“The Other Dream Team,” Lithuanian Olympic bronze medal basketball squad, Barcelona, 1992

Hosting a showing of the rousing documentary, The Other Dream Team, yesterday reminded me of an important Springfield connection with our 1980s-90s Lithuanian Olympic basketball heroes.  Ben and Vita Zemaitis of Chatham met Sarunas Marciulionis, Arvydas Sabonis (one of the greatest centers of all time), Rimas Kurtinaitis and Voldemaras Chomicius after a 1987 exhibition game at the PCCC.

Back then, four Lithuanians formed the core of the USSR national team (Marciulionis was “Soviet Athlete of the Year”), even though what they really wanted was to play in the NBA, and of course, for their own country, Lithuania.

Fall 1988, Lawrence, KS, fr. left – Rimas Kurtinaitis, Sarunas Marciulionis, Vita Zemaitis, Donnie Nelson.

When Vita and Ben met the players in 1987, it was one year after Sabonis had been drafted, in absentia, by the Portland Trailblazers. Sabonis did not actually get to play for the Trailblazers for about another decade, after he was repeatedly and carelessly injured by the Soviet system.

The players’ meeting with the Zemaitises in Springfield, which led to other introductions and meetings in other cities,  also occurred one year before our Lithuanian superstars led the U.S.S.R. team to its famous 1988 Olympic gold medal victory over the United States. In “The Other Dream Team” movie, they explain that their victory was motivated by a Soviet quid pro quo promise that they would finally be permitted to play abroad.

Lithuanian players in the movie describe being guarded by KGB agents whenever on tour. Yet they still managed to get away from their hotels and meet with Lithuanian-Americans who picked them up in parking garages and spirited them away in car trunks, returning them later the same way.

Did Ben and Vita own a Cadillac that could fit one or more huge basketball players in its trunk?  Did they have local Lithuanian-American accomplices?

Fall 1988, Lawrence, KS, fr. left – Arvydas Sabonis, Rimas Kurtinaitis, Sarunas Marciulionis, Vita Zemaitis.

The Zemaitises also met Donnie Nelson, current general manager of the Dallas Mavericks who spearheaded the exit of Marciulionis from the USSR to play for the Golden State Warriors in 1989.  In a sports-meets-rock-‘n-roll twist, Nelson also famously helped Marciulionis secure funding from The Grateful Dead for the tie-dyed 1992 Lithuanian Olympic “dream team.”

I was so involved, stateside, with the Lithuanian “Singing Revolution” (1987-91) that these young Lithuanian athlete-patriots who carried such strong hopes for their country’s re-birth became my greatest heroes.

I only wish Vita could have lived to see such stirring history documented in “The Other Dream Team” film.  But then again, she took part in it.

In memory of my dear friend Vita Zemaitis (July 12, 1936—Dec. 14, 2009)

The 1947-1949 arrival in Springfield of about 60 World War II refugees, displaced persons (“DPs”) from Lithuania, had a big impact on the Lithuanian Independence Day observation at St. Vincent de Paul Lithuanian Catholic Church in 1950.

St. Vincent de Paul’s was a natural first stop for the fresh immigrants. Many carried traumatic personal experiences of the German and Soviet invasions of Lithuania 1940-44, and were anxious to tell the story of their brutalized homeland.

In these crucial early years, the DPs’ ability to get their story out was severely hampered by language. So, it was natural that their first attempts to communicate were with and through the existing Lithuanian-American community.

That community was made up mostly of turn-of-the-Century immigrant coal miners and their children and grandchildren, some of whom, along with other Americans, had not yet heard details of what had happened to Lithuania during the War. For many Americans, credulity also was strained by the enormity of the horrors and the fact that the U.S.S.R. had been a war-time U.S. ally.

So in many cases, DPs who had lost everything and experienced the travails of DP camps in ravaged, post-War Germany, did not get a supportive hearing, or arouse much concern for the truth of their personal experiences, after arriving in the U.S.

The Feb. 12, 1950 issue of the Catholic diocesan newspaper “Western Catholic” describes a “one-act” play especially written and presented by local DPs for the Feb. 1950 commemoration of Lithuanian Independence Day (official date: February 16). The play dramatized the “knock on the door in the middle of the night” that typified the mass deportations to Siberia that occurred during the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania 1940-41 (and resumed again in 1944). Many of the DPs had narrowly escaped these deportations, and had friends and relatives who had been “disappeared” with their whole families, never to be heard from again.

The DPs’ play was part of a program at 3 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 12, 1950, in the St. Vincent de Paul Church Hall. The program also included remarks by the Rev. Casimir Toliusis and DP Vincent Abramikas, as well as music by the church choir to the organ accompaniment of Mrs. A. Foster.

“Tree of LIfe,” Witches Hill, Juodkrante, Lithuania

Bass-relief “Tree of Life” carved from an oak trunk in my backyard

Inspired by the monumental Lithuanian folk art wood sculptures that I saw in Krackas, Lithuania in 1995, and the “Witches Hill” Ted and I visited in 2005 in Juodkrante, Lithuania, we commissioned this bass-relief chisel and chainsaw sculpture for our Springfield backyard in 2006.
The bass-relief feature allows it to pick up a nice “architectural” dusting of snow this time of year. Isn’t it beautiful?
A word of caution: we learned it is much better to let the sculptors use their own seasoned logs or trunks than to chop down a tree to have a sculpture made. The sculptors have plenty of seasoned wood, and they work better in their own studios than outside, on site. Green wood is also a terrible challenge for longevity, and being attached to the ground, through the original trunk and roots, accelerates wicking, cracking and decay. I’d like to know their secret for outdoor wood preservation at Juodkrante!