kellyjasper.com

This is a story I really enjoyed reporting last week, especially amid all the normally routine graduation coverage. Such an interesting fellow. I’ll be out of the newsroom for the week and a half. I’m flying to Amsterdam with a few folks from my church, where we’ll be volunteering for the week and connecting with groups over there. A few days with my family in Enschede and I’ll be back by the end of the month.

Teacher Retiring After Commuting From Vegas Each Week

By Kelly Jasper

WEYERS CAVE ¾ Walter Pruchnic’s travels through a late spring snow shower were hairier than most of his other commutes to his part-time job at Blue Ridge Community College.

The professor eventually made it to campus, but he arrived to an empty classroom. Pruchnic, it seems, was the only one who hadn’t heard the radio broadcasts or seen the television listings announcing BRCC’s snow day.

Why, after all, would a news station in Nevada report on closings in the Shenandoah Valley?

Pruchnic, you see, lives in Las Vegas. But he teaches here, hopping a plane for a weekly, roundtrip commute of more than 5,400 miles.

Now 69 years old, Pruchnic is retiring from Blue Ridge, where he’s taught statistics and accounting for 36 years.

He taught full time for the first 33 years. Back then, Pruchnic says, he drove a few minutes to class, “like normal people do.”

But, when he tried to retire two semesters ago, friends suggested he commute instead. “I thought about it and said, ‘You know, that’s not a bad idea,’” Pruchnic said.

So now, every Sunday night he boards a plane in Vegas, takes the red-eye flight of about five hours to Washington, D.C., and drives to a friend’s home in Verona, about 150 miles away. He showers, puts on a dress shirt and tie — in 36 years of teaching, he’s never once walked into a classroom without a dress shirt and tie — and goes to class.

Pruchnic teaches on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and sometimes Thursday before hopping a flight back home. The jet lag makes it tough.

“When you do it every week, though, you don’t know if you’re jet-lagged or what-lagged,” Pruchnic says. “We always have a great class anyhow.”

In two semesters, he’s spent so much time traveling that he’s only actually been in Virginia for four weeks of the year.

And yet, not once, Pruchnic says, has an airline ever lost his bag.

Why Commute?

It seems crazy, he knows. But Pruchnic’s got a certain commitment to his students and this community that’s hard to break.

When students ask him why he does it, he answers, “Because you people are important to me.”

Pruchnic sat in his office on campus Friday, a makeshift workspace where he finalized grades and responded to appreciative e-mails from students.

Graduation’s today and Pruchnic was looking forward to the ceremony.

He’s been to more than 30 commencements since he first started teaching at Blue Ridge in a classroom just down the hall from his office. Coincidentally, Pruchnic also taught his last class there in the same room, 104, a week ago.

Graduations are always bittersweet and Pruchnic says it’s hard to say what he’ll miss most. It’s a big change, leaving behind this community for the home in Vegas he’s come to love.

“There is a dramatic contrast,” he said. “You take off and see all the lights and excitement in Vegas. I try to bring that back here.”

Pruchnic has always loved it in the Valley, where his late wife first suggested they find a home.

“My wife, we were high school sweethearts,” said Pruchnic, one of 10 children. His family is from a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania.

His wife, Mary, told him he should go to college, so he did.

“I joined the Army to get the GI Bill,” Pruchnic said.

At 28, he started at what is now the University of Northern Colorado. Soon after, he took a fellowship at the University of Missouri before he came to Blue Ridge, where he’s been teaching ever since.

There were a few years he also taught part time at Mary Baldwin College and the Virginia Military Institute, but Blue Ridge has been his home.

Even now that he’s headed for retirement, Pruchnic admits, “If Blue Ridge would call me in the fall, I’d be on the next plane.”

But it’s also time for a change, which is the reason he started vacationing in Vegas in the first place.

It was 1984 when Mary died. The family was driving back from Disney World when they wrecked in South Carolina. Mary never survived the crash and Pruchnic and his three children were seriously injured.

The kids, now all grown and living across the country, were only 8, 10 and 15 at the time.

“This community just smothered us in love,” he said. Every night for the nine months Pruchnic couldn’t work, the family had a hot meal on the table, often thanks to the kindness of strangers.

“When we recovered from that, I started to feel like we should travel,” he said.

They picked Vegas, and started visiting often. Pruchnic knew he’d eventually retire there.

What’s Next?

Now, 23 years after the family’s first vacation to Vegas, it’s time to bid goodbye to Virginia. Staying in one place, Pruchnic says, should save him a bit of money. Because Blue Ridge doesn’t reimburse his travel expenses, he’s been paying them out of his own pocket.

Being a statistics professor is how he can afford the airfare, Pruchnic jokes with his students, because he’s learned to work the odds of the casino slots. He tells them, “I’m going on a field trip to prove what we teach in statistics works.”

Sometime next week — he’s not sure just when — Pruchnic will set off for Nevada maybe for the last time, although he could be back to visit. He’s not flying, though, because he has a car here that he’d like to use in Vegas.

“It’s like John Wayne in a Western movie riding off in the sunset,” Pruchnic jokes. “I’ll put stuff into the car and just start heading west.”

And what about when he gets there?

Once Pruchnic decides how to use all those frequent-flier miles, he’ll travel, of course.