Kiwanian of the Year always makes headlines

In the late ’80s when Bill Sceva started writing the Kiwanis Club of Longboat Key newsletter (then the Sarasota Keys Kiwanis Club), he wrote it by hand and took it to a typist. In the 1990s, he began typing it up on a word processor. Today, he prepares it on his Dell laptop.

But one thing remains the same: Virtually every week since he joined the club in 1987, he’s been the one to put together the newsletter. Everything from the notes to the cartoons that he generates using photographs and clip art to the Kiwanis Club website is Sceva’s creation.

At Kiwanis Club events, he’s usually in the background taking tickets or serving coffee. Sceva doesn’t normally seek recognition, but March 17, he’s being recognized at the group’s weekly breakfast, because he has been named the 2010 Kiwanian of the Year.

“He does a great job with the website and taking pictures, and beyond that, he’s a participant at any event,” said 2009 Kiwanian of the Year Vincent De Lisi. “There’s truly no one in the club who deserves this honor more than Bill does.”

As a retired architect, Sceva has the drawing and design part of the newsletter job mastered. But he also got ink in his blood at an early age. After his father died in 1937, Sceva went to live at a children’s home organized by the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, in Tiffin, Ohio. Children in the program went to school for a half day and received vocational training for the other half. Sceva was assigned to the paint shop for two or three years and later reassigned to the print shop’s pressroom. There, he learned to operate a Chandler letterhead press and helped to print the organization’s magazine, which was similar to the Kiwanis newsletter. By the time Sceva was a high school senior, he became editor and reporter for the organization’s national magazine’s “Home Kid” page, dedicated to children who lived in the organization’s homes throughout the U.S.

Sceva said that he didn’t have much time for service organizations during his career as an architect. But in 1987, his neighbors at Spanish Main Yacht Club, where he lived for 13 years, convinced him to get involved. And although he now lives in Bradenton, he still makes the drive to Longboat Key each week for Kiwanis Club meetings.

Sceva knows first-hand the importance of groups that help children and students in need.

“I really think the Kiwanis Club scholarship program is a great thing,” he said. “It’s just $1,000, but to those students, it means so much.”

Contact Robin Hartill at [email protected]