Nalitz retiring today
WAYNESBURG – Today, Greene County President Judge William R. Nalitz will end his 17-year career on the bench and begin retirement.
He leaves reluctantly because of a state law that requires judges to retire at the end of the year in which they turn 70 years old. Nalitz hit that mark in October.
“I really have enjoyed it. I feel honored and privileged to have had the opportunity to serve as judge for all these years,” Nalitz said Tuesday, as he was busy cleaning off his desk and wrapping up final matters. His last day of court was Monday.
“If it was up to me I’d probably finish my term,” Nalitz said. “But it’s not up to me.” Nalitz’s current 10-year term doesn’t expire until 2017. At that time, he said, he would be 73 and he surely would not seek retention to another term.
Nalitz was first elected judge in 1997. He joined Judge H. Terry Grimes on the bench and was the first judge to fill the county’s second judgeship. Nalitz was retained for a second term in 2007 and became president judge in 2009 after Grimes’ retirement.
Nalitz said he has mixed feelings about leaving, because he likes what he does.
“I guess it’s the way anybody would feel who is leaving a job he’s always enjoyed,” he said. “There’s regret, because you enjoy doing the job, and I’m a guy, like a lot of guys, who really doesn’t do much else besides go to work, so I don’t really have a whole lot of plans.”
Nalitz said he will miss the kind of work that is involved in being a judge, which he briefly described as applying the laws and statutes that are “supposed to regulate human conduct” to resolve people’s problems as best as possible.
“I’ve enjoyed it very much, finding the answer, figuring out what the right answer is in every appropriate situation, which is sometimes really hard to do,” he said.
Some of the hardest decisions he has had to make as a judge, he said, are those that appear to have the most consequence, like fashioning a sentence for a criminal defendant or deciding the custody of a child.
When asked about accomplishments of his tenure, Nalitz spoke of the Greene County court’s reputation.
“I hear this all the time from out of town attorneys how much they appreciate coming to Greene County because we have a smoothly run, efficient and friendly court,” he said. In some counties, it is said, people working in the prothonotary’s office or other row offices have an “attitude” and make matters more difficult than they have to be.
“We’ve never had that attitude in any of our row offices that I’m aware of,” Nalitz said.
There is another aspect, he said, he has always liked about his job – the people he works with in the courthouse every day. “Everybody here has been great to work with,” he said.
Nalitz said his plans for retirement will involve travel. He said he hopes to make more trips to visit his grandchildren in Colorado and California, who he hasn’t been able to see as much as he would like because of his job.
He said he also enjoys doing landscape work around the house and is looking forward to enrolling in life time learning classes at area universities. “I do think you have to keep active both mentally and physically,” he said.
A native of Pittsburgh, Nalitz is a 1966 graduate of Georgetown University. During and after college he worked at U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works. He also served in the U.S. Army from 1966 to 1968, including a year in Vietnam with the Fourth Infantry Division.
Nalitz received his law degree from Duquesne University School of Law and after admission to the bar in 1973 joined the Waynesburg law firm of Sayers, King and Keener. He was a practicing attorney for 24 years before becoming judge.
Nalitz and his wife, Linda, have two children, Thad and Carolyn, and four grandchildren.
“I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to be judge here all these years,” he said. “It’s been a good job and really sort of sobering to have been elected by the community to make the kinds of decisions that might affect everybody.”