HISTORY

Similar to other parts of this website, you can hit the summary at the top, or dig deeper. This website is primarily intended as a repository of my life history for my family, as I wish I still had my Dad around to learn more about his life. Since my Widow-maker and Heart Failure diagnosis, a significant number of people have been in my face to record my stories and history and put my classes into some form that can continue to help people after I am gone. I will try my best to honor this request. I guess it will end up being a sort of digital autobiography. If you are just curious about me for some reason, then welcome, and I hope you enjoy my stories as well.

Executive Summary (still long, sorry)

Dr. Eric Fretz was born on June 6th (D-Day) 1967, in Cheverly. Maryland. His parents, Dr. Bruce Fretz and Dr. Barbara Fretz worked at the University of Maryland and PG County High Schools respectively. He spent his first year or two in a small apartment complex in Calverton, Maryland, eventually moving to a new home in a newly constructed subdivision as was popular at the time. 13021 Ingleside Drive was his home from the late 1960s until they moved to Potomac, MD in 1977. The home was a split level, and he had the first bedroom at the top of the stairs. It had moon landing wallpaper on one wall, and at night in the summer when the window was open, you could hear the trucks rolling by on the not too far away I-95. Just a short walk down the street and up the hill through a park/forest was Calverton Elementary, where he learned from Kindergarten until 4th grade. His best friend was Fawzi Emad and his grade-school crush was Diane Burdine (both are still close friends). He was the only kid in the neighborhood whose mom worked outside the home, much less had a PhD. By the time he was 10, he had travelled to over a dozen countries, because his father was passionate about trains and travel.

Moving to Potomac was a big change. He never realized the financial gamble his parents took to get him a better school system. The family were the “poorest wealthy people in the neighborhood.” They were the only family with a 10-year-old car, but they made it work. The house had a pool which was amazing, as he loved swimming. The schools were modern an open-concept. He rode his bike to school almost every day, to Cold Spring Elementary. The school was NEW (his 6th grade class was the first to graduate from K-6 at that school). The teachers were much better, and he adapted pretty quickly, never being super popular, but always having friends. 9120 Paddock Lane in the FoxHills West suburb was his home. He continued scouting in Troop 1449 and this was a source of great enjoyment. 7th and 8th grade were at Robert Frost Jr. High, where he was an OK student with great test scores, who had a wide group of friends, but again was never “popular.”

Down the hill from Frost was Thomas S. Wootton HS where he was again a solid student, with almost 1500 SAT, but very ambivalent grades. He played HS football in Freshman year, but switched over to swimming which he was better at, plus fewer assholes, AND had girls! Since his skin was very reactive to sun and being scraped, the girls like Sharon Boebel would “carve” inapproporiate comments or logos on his back with their nails during each meet, that could be seen bright red when he stood on the starting block. The team was very successful, iwnning the Tri-state championship more than once. He was a solid “B-relay” swimmer, and his relay was always trying to (and often did) beat the other team’s A-relay. He worked a part-time job at Bloomingdale’s in White Flint Mall (now defunct), in the Deli and Bakery department. He was known for bringing leftover pastry to school for his friends. He got into plenty of mischief and enjoyed going to Ocean City, MD with his friends (swimmer) David Koch and Jeff Strite. There is a two page article in his Senior yearbook about a fake club (DPO, the Dumb Peoples Organization) he started that celebrated failing tests. This was the first in a long line of activities that would make people in charge of him “facepalm.” After graduation, he left for the University of Michigan, having been rejected from all the Ivys and Ivy adjacents because high test scores with weak GPA was something they did not like.

At UM, he signed up for Navy ROTC and loved it. He competed for and won a retroactive 4-year scholarship from his Commander, which changed his life (and his parent’s checkbook!). He lived for two years in East Quad in the Residential College, an unusual, small, degree-granting college INSIDE the University of Michigan. There, he met his future wife, Jenni. In sophomore year, he got a special “apartment” unit in the dorm (rare and coveted), and Jenni “just by chance” got the single room across the hall. (ha, yeah, by chance). Anyway, in Junior and Senior year, he lived with his buddies Chuck and Chris in an apartment at 829 Tappan, in a back corner that looks out over the parking lot. Jenni had a condo in Tower Plaza that was his home away from home, lol. Great view! Side note, those three roommates ALL married their girlfriends of that time, and still live in or around Ann Arbor. They took a group 30th anniversary trip to Hawaii together.

He bumbled through his undergrad, taking 32 credits of German to meet the aggressive language requirement of the Residential College. It turns out that if you have 32 credits of German at the start of your Junior year, and you have a strict military scholarship for four years with lots of technical electives required, you literally become a German major against your will. He was possibly the worst student to ever graduate fromthe German program, (apologies to my Professors, but my eyes were on Navy service).

In 1989, he graduated and headed off to the Navy, and his FIANCE (proposed on Valentine’s Day 1989) went off to Medical School.

From 1989-1996, he was on active duty. First 5 years were on his first ship, the USS CHOSIN, CG-65. This was PRECOM unit, meaning the crew was put together and trained while the ship was being completed in the shipyard. This meant he moved ALOT, and also he never had to be “the new guy” on a ship because EVERYONE was new. That crew was basically the best trained and most cohesive the ship would ever have, since they had ALL been together for two years. They commissoined the ship in Pascaguola, MS, and then sailed her through the Panama Canal, up to San Diego, then out to Hawaii, where she was homeported. He lived in Hawaii through 1994, deploying for the tail end of Operation Desert Storm into Southern Watch in 1992-3. He was promoted several timesand was basically forced (asked) to do a job (DCA) way above his paygrade, with great success. In 1994, he was one of the last Plankowners to leave the ship, and headed to Naval Training Center Great Lakes, to run the Gas Turbine Schools. This was as close to Detroit as the Navy could get him.

He got “home” in March ’94, and Eric and Jenni got married in June 1994 at the Henry Ford Estate. With five years to plan, the wedding was over the top. From the Estate to the most sought after church in Dearborn to the actual Model T Ford, it was amazing. Then, they moved in together out in Great Lakes until he transitioned out of Active Duty into the Reserves. Then, they moved to Bettendorf, Iowa to pursue her interest in Dermatology. Mason was born in Iowa, and they lived in a small condo in Bettendorf. He built up a computer consulting gig, as well as Navy reserve work in Chicago, and working on his first Masters part time.

In 1997, they moved back to Michigan since the Derm program was, well, not exactly ethically run (shall we say?). Jenni came back to the Family Practice residency she had put on hold, and completed it. They moved into a new condo in Southgate, MI, and Eric again began working in computer consulting with the Mac Group. Jenni started practice with her family in her Dad’s clinic. Eric applied to a PhD program at Michigan mostly on a whim because his Masters advisor said he thought Eric could be a good PhD student, and he wanted to at least say he tried. It was an elite dual PhD program at UM, with a 3% acceptance rate. No one was more surprised than Eric when he got in, and was given a 4 year Spencer Fellowship to boot! It ended up taking Eric over 10 years to complete his program, which was not ideal. But with two more children born, multiple parents passing or having major illness, and two mobilizations to the war on terror, he had some other things going on. With great support from his UM program and helpful gradnparents, we made it work!

During his Iraq deployment, which was no-notice 7 days before Christmas 2007, he ended up convincing an Iraqi Special Forces General to let him and his team build a Scout camp on the back of an ISF base nar his base. Creating and leading the Victory Base Council remains one of his greatest achivements.

Upon returning from Iraq, in rapid order he: demobilized, retired, defended his dissertation, built a house on the river on the edge of Ann Arbor, moved the family, got asked to pick up an Educational Psychology course as an emergency/favor and accidentally became a UM Faculty Member without actually applying or asking to be there. This led to a bonkers adventure over 15 years with him creating four different  classes, teaching seven different classes, contracting in four different areas (all of this is highly unusual), and creating and teaching the core course for the newest and most popular minor, Entrepreneurship. He was always beloved by his students, and not so beloved by administrators that had to deal with his shenanigans. Letting his students run wild with creativity definitely led to some great stories and even greater success!

From 2009 in his last year as a student, when he was an officer in a new group for Student Veterans, and 2010-2022 when he was an alumni/faculty mentor for the SVA, he helped build the largest, most vibrant, campus veteran community in the nation. With over 200 days of programming a year and reaching over 50% of the veterans on campus, it was again one of the greatest things he’d ever done. Part of his ethos was to accept anyone, no matter how damaged, to give them a place to feel part of a tribe. This ended up causing problems, as some seriously broken and malicious individuals, coupled with a very weak and biased administrator, caused the University to attack the group. When he put himself between the attackers and the group, things got really bad, (it’s a whole book, but you would not believe the stories, defamation, lies, perjury, false investigatoins, a fake show-trial through SOAR, defamation spread through the highest levels of the University).

And it was so bad that Eric had a widowmaker heart attack coming back from Florida spring break. He had been experiencing heart palpitations/heaving in chest ever since the abuse and attacks from the campus Veteran office began, but never knew how serious they were. He ignored the widowmaker and did not go to the hospital. This is normally 100% fatal. He did not die. He got home and struggled through three years of increasingly bad heart failure (assuming his worsening health was Covid something) until he again nearly died of acute heart failure in July 2023. The VA ER pumped almost 30 lbs of water out of his body in under 3 days! Then he did months of cardiac rehab but there was nothing they could really do, because he should be dead and his heart was destroyed, so with under 20% ejection fraction they sent him home and “we’ll see.” Most widowmaker survivors last 5 years, and he was already on year 5. Eventually, the drug cocktail and rehab got him a bit over 20%, he got a defibrillator implanted, and by mid-2024 his cardiologist said, “Well, Eric, I think you’d agree that when I discharged you a year ago neither of us thought you’d recover to this degree!” Eric then crashed his E-trike on his commute to campus, broke 6 ribs, and then got back on the bike and rode ot lecture to see his students’ presentations, and THEN wen to the ER. (so yeah, he’s a slow learner with a high pain tolerance, which is not great).

During the COVID adventures, as the world and his veteran community were dissolving he also helped Jenni reboot her medical practice into an MDVIP model, where she could care more intensively for smaller numbers of patients (from 3500 to 350). After ten years of “life getting in the way” they also completed a big backyard renovation and lots of projects to complete the inside of the house. 2024 was mostly about recovery and trying to fix all the things that broke from lack of attention during the 2020-2023 heart failure spiral as he became sicker and weaker every month. 2025 was more about “tidying up” and dropping many of his volunteer (over)commitments, and the University finally cancelled his epic Entrepreneurship class, which made the students so mad they made a website about it (free223.org). 2026 has been about shifting gears in a tactical way to ease into a phased retirement, with a goal of putting his “bonus time” to good use, as we just can’t know how much he has. 2026 the kids will all be graduated, and Navy retirement kicks in. Definitely more travel plans. More to come!!

BE NUMBER ONE

Dr. Fretz’s passion for excellence has been well served during his lifetime. He has been blessed to repeatedly lead or be part of teams that were acknowledged to be THE BEST at what they do, at a very high level.

He graduated from Thomas S. Woottoon HS in Montgomery County MD. This High School is ranked in the top 1% of High Schools in the nation, pretty much since the rankings started.

He has graduated three times from the University of Michigan. U of M has been ranked #1 in various catergories by various entities over the years, including, most recently, #1 public university by TIME Magazine.

Dr. Fretz commissioned (brought to life) the USS CHOSIN, CG-65 – at the time, the most advanced and dangerous warship in the entire world. While on her for his 5-year tour, including deploying for the first Gulf War, she won the prestigious “Battle E” marking her as “best in class” at what she does. Twice.

Join Meritorious Unit Award (left) and Navy Meritorious Unit Commendation (right) – both indications that the military unit was being exemplary.

The Navy Meritorious Unit Commendation was awarded to NTC Great Lakes during his tour 1994-96, and to US Navy Central Command, Bahrain during his tour 2005-6.

The JMUA was awarded to Multi-National Corps – Iraq for 08-09 during his tour with MNC-I attached to the 18th Airborne Corps.

Dr. Fretz got his dual PhD and served on the Executive Committee for years in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology, repeatedly ranked #1 in the nation.

In 2009, Dr. Fretz was an officer in one of the first chapters of the Student Veterans Association of America. He then became an alumni supporter and then faculty mentor. From 2010 to 2021, he invested over $100,000 and around 1,000 hours per year providing mentorship, training, and social events to build what was at one point the most robust student veteran community in the nation. Running over 200 days of programming a year, and reaching nearly 50% of the available student veterans on campus, the UM SVA was arguably the #1 veteran support entity on any US campus. The program was given a standing ovation when we presented it at SVA Natcon in 2017, and SVA President Jared Lyon gave Dr. Fretz a SVA coin and his personal coin.

Dr. Fretz was tasked as a new, low-level faculty member, to create the core course for the newest Minor at UM, Entrepreneurship. After launch, the course became incredibly popular, scaling from 60 to at one point almost 350, with 100 person waitlists. His course was one of the most talked about on campus and in 2019, the undergraduate program it was centered in was ranked #1 in the nation.