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In Memory: Life, According To Bill

by Barbara Sueko McGuire

Tuesday December 30, 2008

I assumed Bill Kuderna was part of an East Coast aristocratic lineage just minutes after our first encounter. It wasn’t because he maintained a snobbish air of entitlement, and it certainly wasn’t because he was wearing any noticeable brand of WASP elitism on his sleeve. It had nothing to do with anything as obvious as that. Rather, it was because I couldn’t come up with a better reason for why he’d willing choose to surround himself with gold-lamé-spandex-wearing, red-mohawk-sporting, Gender-Fuck-Symposium-hosting college students. Even though he’s a young seventy eight, as Sarah Lawrence College’s gatekeeper, Bill can’t help but stick out like a nun at a Britney Spear’s concert. Thus, I imagined he must be a distant Lawrence descendant and out of genuine familial responsibility loyally stood guard and vigilantly watched over the school his forbearers had founded. I figured this must be more than just a job, because really, given the six-generation gap, why else would he be there?
Despite a higher calling seeming like the only logical response to this question, Bill is not actually a blood relation of the Lawrences. He also doesn’t work any security detail whatsoever, not that there are every any such issues on campus. But, as gatekeeper of this small liberal arts university (that, to the inexperienced eye, is nearly indiscernible from the wealthy homes in which it is nestled), after nineteen years of service, he is still very much the eyes and ears of the school. And although he strikes a stark contrast when compared to the college’s population, if anything, on a visual basis alone, Bill blends in better with his Bronxville, New York, surroundings than the students do.
As far as on-the-job responsibilities go, Bill keeps watch over the school’s main entrance, located at the apex of Mead Way and demarcated with a dark-green gothic wrought-iron gate. For the most part, he spends his days helping direct traffic and telling visitors where to park—that’s about it. “I didn’t want to sit around the house doing nothin’,” Bill explains, finally shedding some light on the mystery. “So it’s a good job for a retired person.” I couldn’t agree with his logic more. Why sit around the house doing nothing when you can sit around a college doing nothing and get paid for it? I salivate just thinking about all the books I’d be able to read. But Bill’s not interested in the written word. “Naw, I don’t read,” he says. “I just like to people watch.”
Bill’s got a thick Yonkers accent (which sounds to my West-Coast ears like an Italian mob boss infused with a seafaring sailor), and coupled with his five-foot-five gentlemanly frame and two perfect rows of bright-white teeth and matching head of hair, perhaps you can understand how my imaginative ball got carried away when I first met him. Having been born and raised in Los Angeles, the only accent I’ve ever been familiar with is the Valley girl, and I know first-hand that she isn’t all that interesting. Bill, however, is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. Bill’s campus post is officially known as the Westlands Gate House, “house” being a questionable word choice given that it’s nothing more than an upright wooden shack that features seating for only a party of one. As a member of the graduate student body, although I’m only on campus a few times a week, I always make sure to pause by the outhouse to say hi. Bill has an almost magical-like soothing effect on my ambitious, type-A tendencies. I think he likes me—he at least smiles every time I show up and he always says my first name in greeting, “Hi Barbara.” And although he isn’t much of a talker—something he’ll tell you right off the bat—I’ve discovered that if you listen carefully, Bill can teach you a lot about life and the pursuit thereof. Here, then, after nearly eighty years on this planet, are the five most important things Bill’s learned about how to live the good life:

It’s the way we was brought up. You stay with the family. Bill was born in Pennsylvania, and his family moved to Yonkers, New York, when he was nine years old. His father worked in the coal mines in Pennsylvania and after the move picked up work in a carpet factory. Eventually he landed a permanent job with the county, working on bridges. He stayed with the county until his retirement.
Bill considers Yonkers the only home he’s ever known. Although he lived in Germany for two years, he doesn’t count that because it wasn’t by choice—it’s just the place he was stationed after being drafted into the infantry during the Korean War. He doesn’t remember if he was twenty or twenty-one years old when he was drafted, but he does remember that while in Germany they would sleep outside three weeks out of the month. “It was like camping,” he says. Bill seems to have really enjoyed his time there. Luckily for him, by the time he was completely trained, the war was over, so he never saw any combat action. When I ask Bill if he was upset that he got drafted, he shrugs noncommittally. “Not really, because everybody was gettin’ drafted,” he says. “I think that’s what they need now. Everyone takes too much for granted, that’s right.” His rather hardliner stance surprises me because Bill seems like a laid-back, go-with-the-flow kind of guy. In fact, that’s what drew me to him. Impulsively I ask him what he thinks about the war in Iraq. “I think they’re staying there too long, and I don’t know the reason why,” he says. After Bill finished his stint with the army, he landed right back in Yonkers with his family. At a Catholic Youth Organization dance he attended soon after returning, he met Agnes, his wife of the past fifty-one years. “We were married after about six months,” he tells me. Since six months doesn’t seem like nearly enough time to determine whether or not a person you’re dating is “The One,” I ask him how he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. With a sheepish smile he tells me, “Awww, back then you just knew right away.”
When Bill talks about his life, you get the impression that deciding which path was the right one to take was always as simple choice. I can’t help but feel envious of his self-assured nature and hope some of it will rub off on me. As far as I’m concerned—and at least everyone I know—any decision, nonetheless life-changing ones, require detailed pro and con lists, and even then, what move to make is still often unclear.
The family Bill created with Agnes—which consists of one grown son, who works as a civilian for the army, and one grown daughter, who is a stay-at-home mom—is the accomplishment he’s most proud of. That, and his house. “I worked for a house and we got a house,” he says. “In 1977 I bought the house.” But according to Bill, since then, the neighborhood’s drastically changed—for the worse. “Before, you used to know everybody on the street. Now, people’s changing in and out—it’s all changed,” he says. “I don’t know. I liked it better before when you knew everybody. Now, you don’t know nothin’ about your neighbors. You don’t know nothin’.”

I just work and live day to day, that’s all. Bill had his first job when he was fourteen years old, caddying on a golf course. “You always hadda work,” he says. “I know that. We all hadda work—the whole family hadda work.” He earned sixty-five cents for nine holes and a dollar thirty for the full course. “Today, I don’t know what they get,” he says. “They’re probably gettin’ fifty, sixty dollars per round.” Bill makes it clear that if it was at all physically possible, he’d be right out there on the course, lugging around somebody’s clubs. Before he was drafted into the army, Bill followed in his father’s footsteps at the carpet factory. Then, after his two years of duty were up, he landed a job with the United States Postal Service. It wasn’t his dream career, and delivering mail wasn’t what he’d had his heart set on as a child. “I just thought it was a good secure job,” he says. Again, for Bill, upon reaching yet another fork on the road, choosing which path to follow was easy—this time it was whatever would provide best for his family. When I ask him why he didn’t enroll in college under the G.I. Bill, he makes it clear that his Catholic school education was enough learning for him. “I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t into school,” he says. “You know how the nuns are, they teach ya—you get whacked.” Bill spent thirty years with the post office and retired from his position as a letter carrier in 1988. Awed by the fact that he had just one job for more years than I’ve lived, I try to find out what it was about the U.S. Postal Service that made it such a great fit for him. Since graduating from college nearly five years ago, I’ve already test driven three different careers and none of them were the right ride. But this isn’t something Bill seems to have ever considered—what kept him there for three decades. “I don’t know,” he says. “I didn’t have no college education, so it was a good job. I hadda lot of friends there.”
After thirty years as a mail carrier, Bill wasn’t ready to stop working, but he was ready to stop working for the postal service. Once more, change had altered the playing field for the worse. “Before, you do your job and they let you alone,” he says. “Now, they follow you around and everything. I heard they even scan letters at certain spots to see where you are—that’s what I heard. The job was changing. Everybody’s afraid of the person above ‘em, you know?” Bill relaxed for a grand total of eight months before taking charge of Sarah Lawrence’s main gate. The decision-making process underlying accepting this position didn’t differ from any of the other important moments in his life—it was a simple and obvious choice. “I met this here fella that worked here and he told me to come here because a fella was leaving,” he says. “So I came here and I liked it here, and I’ve been here for nineteen years now.”

It’s changing, all things change. From his Yonker’s neighborhood to his former job at the post office, Bill has experienced a lot of change, and though accepting of it, he doesn’t necessarily seem to be a big fan of the axiom. But that doesn’t apply to his work as Sarah Lawrence College’s gatekeeper, where he’s enacted what he considers positive improvements. “Before it used to be crazy,” he says. “There was no control with people going inside. But now, you see, it’s nice and quiet.”
Bill’s referring to the parking situation on campus. Sarah Lawrence isn’t exactly overflowing with extra spaces, and stack parking is regularly engaged in the small lot across the street from his post. When I ask Bill if he laid down the law and regulated on visitors, he doesn’t catch the sarcasm. Or perhaps, he does. “I only work from eight to one, so I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what goes on at night.” It’s easy to see that Bill loves being able to tell visitors where to park. It’s not out of some Napoleon Syndrome-like need to boss others around, but rather because it allows him to meet different kinds of people. After inquiring as to who the most interesting person he’s met is, Bill gives me a shrug and a “not really” before getting star struck and admitting that it’s Paul Newman and his wife. “Their daughter went to this school and they came here,” he says, grinning. “They were nice people. They were friendly, they talk witcha’. They’re just regular people—they live life the same way.”
Bill also tells me about how he’s been witness to positive changes within the Sarah Lawrence student body itself, though admittedly he had no direct influence upon that. “I think they’re more calmer now,” he says. “In the early 90s, they used to always protest. There were signs all over the place protesting anything and everything. Like once, they even took over Westlands [the main administrative building] with their protesting.”
Somewhat astonished that the small Sarah Lawrence population (which currently scales in at about 1,300) could even mobilize a large enough group to stage a sit in, I probe Bill for further details about this demonstration. “I don’t know what it was about, I was over here,” he says, chuckling. “They all went inside the building, like on the steps and everything, and they wouldn’t leave. I just stayed down here.” As far as people-watching moments on campus go, I’d say that this protest was a highlight for Bill.
The drastic age difference and protesting whims not withstanding, I imagine Sarah Lawrence’s eclectic students must seem strange to Bill, especially taking into consideration the Catholic school education he received and traditional environment he grew up in. So I ask him for his general impression of the undergraduates. He seems reticent to give me an opinion, as if he doesn’t want to offend anyone. “To me, it seems like there are more girls here now than usual,” is all he’ll say.
But I’ve spent enough time with Bill to know that he isn’t just beating around the bush. He genuinely seems to abstain from passing judgment. When a woman walks by one day, for instance, dressed in bright blue leggings, black lycra shorts and a Nordic-inspired thick wool sweater with a pastel heart motif, I do a double take and raise my eyebrows. It looks as if she got dressed in a thrift store, in the dark. Noticing my reaction and incorrectly assuming I was wondering the same thing as him the first time he saw her, he offers, “You know, for the longest time I didn’t know if she was a woman or a man.”
I ask Bill whether he’s friends with any Sarah Lawrence students and his response isn’t what I expected considering the inescapable urge I felt to befriend him. “Nah, not really, nah,” he says. I tell him I’m surprised, and after a long pause during which it seems as if he’s looking for an answer he thinks I want to hear he says, “Just one girl sent me, after she graduated three years ago, she started to send me a coupla cards. She was on vacation in Europe, that’s all. She lives in Colorado or some place now.”
Given that Bill doesn’t even seem to know her name, I assume he’s ok with not having any seventeen- to twenty-two-year-old pals. “They’re different, that’s all,” he says, as if he’s trying to find an excuse for their anti-social behavior. “In their own way, they’re ok. They’re all friendly, nice—they all say hello and everything.” Later on in the conversation he makes it clear that while he wouldn’t mind a more elaborate exchange, a simple hello is really enough. “I tell you, I’m not much of a talker, but I’m a good listener. Most of the time, it’s always in one ear and out the other. I just let ‘em talk about anything.”

Naw, I wouldn’t change anything. I’m satisfied with everything—I’m okay. Bill doesn’t believe in regret. He’s not the type to ever say this outright, but I can tell. Sure, at seventy eight, he’s got the clarity of hindsight, but regardless, the way he talks about his life makes it seem as if he always knew how, when and where to open and close each chapter. Or, at least he knows better than to look back. Maybe that’s just one of many reasons his life seems so fluid and contiguous. Though I know it’s impossible, I feel as if Bill existed before the word stress—it certainly doesn’t seem as if it’s a part of his current vocabulary. His contentment is impressive to me, as someone whose life is filled with false starts, lots of stops and even some rewinding. I want to be like Bill when I unofficially retire. It’s as if he’s this bodhisattva, with an innate Zen-like nature that can calm my grad-student nerves in the span of just a fifteen-minute off-the-cuff conversation. Another important reason behind Bill’s satisfaction with his life is his ability to change with the changes. He’s not one to ignore the developments that are taking place in the world around him. Consider, for example, the brand-new GPS navigation system he recently splurged on. He was taking a break from people watching to read the instruction manual cover to cover when I stopped by one day. Because Bill only lives ten minutes from the Sarah Lawrence campus and because he himself told me that he only ventures into New York City once, at most twice, a year, I wasn’t exactly sure why he needed up-to-the-minute satellite-generated directions. “Agnes is flyin’ down to Florida for the day with her sister—I dunno why—so I’m lettin’ her take this for the rental car,” he tells me, as if reading my thoughts.
I later learn that Agnes was traveling to Florida to visit her brother, who is sick, but recovering. “He’ll be alright, he’ll get better, but my wife, she’s sick and she’s not gonna get better. She has Alzheimer’s,” he tells me, before changing the subject to the annoying squirrels who gnaw at the bottom of his shack’s door.
Once a year, Bill and his wife go down to Florida together as well. They stay in a time-share they have in Kissimmee, a.k.a. the home of the Walt Disney World Resort. They also have an annual time-share in Las Vegas, Nevada, a.k.a. the Entertainment Capital of the World, a.k.a. Sin City. Thinking about how much my 80-year-old grandfather likes playing the slots, I ask Bill if he’s ever won big. “We don’t gamble much,” he says. “It’s a resort, so we don’t go to the casinos too much, we just visit ‘em.” For almost-octogenarians, Bill and Agnes are quite the jetsetters. When Bill tells me they’ve been on more than twenty cruises, I can’t help but feel a little jealous. Other than the Queen Mary, I haven’t even been on a cruise liner. They’ve been to Alaska (his favorite), Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (to visit the town his father grew up in), Austria, the Panama Canal, Aruba and Puerto Rico, just to name a few destinations. “We go on a cruise every year,” he says. “The last one we went on, we left from Bayonne and went to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, San Juan and St. Thomas.”
I have to give Bill some respect—not just any senior citizen, scratch that, not just anyone, would travel to Haiti these days. Bill makes it clear that nothing gets in his way when it comes to travel—not even 9/11. He and Agnes had a cruise to the Mediterranean scheduled for just a few days following the attacks, and they were ready to go. New York airports, however, weren’t yet up and running. “We lost all our money,” he says, clearly still annoyed. “They said if the terrorist attack was where we were going it would’ve been different.”
When I ask Bill what he does for fun in between his annually scheduled vacations, he informs me that he regularly makes pilgrimages to Pennsylvania with the priest of his Parrish, who is a good friend. He explains that these are typically one-day affairs with people from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania gathering together to enjoy each other’s company and attend mass. Bill then suddenly changes directions, and begins telling me about how he and Agnes went into the City this week. “We went to a church down there because I know this priest,” he says. “He told us to come because they were honoring Chris Farley—he used to be on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ The whole crew from ‘Saturday Night Live’ was there, so we saw all of ‘em.”
Who would’ve thought, Bill’s an SNL fan.

I’ve seen plenty. Bill’s friend who helped him acquire the position of gatekeeper nineteen years ago recently passed away. He was eighty-three years old and had shared shifts with Bill up until six months before his death. Bill says he doesn’t think he’ll stay around as long as his friend, but, after all he’s seen, he knows and is open to the fact that things may change. “Maybe a coupla more years, that’s all,” he says. “That’s the plan now, I don’t know when the time comes.”