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93-year-old Bill Venuti of Los Gatos, CA appears on episode #532 of Hometown Heroes, airing July 12-15, 2018. A native of Philadelphia, PA, Venuti served aboard the battleship USS North Carolina (BB-55) during World War II.

Listen to Bill’s interview to find out how his time in the Navy became a pivotal point in his life, taking a young man who had never considered going to college, and turning him toward a path that would yield degrees from some of America’s most distinguished universities and a long and impactful career as an engineering professor.
“We lived in a neighborhood of all Italian immigrants,” he says of his upbringing in Philadelphia. “No parks, all our recreational activities were in the street. We made up our own games.” You’ll hear what some of those games consisted of, and other details from his childhood, including the risky routine he and his brother and sister had to carry out in order to take a bath. Bill was a talented drummer, and had aspirations of becoming a professional percussionist. Like so many fellow Americans, the trajectory of his life was altered on December 7, 1941.

“I was walking down the street,” you’ll hear him recall of that fateful Sunday. “Somehow I heard a radio program coming from one of the houses with an open window, about the Japanese having attacked Pearl Harbor. I had no idea where Pearl Harbor was.”

Bill graduated from high school a month later, and spent the next year working in a machine shop. His older brother was already working in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, and thus would be exempt from the draft, but Bill knew he was likely to receive Uncle Sam’s summons. Rather than wait to be drafted into the Army, he elected to enlist in the Navy.

Hoping to use his drumming talents with the U.S. Navy band in Washington, D.C., he was rerouted instead to San Diego, where he found several professional drummers from recognized bands of the area snatching up positions on bands assigned to various ships. His musical ambitions put on pause, Venuti decided his next best option was to join the crew of a battleship. That wish materialized when he was sent to Pearl Harbor to join the crew of the USS North Carolina. Unfazed by the reality that the ship was in dry dock there to receive repairs from her prior activity – which included being struck by a torpedo near Guadalcanal in September, 1942 – or the still visible damage to ships and aircraft that had been inflicted during the surprise attack on Oahu, the teenager quickly took to his assignment in the lookout division. The sounding of general quarters meant he had to hustle to Sky Control atop the conning tower.

“Most of the time I was in my quarters, which was one deck below the main deck,” you’ll hear him explain. “I had to run from there to the top of the ship in about one minute, no hesitation at all.”

You’ll hear Venuti recall steaming toward his first naval engagement in a convoy of 102 ships, and how “fascinating” it was to witness the scale and coordination of that effort from his bird’s-eye view.

Starting with the Gilbert Islands – including Makin and Tarawa – in November, 1943, Bill was one of the lookouts tasks with tracking where artillery shells struck enemy positions during the pre-invasion bombardment phase. He also had to watch for incoming torpedo wakes, and enemy aircraft, sometimes as many as 80 Japanese bombers in the air at the same time.

“I was frightened the first time and the second time,” Venuti says of his lookout duty during the hear of battle. “There are so many times that these planes came in, that one gets used to it.”

He grew accustomed to performing his duty under those circumstances as the battleship proceeded to the Marshall Islands, Truk, and the Marianas.

After serving aboard the battleship for nearly seven months, and enduring those five major campaigns, Venuti was invited to take a test to qualify for officers’ training. Out of 120 applicants aboard his ship, he was one of 15 selected to return to the U.S. for the Navy’s V-12 college training program.

“My parents were uneducated. My father was illiterate,” you’ll hear Venuti explain. “College was not part of our family conversation at all.”

Soon, he found himself back in his hometown of Philadelphia, studying mathematics at an Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania. Shifting from the V-12 program to ROTC, he earned his degree in 3 years, with World War II coming to an end during his studies. Simultaneous to graduating, he received his naval commission. Listen to Hometown Heroes for his reasoning in electing for discharge from the Navy, choosing instead to spend the next 12 years in the naval reserve as he pursued further education.

Listen to Bill’s interview for the unique manner in which he met Twila, the woman who would become his wife, and for the unexpected suggestion that led to an occupation he had never considered: engineering professor. With bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Colorado, and eventually a doctorate from Stanford, Venuti spent more than 40 years on the engineering faculty at San Jose State University.

“The engineering program was low-level. It was more like a technician program,” he recalls of when he arrived on campus in 1955. “Some of us felt that we ought to beef up the program.”

Bolstering the quality of the course catalog, Venuti teamed with other instructors in the department to help San Jose State’s civil engineering program to achieve accredited status for the first time. He spent time instructing future engineers in Thailand, China, and even Scotland, remaining on SJSU’s faculty until segueing into emeritus status in 1997. Retirement has given him plenty of time to travel. You’ll hear Bill discuss the fulfillment he experienced on a 2017 trip to Washington, D.C. with Honor Flight Bay Area, and there’s another destination that qualifies for his itinerary on an annual basis. Every April, he heads to Wilmington, NC, where the battleship USS North Carolina is on display as a museum ship. In recent years, family members have accompanied him, and he says that family contingent gets larger each time.

“When I’m able to take the entire family, climb up the conning tower to the top” he elaborates. “It’s just a thrill to be able to show my family where I was, and tell some war stories.”

Watch the brief video below for more from Bill about his annual pilgrimage to the ship that carried it through those harrowing moments in World War II. If you ever have the chance to visit the battleship North Carolina in Wilmington, keep an eye out for a nonagenarian scaling all those rungs toward Sky Control, and perhaps try following him up there. Then you’ll have a spectacular view when you shake his hand and thank him for serving our country.
—Paul Loeffler