Mission Viejo Pair Are Hub of Baltic Network

Inside the home of Danute Mazeika, a facsimile machine sending documents to Eastern Europe hums noisely amid the din of children playing and the telephone ringing off the hook.

Mazeika answers the phone with a curt “hello.” Then, when she recognizes the caller’s voice, she informs him of the events taking place in Lithuania thousands of miles away.

“We got a report that soldiers from Moscow are in tanks driving in Vilnius and damaging buildings, street lights and everything,” Mazeika says. “And we hear that the thugs are out in force.”

Welcome to Baltic HQ, the Mazeika residence, which up until recently was a typical home for a family of five. But increased tensions between the Soviet Union and nationalists in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia have transformed the Mazeika home into the Southern California hub of information, linking thousands of Baltic-Americans to events taking place in their homeland.

Despite their relatively small numbers, the Baltic-Americans represent a highly vocal community. Both Mazeika and her husband, Anthony, were born in the United States. But she is a distant cousin of Lithuania’s president and granddaughter of one of the signers of its 1918 independence pact. Her husband, who has a real estate business in Mission Viejo, has distant relatives in Lithuania.

They both are co-founders of the Baltic American Freedom League, one of several Eastern European ethnic organizations that met with President Bush and his top advisers this week. Anthony Mazeika, who is considered one of this country’s leading spokesmen on Baltic issues, was a member of the 14-person delegation that met with Bush.

“Usually, this is a pretty average household,” said Danute Mazeika, a mother of three. “I had to deport my three kids to another home while my husband was in Washington. I mean, it got crazy around here.”

The one positive aspect that has emerged as events in Eastern Europe unfold, she said, is that Orange County Baltic-Americans “have come out of the woodwork.”

By contrast with other ethnic groups, the Lithuanian community is not large. There are an estimated 20,000 residents of Lithuanian descent in Southern California. While the majority live in Los Angeles, a number of the leaders are in Orange County, where they and other Baltic-Americans number about 1,500.

Orange County businessman Richard Kontrimas, a Lithuanian-American who also lives in Mission Viejo, recently accompanied Rep. C. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) as an interpreter during the congressman’s observation of elections in Lithuania in February.

Kontrimas said Lithuanians have found strong support from Cox and other elected officials, but not from President Bush. “Despite meeting with Baltic-Americans in Washington who asked for him to take stronger action, we still don’t have a clue as to what Bush is going to do,” he said.

Danute Mazeika said that since the declaration of independence in Lithuania more than a month ago, she has put aside her at-home art business. Her husband’s real estate business also has taken a back seat to more pressing events taking place in Eastern Europe.

For the Mission Viejo couple, it was an easy decision.

“It’s not an ethnic issue,” Anthony Mazeika said. “. . . There’s a much greater issue here. When we formed the freedom league in 1981, we felt that it was time to have a nationwide grass-roots effort to champion freedom of the Baltic region. We’re busy giving information, developing American consensus and trying to develop a favorable policy in the Bush Administration towards the Baltic states.”

The Mazeikas are well-versed on political causes. In 1983, Anthony Mazeika and other Baltic-Americans organized a “Ban the Soviets” movement aimed at eliminating Russian athletes from participating in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

“I remember I was nine months pregnant when Tony came in and said, ‘Honey, we’re going to ban the Soviets from the Olympics,’ ” Danute Mazeika said.

She said she doubted her husband’s goal then but has since gone toe-to-toe with Soviet propaganda officials. At a recent speech by a Soviet official at UC San Diego, the official refused to answer Mazeika’s tough questions on Lithuania. But she was undaunted. When she was asked to sit down, she refused. When they went to another speaker, she fumed.

“I’m a housewife out of Mission Viejo going up against somebody from Russia. Why should they be afraid to answer me?”

She said she believes that a lot of Americans are being taken in by the openness of the Soviet Union under glasnost. She warned, “You cannot turn your back on the dancing bear.”