My meeting with living Alaska history

After our Tuesday morning broadcast on KVRF, station manager Mike Chmielewski told me we were going to have a special guest come to the studio on Thursday. Thursdays I man the phone and manage the station as a volunteer. Heck, even my time on air Tuesday mornings is volunteer, but that is the way of things in the world of public radio and I love it.

“We’re going have Vic Fischer here on the 20th. After that he will be at the Rotary club meeting. Then to Fireside Books to sign his latest book, ‘From Russia With Love,’” Mike said.

I told him the name was familiar, something about Alaska statehood in a PBS special I watched a year ago.

“You might want to bone up on him before he shows up here in the studio,” Mike chuckled.

I got the feeling he knew more than he was letting on as I headed out the door to my day job.

After work, I searched his name on Google and my jaw dropped when the results popped up. This guy’s life story read like an epic movie or weeklong mini series they so loved to air on TV in the ’80s.

Imagine you’re a young boy living with your older brother and mother in Berlin, Germany. Father is the famous American journalist Louis Fischer, who is away on assignment more than at home. It is the early 1930s, the country is divided by those supporting communism or the Nazis. The country has been ravaged by the Great Depression — it was worse in Europe than in the U.S. — and the harsh reality of being the losers of World War I. Adolf Hitler has just elected and riots were taking place just under your apartment window. You are witness to the burning of the Reichstag and the rise of the Third Reich with Hitler as its absolute ruler. Which in a few years, he would turn that country and the rest of the world into the horrors of world war, mass murder and genocide.

So you and the family flee to Russia because you have three strikes against you living in pre-war Nazi, Germany. Your foreign-born parents — dad was an American, mom was Russian — are Communists, speak German with a Russian accent and you’re Jewish. The later is only told to you after fleeing the country. Not a good combo for living there.

Then after escaping to what appears to be safety in mother Russia. Its leader, Joseph Stalin, launches a series of brutal purges to eliminate so-called “enemies of the state.” Close friends disappear to prison, or in most cases are executed, on a daily basis. Now you are in the middle of another growing nightmare, disillusioned and living in total fear of arrest in the middle of the night. Fleeing the country looks like an impossible dream with the secret police tracking your every move. It took a meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt and your estranged father to get the family out of the country and into the United States.

There is so much more Fischer did, from serving in the U.S. Army along with his older brother in World War II to coming to Alaska in the early ’50s to help make the territory into the great state it is today; even helping to write the state constitution, which is coming under scrutiny as of late. And he is still active in the events and issues of today. I suggest you get his book.

And I was going to meet this man on Thursday? Oh, man, I got to break out the going-to-Sunday-meeting boots — my best Army jump boots, polished to a high-gloss black.

The day came quickly. I arrived at the studio perched above Turkey Red Restaurant. Mike was dressed up, too, in a gray sport coat with an Alaska-shaped pin on his lapel and his best jeans. We made some small talk and plans for the day. Mike would record Vic’s interview while I recorded a show for another client. It would be my first time working solo. Mike also had a copy of Vic’s book, which I grabbed and began to devour like a starving man recovering from a famine.

Then close to 10:30 a.m., an old man was making his way up the stairs to the studio. Bald with deep-set eyes and an angular close-shaven chin, he stepped in the doorway. It was Fischer in the flesh. I stood up and was surprised that I nearly towered over this man 90 years young, who did such huge things for Alaska (I’m only 5-foot-7). I shook the hand he offered to me, gnarled with age.

“Howdy, Mr. Fischer, I’m Dan Grota.” I said. He thanked me, followed by a warm smile and a pretty good grip for one who has lived so long on this earth.

Before Mike led him into the recording studio, we talked for spell about a road trip he took to Fairbanks in a ’65 red Mustang convertible (a car I love to drool over) with the top down in the early spring some years ago. I grinned ear-to-ear picturing Vic in a parka and thick gloves, driving from his home in Anchorage to Fairbanks in a convertible.

And the rest, shall we say, is history.

Wasilla resident Daniel D. Grota retired from the U.S. Army after more than 21 years of service.