When Leon Spivack first arrived at Boston University, the campus was located on Boylston Street, rent was three dollars a month, and the football team wore leather helmets. Spivack (Questrom’38, SED’40) studied business administration, made the dean’s list three years in a row, and earned a place in Beta Gamma Sigma, a national honor society for business. He excelled in the classroom at what was then the College of Business Administration (now renamed the Questrom School of Business)—but his focus was on the field.

“I was there to play football, to provide a good team, and most important, to win,” says Spivack, who was the quarterback and captain in 1937, when the Terriers defeated Boston College for the first time in 42 years. The following season, he was named Athlete of the Year, and was inducted into the BU Athletics Hall of Fame in 1965. To this day, he remembers the names and positions of his teammates, says his daughter Carol Weinshel (CAS’70).

Spivack’s love of the game continued long after graduation; he and his wife, Sylvia, followed the football team for 20 years. “My parents attended every game, away and home; rain, snow, or shine,” Weinshel says. “They were more reliable than the mailman. They adopted the team.”

After BU, Spivack graduated from the Army Air Corps Officer Candidate School (OCS) as a second lieutenant—a “90-day wonder,” as OCS grads were nicknamed at the time—and continued there as a physical training instructor. He later worked with his father in the family’s wholesale meat business in Bridgeport, Conn. He married Sylvia on the only day he had off from work: July 4, 1946. They had three daughters, all of whom became Terriers like their father.

Spivack retired from the wholesale meat business in 1988, but has not slowed down. In his 80s, he climbed Mount Washington, and for years worked the chain markers at the football games until the final home game, in 1997. He now audits classes in multiple subjects at Fairfield University and holds season tickets for the college’s basketball games, as well as for the Bridgeport Bluefish, a professional baseball team in the Atlantic League.

Spivack celebrated his 100th birthday on February 6, 2015, followed by a party on Valentine’s Day in Trumbull, Conn., with 125 friends and relatives, including Weinshel and her sisters, Marjorie Renken (CAS’74) and Susan L. Spivack (SED’72), and his grandsons Matthew R. Weinshel (CAS’95), a US Army lieutenant colonel, Randy M. Weinshel (CAS’97), a pediatric dentist, and Seth Weinshel, who graduated from George Washington University.