for the newspaper. Fraser would always joke about Stanny being a sandbagger, an accusation Stanny laughed about, but denied. 

Fraser, who passed away at the age of 88 on Jan. 6, was inducted into the Butte Sports Hall of Fame in 2017. That happened to be the first year that I was the executive director of the Hall of Fame.

It seemed so fitting that the Hall of Famers voted in Fraser as a contributor because he was a member of the selection committee that picked the first class of the Hall of Fame in 1987.

When Ron Davis asked Fraser if he was surprised to be selected during the induction ceremony, Fraser said, “Well, I know this. I wasn’t in the company of the people who went in the first time.”

Among the many contributions he made to the local sports scene, Fraser was a radio announcer. He called Butte High and Montana Tech games. He also called Butte Copper Kings baseball games.

When he first started working at KBOW, a young Paul Panisko was running the board for Fraser as he called a football game. As the clock ran out for halftime, Paul had two minutes of commercials queued up for the break, assuming Fraser would talk about the game at the half.

Instead, Paul got a lesson in scrambling to fill dead air as he heard Fraser say, “We’ll be back after this 20-minute break.”

Davis, a broadcasting legend himself, says that Fraser is the one who taught him how to call a game.

I got to talk to Fraser a ton during the months leading up to his Hall of Fame induction. He was so excited to join the list of Butte legends, even if he would joke that he didn’t belong.

Even after the induction, Fraser would occasionally give me a call out of the blue for the next couple of years. I would often have tears of laughter running down my face by the time I hung up.

It has been several years since Fraser made me laugh. I tried to call him a few times to try to correct his address so I could make sure he got a ballot to vote for Hall of Fame classes, but he never answered.

I knew his hearing was bad, and I knew he was dealing with dementia. Still, I was hoping for one more time to see Frasier, who most definitely belongs with the other immortals who donned the Green Jackets of the Butte Sports Hall of Fame.

That hope faded away for good when I saw his obituary online. Fraser was 88, but it still seems too early to say goodbye.

When I look back at Fraser’s life, though, I will do so with a smile. I might even laugh out loud some times.

It is amazing to think that to me, he went from an unreasonable monster to a legend to a friend.

I will miss him.

— Bill Foley, who is kicking himself for not skipping after getting the golf pass from Fraser, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.