If anyone ever called the Saxon Inn looking for Ralph McClain, he was never there.

McClain figured anyone who didn’t call him “Fritz” didn’t know him, said his daughter, Michelle Gutonski.

“A lot of people never knew my dad’s first name,” Gutonski said. “Everybody called him Fritz.”

Ralph L. “Fritz” McClain, of Brackenridge, died Monday, Feb. 15, 2021 at Allegheny Valley Hospital in Harrison after a lengthy illness. He was 80.

McClain lived most of his life in Brackenridge and Harrison, where he owned and operated the Saxon Inn with his family for 45 years until they sold it in February 2019.

“He was very genuine at heart. He just loved being at the restaurant and the bar,” said Gutonski, 37, of Harrison and the youngest of his three daughters. “He loved people so much. He loved to make people laugh.”

Gutonski said her father had a saying or motto he tried to live by. “He’d say, ‘I trust everyone,’ then with a point of the finger say, ‘Until they give me a reason not to.’”

McClain grew up in the New Kensington area and attended Valley High School. He went to work straight out of school, first managing a drive-in movie theater, and later working as a butcher, among other jobs.

He bought the Saxon on Saxonburg Road after working at the Commercial Hotel, which Gutonski said he managed for several years in Tarentum.

Gutonski, who grew up working at the Saxon, said her father wanted his own business. He rebuilt the Saxon after it was badly damaged by fire only a few years into his ownership.

“My dad is easily the hardest working man I know,” she said. “At the Saxon, in his prime, he was the owner, manager, bartender, maintenance man, groundskeeper. And it wouldn’t be crazy to find him on the grill cooking in the kitchen. He took pride in that.”

The Saxon may have looked like a dive from the outside, but Gutonski said it was a really nice place — the kind of bar where everybody knows your name.

“He always kept it clean. His pride was for it to be clean and welcoming,” she said. “He wanted a lady and her friend to be able to come to the bar and be comfortable. He wanted it to be an environment where a family could come in. We didn’t have a lot of trouble because we didn’t put up with it.”

McClain was a life member of Citizens Hose alongside his lifelong friend, former Harrison Commissioner George Conroy. In addition to being a firefighter and paramedic, Conroy said McClain, a scuba diver, was among the fire company’s first dive team members.

Conroy, 83, said he knew McClain when they were boys.

“I used to kid him because he was the only kid in the neighborhood who had a Schwinn bike, and that was an expensive bike in the day,” he said.

McClain was an avid Steelers fan. He was at Three Rivers Stadium for the Immaculate Reception in 1972. He and Conroy both had season tickets for many years, and attended the team’s first Super Bowl appearance together in New Orleans in 1975.

“It was the first time Fritz had ever flown, and he was very nervous,” Conroy said.

Conroy said McClain once owned a pickup, for which he had a snow plow with a large Steelers emblem on it. There was a big snowstorm right after he got it, and Conroy said he came home from work to find the front of his house all plowed out.

“Here it was Fritz that did it. He never told me, nothing. He just came over and did it,” Conroy said.

“You get a lot of people you think are friends who are just acquaintances,” he said. “If you have a few good friends, you are fortunate. Fritz was one of mine.”

In addition to Gutonski, McClain is survived by his wife of 40 years, Kathy McClain; daughters Lisa Hall of Wampum and Josie McClain of Harrison; five grandchildren; and siblings Jerry McClain, Karen and Linda Ostroski, Connie Matsik and Judy Ruemmler.

McClain’s visitation and services were held privately on Wednesday at Duster Funeral Home in Tarentum.

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