By Mike Schnitzel
³She was a great baker,² said Albert Arnone, principal of Willow Avenue School, who grew up with Faso¹s son, Richard. ³I always looked forward to her pies at holiday time.²
The holidays were a time of mirth and merriment in the Faso home, and baked goods were never far from the minds of those who participated in the festivities. ³A holiday wasn¹t a holiday without the aromas and tastes of her homemade country pies,² Richard said. ³She was best known for her apple and rhubarb pies.²
Faso, who taught for 25 years at the William L. Buck School in Valley Stream District 24, died on Nov. 16 at age 82. ³She was a lifetime teacher here and a real professional,² said Jean Scarmozzino, District 24 secretary. ³She taught my three daughters when they were in the district.²
Teaching was stamped on Doris Faso¹s DNA. Her grandmother taught school in Pennsylvania, where Faso grew up, and Richard teaches sixth grade at Willow Road School. Doris¹s husband, Bill, began substituting at Valley Stream South High School after his retirement in the 1980s. ³When I first put my name up on the board, students began asking if I knew Doris Faso,² Bill recalled. ³Then they started giving me letters to give back to her. She really had an effect on her students.²
Her style was a combination of strength mixed with a gentleness that could smooth even the harshest opinion into a palatable positive. ³She gave you a clear vision of how good life could be,² said Richard, reminiscing about how his mother inspired him to become a teacher.
In 1983, Richard was a wet-behind-the-ears first-year teacher at Willow Road. Continuing a tradition begun decades earlier, Doris gave her son a present to bolster his confidence before he set foot in the school. ³Her grandmother, who taught at a school in Pennsylvania beginning in 1888, had to ring the school bell every day before class started,² Richard said. ³My grandmother gave my mother that bell when she started her teaching career in 1944. When I started at Willow Road, my mother gave me that school bell. She had had all of our names engraved on it.²
Born on March 16, 1924, in Susquehanna, Pa., Faso graduated from Mansfield State Teachers College before getting a master¹s in education from Adelphi University. She began her teaching career at an elementary school in Johnson City, N.Y., a suburb of Binghamton, before coming to William L. Buck in 1959. ³She was really a master teacher,² said Bill. ³She really knew how to get through to children.²
They married in 1948, and they moved to Valley Stream in 1952, raising two children in the community. Besides cooking, in her spare time Faso enjoyed knitting and sewing as well as the company of friends and family. ³She was such a remarkable person,² Bill said. ³It¹s hard to talk about her.²
³She was like a second mother to me,² Arnone said. ³She was very, very sweet and highly respected by her peers.²
In addition to her husband and son, Faso is survived by another son, Frank; two brothers, Stuart and William Benson; two sisters, Jean Schuette and Maxine Blevins; and grandchildren Emily, Jason, Jillian, Thomas and William.
Faso was waked at O¹Brien-Sheipe Funeral Home in Elmont on Nov. 22, where the funeral service was held later that evening. She was interred in North Jackson Cemetery in North Jackson, Pa., on Nov. 23.
