Walter Perras, ex-Newsday printer, has died

It was a gentle act offered years ago, amid the biting swarms of a predawn Fire Island morning.

But that kindness of Walter J. Perras, a former Newsday printer who died at home July 6 of congestive heart failure, still brings a smile to his daughter Pam's face.

Perras, 94, who lived in Massapequa Park until he moved to Stoneham, Mass., five years ago, loved to fish Long Island's beaches.

He had taken his daughter surf casting on Fire Island "with mosquitoes and tiny flies feasting on us" when she was perhaps 12, Pam Perras remembers.

Perras had already caught several fish and was tugging at another when he noticed that she had yet to land one. Perras suggested that his daughter take the rod for herself.

"He offered to let me pull it in and I stubbornly, but good naturedly, refused, telling him I was certain I'd catch my own any minute," recalled Pam Perras, of Wakefield, Mass. "I never did, but it became one of my fondest memories of braving the early morning elements with my dad."

Walter Perras grew up in Lowell, Mass, where he became the first in his family to graduate from high school.

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He was a machinist in a textile mill when he was drafted into the Army 10 months before Pearl Harbor, and was sent to patrol Long Island's beaches.

While he was here, Dorothy Koshefsky, then 13, met Perras at a Foresters of America dance she attended with her mother, and began sending him pen pal letters.

Perras was sent to Europe in 1944, where he served with Company L, 101st Infantry Regiment, 26th Infantry "Yankee" Division.

He fought in the Loraine Campaign and the Battle of the Bulge, and earned a battlefield commission as second lieutenant. On Dec. 30, 1944, he earned a Bronze Star for laying land mines under fire that stopped an armored advance at Nothum, Luxembourg.

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The pen pal letters kept coming. He had one in his pocket, he later told his wife, when he was briefly captured by -- and quickly freed from -- German soldiers.

He received an honorable discharge in 1945. He married Koshefsky three years later. The couple settled in Massapequa Park, where they raised five children.

Perras, an avid bowler, archer and flier of model airplanes, retired from Newsday in 1982.

In addition to his wife and daughter, survivors include daughters Tracy Boies of Pueblo, Colo., and Pat Kowalczyk, of Winchester, Mass.; and a son, John Perras, of Annapolis, Md.

Burial was at Massachusetts National Cemetery, in Bourne.