I believe you. Tell us some of those stories when you have the time.
“The family stories from his time in Russia I could recount would fry your hair.”
Please consider posting some of them. When my grandfather passed a great resource of family history passed with him. If we don’t write down our stories the next generations cannot benefit from them. And the young know nearly nothing about liberty.
We need to tell our stories while we still can.
I met a man like that when I was a boy of 11 going on 12. My father was an Air Force Reserve officer on active duty who was assigned to a big NORAD defense facility in the upper Midwest -- a so-called SAGE building, or "Semi-Automated Ground Environment", a thick-walled, heavily-built concrete building designed to withstand a nuclear detonation within five miles.
The Russian was an old Imperial Russian Air Force officer named Louie Lesnik who had left Russia after the Revolution and was on Stalin's long, long death list. In Detroit, he'd been discovered by the local Communist Party, and union goons had cornered him in an alley and tried to kill him. He showed me the deep, unnatural grooves on the top of his balding head where they tried literally to beat his brains in -- "look for the union label", indeed.
So the Air Force gave Louie a sinecure job as a janitor in the big SAGE building, where he had a little apartment and never had to worry about Communist goons again.
Would you please write them for us? Here or better yet start a new thread and ping me please?