‘He’s So Cool’ After 38 Years Teaching At Shadle Park High School, Bill Via Is Retiring
Since Shadle Park High School opened its doors in 1957, one man has been as much a part of the school as the walls and the Highlanders.
He’s known as a relic, a grouch, Father Guido Sarducci. His real name is Bill Via. After 38 years at Shadle Park, he’s leaving.
“I’m not angry with anyone,” said Via, 61. “I still enjoy the kids. So why not go out when you’re winning?”
Via started at Shadle Park teaching Latin and language arts. This year, he directed the school’s Language Arts Department - the largest department in District 81 - and taught four French classes a day.
Via announced his retirement in May, despite attempts of several people to talk him out of it.
“We all want to cry,” said Donna Hamm, the school’s business manager.
“I can’t stand it,” said Claudia Halseth, an art teacher. “When I start thinking of him, I get a lump in my throat.”
“He’s like a relic here,” school office manager Anne Bruya said. “He’s like one of the walls. We’re really going to miss him.”
His life’s been predictable. Via and his wife of 43 years have lived in their white, three-story Hillyard home for almost 25 years.
Via’s rumbling 1965 Thunderbird is a familiar noise at the high school. He always stops by the school’s budget office to talk in the morning. He makes the coffee in the English staff room every day.
“I have a worldly rut-ual,” Via said.
His face has few wrinkles, spare the lines around his eyes. He’s solid. He looks like a former football player, a cooler on legs.
Put together, it works.
“When he was young, he would knock the socks off all the young girls and teachers,” said art teacher Halseth, who’s known Via for 28 years. “He still does. He’s an exquisite looking man - inside and out. Every year he has a following. He’s like the Pied Piper. He’s always got kids hanging around him.”
Just ask his students.
“He’s so cool,” said Jennifer Lerner, a 16-year-old sophomore. “He tells lots of stories. He even tells stories that embarrass himself, he doesn’t care. He knows we love him anyway.”
Like the story about the French conference, when Via made a speech. Everyone started laughing. Via didn’t know why. Only later, he found out that he made a pronunciation mistake.
“He said he was a stripper,” Lerner said.
Via also is something of an actor. He’s been doing the French verb dance for years and years - a hopping jig that teaches students to conjugate. He’s been doing a deadon imitation of Father Guido Sarducci from “Saturday Night Live” at small staff functions for years.
“I’ve seen him dressed in kilts, dancing around,” said Joyce Simpson, a student teacher for Via in 1967 and a French teacher at Shadle since 1980. “He’s played Santa Claus. I’ve just seen him in so many roles. He’s maybe the only teacher 90 percent of the kids know by name.”
Via has his own acting idols. The Bruce Willis of “Moonlighting” and the Dennis Franz of “NYPD Blue” those are Via’s type of guy.
Other teachers chipped in to buy Via a poster of Willis during the heyday of “Moonlighting.” It still hangs on the staff room’s wall. It’ll leave with Via. So will a brass eagle, the Madonna statue and a few books. Other items will probably stay, like the Dole, Chiquita and Del Monte banana stickers that Via has stuck on a bookshelf.
Via’s a teacher of generations, instructing many children of former students. This year, he even taught a grandchild of a former student.
“The old fart, the grouch, that’s what they call me now,” Via said. “I put on a good front. I guess I’m a pushover.”
Teacher Staci Vesneske’s mother was a student teacher for Via when she was pregnant with Staci.
“When you think of the literally thousands of people his single life has affected, it boggles the mind,” Vesneske said. “I don’t think you’ll find one person in Spokane who says, ‘I don’t like Bill Via.”’
Via always wanted to work and live in Spokane. He’s a product of the area. His parents met and married in Italy and moved first to Portland, then to Hillyard. His father worked on the Great Northern Railway and opened Via Bros. grocery with his brother.
He met his wife, Marilyn, in the third grade at St. Patrick’s School in Hillyard. Marilyn’s family moved away and moved back in Via’s junior year at Gonzaga High School, now Gonzaga Prep, then an all-boys school. They met again at a youth group. They married when Via was 19 and a student at Gonzaga University.
Via’s eyes water when he talks of the sacrifices his wife has made. She’s cared for five children and never worked outside the home.
Now, with retirement, they’re starting a life after teaching. Via hopes to travel around the country and spend a lot of time in his motor home on Priest Lake.
He also wants to travel to Italy for the first time and visit where his parents were born. His brother lives in Florence, where he’s a priest at a Catholic university.
“I’ve always enjoyed it, what I’ve done,” Via said. “But after 40 years, I know how dinosaurs feel. When you’re the last of a breed, you know.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Retirement dinner A special retirement dinner will be held for Bill Via at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Fort WrightMukogawa Institute. For more information, call Staci Vesneske at 353-4531. Vesneske is also collecting Via memorabilia for a special scrapbook.