‘It’s a Fairy Tale,’ Son Says as He Joins Father in U.S.

It was a time of wonder and marvel Wednesday for Teodor Sakalauskas as he surveyed a new country, reunited with his father after 47 years.

“It’s unbelievable, like sometimes when you read a story in book. It’s a fairy tale,” Sakalauskas said, through his 71-year-old father and interpreter, Vytautas, a retired engineer who lives in Costa Mesa.

Sakalauskas, his wife, Teresa, and their 13-year-old daughter, Aida, were among the 117 families that the Soviet Union had announced last May would be allowed to join relatives in the United States. But it took until early this week to have their exit visas processed.

On Tuesday, the elder Sakalauskas was on hand in Washington to meet the flight from Moscow and bring everyone home to California by way of Maryland, where Teodor had a chance to meet his half-brother Gint, who owns a machine shop.

The first day home in Costa Mesa was consumed mostly by interviews with reporters, but Teodor’s father said that when things calm down, “I want to take little bit tour with them--Sea World, Marineland, places like that.”

And Aida, her grandfather said, “is dreaming to go to Disneyland and dreaming to go swim in the ocean.”

Teodor was only 1 year old when the German army overran what was then Lithuania and is now part of the Soviet Union and his father was sent to a labor camp in Austria.

Sakalauskas escaped from the camp, joined the British army in Italy and, after the war, traveled to New Jersey in 1949. He remarried, and he and his wife, Susan, moved to Costa Mesa in 1973.

In 1978, Sakalauskas returned to his hometown of Kaunas and found his son, who was married, had children and was working, just as his father had, as a structural engineer. Every year since, the senior Sakalauskas has applied to Soviet authorities for exit visas for his son and family. And each year, there was no response--until last spring.

As befits an engineer, Teodor is very impressed with the highways and freeways he has traveled since arriving in the United States, his father said.

“Also the people are happy, and they are smiling all the time,” Vytautas relayed. “Not like in Russia, where everybody is sad.”

The father said Teodor hopes to find work as a structural engineer, but first “there is more English that he has to learn. He has some, but he will need some more.”

And Aida, beside looking forward to Disneyland and the beach, is eager for school, her grandfather said.

“She has a little English now, but I think she be catching up very fast,” Vytautas said.