Valley Stream's Bill Paraszczuk, who worked at Newsday for 45 years, dies

Across decades and parts of two millennia, if you got your Newsday home-delivered you probably had Bill Paraszczuk to thank.

The Valley Stream resident, who died of heart failure June 9 at NYU Langone’s Tisch Hospital in Manhattan at 71, had joined the newspaper in 1978 and rose to managerial positions in circulation and distribution before retiring in August 2023. He became so proficient and trusted that he eventually made his own hours, longtime friend and fellow former Newsday staffer Ron Rothstein said.

But those hours were long, noted Rothstein, now of Portland, Oregon.

“He had to go to staff meetings and stuff like that, but if he said to his boss, ‘Listen, I'm going to leave early to go to my son's baseball game,’ there was not a chance the boss would say, ‘No, Bill, you can't do that,’ because the guy's working 60, 70 hours a week," Rothstein said. "Bill worked till the job got done.”

He put in the hours with his family as well — including times when those baseball games would be an all-star event in Cooperstown.

“That’s four or five hours north” of Paraszczuk’s Melville workplace, Rothstein said. “And Bill would leave work, drive up to Cooperstown so that he could watch his son play and then drive back to work.”

Paraszczuk's wife, registered nurse and Molloy University professor of nursing Ann Marie Matarazzo Paraszczuk, said Bill was a dedicated father.  

“He did a lot of outdoor things with the kids,” said his wife, whom Paraszczuk married in 1981. “He was involved with the Boy Scouts, and even after our youngest son finished through the troop, he was still helping out with the Scouts in Valley Stream. And he did Little League coaching when he had time.”

With his wife, he would fish and kayak; on his own or with friends, he hunted deer, turkey and small game when upstate at the family’s Catskills vacation home. Deer heads were taken for taxidermy and much venison went to friends. He was a Mets and Jets fan who liked good whisky, cigars, historical fiction and Labrador retrievers.

Of Ukrainian background, William Gary Paraszczuk was born Sept. 26, 1954, in Washington, D.C., the younger of two sons of John Paraszczuk, a mechanic and later service-station owner who had fought in World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, and Julia Ellen Orange Paraszczuk, an administrative assistant for the federal government in Washington. The family soon afterward moved to Mineola, where Julia worked for the Nassau County court system.

A 1972 Mineola High School graduate, Bill Paraszczuk earned an associate degree from Nassau Community College. He continued on to SUNY Oneonta, then transferred to SUNY Old Westbury to be closer to family when his mother took ill; she died in 1976 at age 50. Paraszczuk graduated with a business degree in 1977.

The following year he began his Newsday circulation and distribution career. In various positions through the decades, “Praz,” as he was nicknamed, managed delivery drivers with routes both on Long Island and in New York City, and helped to boost circulation.

Rothstein worked under him for about a decade through 1995.

“It started out as a boss relationship and turned into a lifelong friendship,” he said. “I'm his youngest son's godfather and he's my son's godfather.”

And despite differing views on some significant issues, “We haven't had an argument in 40 years,” Rothstein said. “I think the secret to a friendship like that is to trust that that person will be there for you. I can give you a bunch of examples,” including the night Paraszczuk drove out from Valley Stream to the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge when Rothstein became stranded with an overheated radiator.

In addition to his wife, Paraszczuk is survived by sons Joe, of Stamford, and Billy, of Chatham, New Jersey; daughter Nicole Paraszczuk, of Danbury, Connecticut; a brother, Jeff, of East Northport; 10 nieces and nephews; and six grandnieces and grandnephews.

Visitation was held June 14 at Lieber Funeral Home in Valley Stream. Following a Roman Catholic Mass at that village’s Holy Name of Mary Church the next day, he was buried at St. Charles / Resurrection Cemeteries in Farmingdale.