By MARTHA JACOVIDES
A funeral mass will be celebrated this Saturday, Dec. 1, at 9 a.m. at Blessed Sacrament Church on North Central Avenue.
Bill Puka was born in Frackville, PA, one of 14 children whose father was a coal miner. As a young man, he came to New York City to look for work. He eventually founded Puka Fuel Corp., a one-man operation that delivered oil and serviced boilers, headquartered in Valley Stream.
He met the former Mary Trotta of Brooklyn and married her in 1943, settling in the west end of the village in 1954. Here, their one child, William J. Puka, was born and raised.
Village activist
The first village mayor to get Bill Puka's attention was W Tom Ward, who came to office in 1970 when Puka began exhibiting habits that would last a lifetime. He spent hours in village hall, searching budget lines and work records for any hint of what he might see as mismanagement of the taxpayers' money.
"Willie set himself up as the village watchdog," Mary said on Monday, using her pet name for him. "At first, I didn't know what he was doing. He would go to a meeting and then I would read about it in the newspaper. He aggravated them all."
Puka insisted on following to the letter the code book of New York State village law, and often approached the microphone at village board meetings with a yellow legal pad of several scribbled pages. From his notes, he would accuse the mayor and trustees of not running public business and the public purse properly.
After Puka retired from business he had an advantage over the village's elected servants - he could devote full time to village hall; mayors and trustees serve part time.
In later years, Puka suffered a stroke. Some village workers began to feel menaced when he waved his cane and on a few occasions, police were called to village hall to quiet things down.
Village officials in Mayor Ralph Greco's time installed a wrought iron gate across an inner hallway to keep him away from the workers. Fascinated bystanders were part of the scene when the police came to escort a recalcitrant and protesting Puka out of the building. The gate was removed about a year ago. "There's no need for it now," said Village Clerk Vincent Ang.
Many who knew him recall, however, that he was a man of great good humor and decency. "When I had the pet store, Bill would come in to help me," said Ang, owner of a Rockaway Avenue business in the '70s.
"He was a good friend, if he was your friend," Ang said.
"He took a liking to our monkey, Peanuts. Bill would go to Mitchell's [restaurant] every noontime, buy half a cream cheese and jelly sandwich, and bring it across the street to feed the monkey. We used to call him 'Uncle Willie' and teased him that he was a monkey's uncle."
Puka ran for trustee in 1984 with Ang's help. "He lost, but he got a thousand votes," Ang recalled.
When his successful opponents arrived for their first board meeting after that election, they found black balloons tied to the end of every pew in village hall and Puka laughing in the back.
"His reputation was as the original 'freedom of information' man," Ang continued. "He was always in village hall getting papers copied, talking to the women who worked behind the desks."
Puka also visited the village garage, counting the trucks and the repairs and expenses, to the consternation of workers there.
"Before that first stroke, there was a lightheartedness about the serious things he did," Ang said. "But after that stroke, he became harsh and harder to deal with."
Former Mayor John DeGrace remembers the fun. "He did things just to create humor; to him it was a game," DeGrace said this week. "But he was a person who spoke on behalf of all those residents who, for whatever reason, did not want to lodge a complaint. Bill was always up to the task. He was an institution in the village. He tried to make a difference, and he did."
Said Bill Freda, who some might say has taken the mantle of gadfly to his own shoulders, "Bill introduced me to New York State Village Law - how a person can just buy a copy and use it to learn the law for themselves.
"Bill was always more well acquainted with the issues than the board was. His research was solid."
Freda recalled that during the time of Mayor George Donley, many members of the local Elks Lodge were appointed to positions within
the administration. "I saw Bill Puka at village hall one day, and asked him his business. 'I'm here to hunt Elk,' he told me."
Dominick Minerva, popular young mayor
in the '70s, was not spared but bears no grudges. "Mine is an affectionate memory of a very unique personality," he said this week.
"There may be no specific list of accomplishments but if you think about it, someone on the outside, lobbying a municipality, very often does not have that kind of a list of achievements.
"They serve as a reminder to government officials that their actions are subject to review by the people they serve."
Besides his wife, and son, a professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bill Puka leaves a granddaughter, Emma, 12; a grandson, Jesse, 6; and daughter in law, Judy Beals. His remains were cremated.
