The Daily Orange

Media Credit: Luke McComb

Kyle Fetterly stopped a guest walking out of his office with a simple gesture.

"Just one more quick story and I'll let you go," he said. After more than two decades as the school's equipment manager, he's got a million. Name me a person, he says, and I'll bet I've got a story on him.

But on May 9, 2009, with the lights shining on him, dressed in his ceremonial garb, the story, for once was about the 50-year-old Fetterly.

For 15 years, he'd been working non-stop to earn his diploma to tell a new tale, one about the most important day of his life.

"Walking across that stage, there was that feeling of accomplishment when you hear your name called. I just wanted to do it for myself," Fetterly said. "I just wanted to say that I was a Syracuse University graduate - and I'm proud of that, too."

Taking one or two classes a semester, Fetterly was able to complete a degree that started as an undergraduate in 1977. After failing out of the university three times, Fetterly latched on as the school's head equipment manager in 1983. But as the years passed, a desire to get the once-evasive diploma nagged at him. So in 1994 he began taking classes again toward a degree he started long ago in retail management.

Now, this football season - his 29th on staff - marks his first as a Syracuse alumus.

Sitting in his computer chair, his face brightens when he speaks of his background in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. Cracking a fresh tin of Copenhagen, he segues flawlessly between stories about the 1993 Fiesta Bowl and market-to-market assessment. From long bus rides and cold-cut sandwiches with John Desko, to the long-term effects of radio frequency identification chips.

"He figured out over this time interests I don't think he even knew he had," his former academic advisor Amanda Nicholson said. "If someone had gone to him 20 years ago and said 'You'll take this class and find it interesting' I think he would have said 'Nahh.'" He is a connoisseur of all the many facets that made up his retail management degree. "One time, I even proved in a class that Alan Greenspan was the cause of the financial crisis on an economics graph," Fetterly said. "It got a lot of boos."

Over the years, Fetterly's friends maintain that the only thing that's changed about him is his moustache. He's kept his affable demeanor, his booming guffaw and his talent as a brilliant storyteller. However, his appetite for education, he thinks, came a bit later on in life.

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