Impressions of my Father

by Dr. Richards Plavnieks

Egons Plavnieks was a Saimnieks in the best tradition of the word, and he raised three sons over the course of 50 years. Egons was born in 1953, Kris in 1972, Richards in 1982, and Roberts in 2002. He imbued in all three of us different measures of his own interests: music, history and politics, and sport. Our respective times in Egons’s household only briefly overlapped one with another, but a major consistency of the world around Egons was its linkages to Latvia and Latvians. We inherit this connection with, and affinity for, Latvia through him, each in our idiosyncratic and historically contingent ways. This essay is my attempt to tell the community of American Latvians who he was, as best I can ascertain as Egons’s middle son.

When Egons lay at home on his deathbed, his three sons went to him. The youngest, Roberts, still lived in his house. The eldest, Kris, flew from his home in London. I myself drove from Lakeland, Florida. We arrived in Garrett Park, Maryland, in time to talk to dad before he passed.

Once it was over, eight months after the cancer diagnosis, stunned, we drifted around the familiar but ineffably changed house.

Eventually we found a carven wooden plate in the basement. It was displayed in a dusty glass cabinet, but I curiously had never consciously noticed it before. If a photo had been taken in the basement the year I was born showing the plate in the same place, not only would it not surprise me, but I would bet it hadn’t been touched in the interval. We turned it over. It said:

“Iruks” meant Irēne Pļavnieks, whose maiden name was Ābols. “Ričs” was Vilis Richards Pļavnieks. They were our paternal grandparents. The couple gave the plate to Irēne’s mother, Elizabete Ābols, whose maiden name was Eglītis. 

I only knew them quite differently from the way they were when they left the Displaced Persons’ Camp in the American occupation zone of Germany in 1949, when Iruks and Ričs were only 21 and 27 years old. Describing their relationships with Egons would be beyond my ability, but here is how I understood them.

Irēne I always knew as “Mimimat.” This was my word which, as a tiny child, completely transformed Irēne, who remarried as Irene Kleimanis, into “Mimimat.” It has been postulated that my error was the result of the fusion — in the 2-year-old palate of her first biological grandson — of the two names by which Mimimat was commonly called in my presence: “Māmite” by Egons and “Vecāmāte” by others since I’d been born. But after the coining of my neologism, “Mimimat” did everything but sign her checks in the name I gave her. She doted. I was 31 when she passed away in 2013.

Elizabete I knew only as Vecāmāte, Egons’s grandmother. A witness to two World Wars and various military occupations, I remember that she darkly admonished me to get an education, since it was the only thing no one could ever take from me. I was 16 when she passed away in 1999. 

As for Vilis Richards Pļavnieks, Egons’s father: I never met him, though I am named after him. He was born in 1922, and according to family legend, his parents used the English spelling for his middle name in Anglophilic zeal after the achievement of Latvian national independence. The spelling indeed appears on a 1941 registry from his town of Baldone.

The house he built in Garrett Park is a catalogue of sturdy evidence attesting to his work ethic, practical knowledge, and personal code. Otherwise I mainly know him through war stories from his days in the Latvian Legion. Some of these he told Egons directly, others dad overheard in his father’s conversations with fellow veterans. Their subject matter was surely related to his alcoholism. He died early and suddenly from a heart attack while at work in 1976. Egons was just 23.

Egons’s older brother, Olafs, from whom I take my middle name, died in the late 1950s before the age of ten of a degenerative muscular disease.

In the 1960s and 1970s, high-quality education was available for the children of people of fairly modest means like Iruks and Ričs, Egons’s parents. Egons first dedicated his life to music, and he played for Americans, Latvians, and American Latvians his whole life. 

The 1970s — when Egons was in his musically-exuberant heyday — should be recognized for the greatness not only of the music it produced, but for the democratic verve of the whole landscape of music performance. Arguably dad’s peak as a professional musician occurred in 1977, while he was still earning his Master’s Degree in Music from Catholic University. The audience at Carnegie Hall beheld an American civic spectacle when this ethnic American Latvian performed Mozart, Bach, and music from two Latvian composers who appear in the program as Jānis Ivanovs and Joseph Wihtol.

Egons’s versatile fingers sometimes plucked the kokle with the Latvian Folk Ensemble as a young man and he traveled with them internationally.

His hands also sped over the keyboard and synthesizer in a whole series of modern bands: the Motley Crew, with his cousins Ivars and Andris; Walpurgis Night; Boxcar; Karma; and Musique.

In his last decade, Egons was the master of the keys, pedals, and switches of the organ of the Latvian Lutheran church in Rockville which his father had helped build

All three of Egons’s sons took piano lessons, but only Kris, switching to the guitar after threatening to destroy the piano with a sledgehammer, became a competent musician.

For my part, dad insisted that I take piano lessons from ages 8 to 16, but I never was capable of reading the notes on the clefs by sight, to dad’s frequent exasperation. Roberts also dabbled briefly in piano to please dad. Nevertheless, we each gained an appreciation for music that began with immersion in dad’s favorites like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; Mott the Hoople; Jethro Tull; Led Zeppelin; Cream; Sly and the Family Stone; and the Doobie Brothers. From there, we each evolved our own preferences and influenced each other as we shared what we liked.

I often sat beside dad in the warming car on the way to and from holiday services in Rockville. He took playing at the church seriously because of the value he set in the community and the enjoyment he could provide. In every venue, with Egons it was also a matter of professionalism: he always wanted to do a proper job.

At the end of the 1970s, Egons realized that music would not earn him the living he desired. The electronic Hammond organ, the Leslie speaker cabinet, and the ARP 2600 synthesizer that Egons had purchased he sold to make his move to Wisconsin with his first wife, Karen, the mother of Kris and myself. He never stopped enjoying music, and preserved his Cerwin-Vega speakers to the last, but business was how Egons would support his family. In this arena too, Egons was a diligent professional. 

He obtained his Master’s in Business Administration at Madison while Karen worked at the University hospital. When he graduated, she went back to school for more training as a Nurse Practitioner. The couple then left Madison for Appleton, Wisconsin, where, with Kris, they lived when their first son together — me — was born.

Egons adapted to the region and permanently became a fan of the Green Bay Packers during this phase of his life. He also began a lifelong habit of reading history books — usually about the Second World War and frequently specifically involving tanks.

I must have been absorbing this all through my childhood, though the only personal interest I had cultivated to date was, I suppose, dinosaurs, if my lunchboxes, clothing, books, toys, and Halloween costumes are anything to go by. Kris, meanwhile, played Little League baseball and eventually highschool football though his sophomore year until he picked up the guitar. 

Though neither Kris nor I learned Latvian at home, annual holiday pilgrimages to Garrett Park ensured that we were always reminded of our link to Latvia and exposed to the community there. We both grew up eating pīrāgs made by Mimimat and Vecāmāte and hearing the cadences of the Latvian tongue, often in song, often in church. We also heard the lamentations of an exiled people whose homeland, of which we were given the impression of some kind of forever inaccessible utopia, was still occupied by the Soviets. 

Having fatefully turned down a position at IBM, Egons sepent the 1980s doggedly doing the grunt work of Procter & Gamble. He was assigned to inspect product placement on the shelves of semi-rural Wisconsin drug stores and supermarkets. Eventually, his quality was recognized by a superior, the Milwaukee District Manager, A.A. Gimbel, whose handwritten endorsement dad kept in his desk at home for the rest of his life.

Dad was reassigned to P&G headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1987. Groomed as management material, he left Cincinnati for assignments in Cleveland in 1988, and then Baltimore in 1990.

In 1993, Egons got his big offer and changed the trajectory of my life. Together with Karen and I, dad moved to Russia when my brother Kris was a sophomore at George Washington University. Mimimat and Vecāmāte begged Egons not to go. The reach of Moscow was what they had fled from with Ričs. Now Egons and his family were going to live there.

Times had changed and, thus, surrounding me at the ages of 11 and 12 was the surly, grey, and dilapidated world of the post-Soviet imperial core between 1993 and 1995. I remember CNN International — there were often few to no other channels in English — reporting on Bosnia and later Chechnya. Perhaps that incessant background steeping in Live War-on-TV subconsciously impressed on my mind an inclination to view war as a highly significant and interesting human pursuit. We arrived in the country just in time to be present for the attempted coup against Yeltsin, which reached its crescendo when tanks opened fire with their main guns aimed at the Russian parliament. Later, dad himself was only a couple of blocks away from automatic gunfire when at the P&G office in Moscow.

When we lived in Russia, my entertainment diet — because it was dad’s — consisted largely of classic American World War Two movies of the “Patton”-type and World War Two documentaries. There may have been an entire documentary set about tanks. This viewing repertoire he interspersed with VHS cassette tapes of Green Bay Packers games, mailed to us from America and arriving semi-regularly according to the imponderabilities of the Russian customs process, weeks after the games were played. We weren’t just living in another time-zone. We lived on a different plane of time from the one all of our family members back home existed on. Telephone connections were spotty and expensive, and “internet” was still barely a word even on the far side of Europe and the Atlantic Ocean from us.

Egons travelled the width and breadth of Russia on Aeroflot Sukoys and Tupelevs. He endured saunas and birch-branches; zakuski and neverending vodka; and baffling, primitive, and often inoperable toilet facilities in strange “hotels” in a litany of places whose names would have been familiar to Hitler’s generals and SS Einsatzkommandos — and Western historians. He made it a point to see Motherland, the gargantuan statue holding a sword aloft that reaches higher than the Statue of Liberty, commemorating the defiant fallen of the Battle of Stalingrad. Of course, business also took him to Kursk, site of the largest tank battle of all time.

By virtue of his work at this “hardship post,” Egons was selected to lead sales for P&G’s Baltic operation, based in Rīga, beginning in 1995. This was Latvian victory at the end of the Cold War made tangible to all of us: a democratic Latvia, open for business. Egons became a dual citizen.

Kris was a sophomore at university when we moved to Russia, which opened undreamed of travel opportunities for him. While in a Western hotel bar, he was offered Soviet military equipment, from night-vision goggles to an anti-aircraft missile, for purchase. He declined as politely as one can on such an occasion. On his return trips to the United States, he was free to stop anywhere he liked in Europe on the company’s dime — an opportunity he did not waste.

In 1997, Kris moved to London, where he has lived ever since. His Latvian partner, Jogita, joined him in London in 2004 and they have been together ever since. He was charmed by the life in Latvia and has immersed himself in it more and more, to Jogi’s delight. Kris has traveled back to Latvia two or three times every year since the mid-1990s. There he created a whole array of friendships in both urban, small-town, and rural settings, including entrepreneurs, artists, a film producer, a former Kolhoz “brigadier,” a small-town high school director, a dairy farmer, and many other warm and interesting people. The Latvia described in the reminiscences of the exiles when we were growing up did not exactly exist, but what we found was far more interesting and human. At this point, Kris’s knowledge of the country is so extensive that once, when the four of us were driving around Kurzeme looking at castles, dad jokingly asked if anyone knew any good restaurants in the town we were passing through. The town was Kuldīga, and in fact, Kris knew two.

My interest in Latvia, perhaps perversely, was more bloody: what concerned me most was my paternal blood heritage and the subject of World War Two. The inspiration dad engendered in me was less musical and cultural, as in the case of Kris, and more political and professional. Egons was such a Renaissance man that he could impart all of these things to his sons in different measures.

Rīga was where I spent some of my most formative teenage years. At the International School of Latvia, to the delight of Mimimat, I fatefully opted to learn German instead of French and thus unwittingly participated in a centuries-old practice of Latvians seeking professional and social advancement. Unknown to me at the time, the choice would indeed have profound professional ramifications, since a decade later I would attempt to earn a Ph.D. in Modern German History.

In Latvia, Egons reached the pinnacle of his business career and did something that may have been his proudest contribution to Latvian heritage. In 2001, entirely on his initiative, P&G funded the restoration of the organ of Old Town’s cathedral, Rīgas Doma — perhaps the most baroque object in the country.

It was in Latvia that he also lost his first marriage. My mother and I left and resettled in Florida in 1998.

Probably when I was in third or fourth grade, dad took me to the single soccer practice I ever attended. Growing up, I showed the opposite of any athletic inclination. Thus, it astonished dad that I joined Stetson University’s Men’s Crew team the first semester of my Freshman year, Fall 2000. I remained an oarsman, even getting a tattoo late my Freshman year as a ward against quitting in the face of unbelievable physical torment and early mornings. I needn’t have worried: I craved the fellowship I acquired on crew too much to willingly relinquish it. I was elected Captain my senior year.

My destination, graduate school for modern German history, was a settled thing well before my Senior year. The summer spanning my Junior and Senior years, I was given grant money for a research trip to Germany. I went to, among other places, the Federal Military Archives in Freiburg, Germany, researching the German occupation of Latvia. On my last day there, entirely by accident, I found the name of Bruno Kleimanis on a document citing him for conspicuous bravery in close combat. He was the man Mimimat married after her first husband, my grandfather, died. I had never known that Bruno, too, had been in the Legion. This archival discovery helped confirm my determination to become a professional historian. 

Dad’s attitude was, at first, dismay at my selection of a non-remunerative profession, but this gradually gave way to esteem and finally admiration as I made my way across a series of milestones: admission to grad school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006 under Christopher Browning; the defense of my Master’s Thesis in 2008; the defense of my dissertation in 2013, which signaled the start of five years of adjunct gigs back at Stetson and at Rollins College and the University of Central Florida; the publication of my book in 2017; securing at tenure-track position at Florida Southern College starting in Fall 2018; and, six months before his death, delivering a lecture at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute in Arlington. He knew that it was the first address to a professional audience I’d given with more excitement than worry.

My brother Roberts, Egons’s third son, was born in Latvia in 2002, several years after Egons and my mother divorced, and when I was at Stetson University. He married a Latvian woman, Anda, and purchased a second home in Old Town Rīga. This apartment has been used ever since by all of us as a base of operations and meeting place for our numerous trips back to Latvia for the last decade and a half. 

While thus based in Rīga, dad continued to work abroad for P&G, first in Yemen where he was during the September 11th attacks, and later in Algeria. Shortly before I started graduate school, dad brought Anda and the young Roberts back with him to the United States.

Egons’s career with P&G came to a bittersweet end after a 2-year swan song in Baltimore, where the three of them lived in an Inner Harbor-area condo. 

In 2008, he set up permanent residence with his mother in the house his father built. Mimimat was 80, Egons was 55, and Roberts was 6. Thereupon, he boldly began his own “Brightstar” franchise that provided in-home care to the elderly and invalid — the last chapter of his career in business. 

During my years at Chapel Hill, I frequently stayed with them in Garrett Park, usually because I was doing research at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum or the National Archives. I gave dad military history books to read, and sometimes serendipity caused me to arrive at the house on the day of a Packers game. And I always drove up for Christmas.

This was the main context in which my relationship with Roberts developed. I witnessed his mental evolution as it manifested itself first in increasingly ingenious and sophisticated lego constructions and later the development of his own interests and musical tastes as he passed through elementary school and high school. The three of them spoke Latvian in the household and were involved with the Latvian Lutheran Church, which included Roberts’s participation in the Sunday School there.

For his health and for recreation, dad began playing tennis earnestly and learning about the sport as a serious amateur. I was often startled at first when he mentioned various high-profile people as his tennis partners, including Latvian embassy personnel. Roberts, after a childhood spent in competitive swimming, began playing tennis too and demonstrated a previously unseen alacrity and determination as he matured. It was excellent that the two were able to completely share this passion. Dad watched with pleasure as several Latvians came to prominence in professional tennis like Ernests Gulbis. Once, during their annual summer stay in Rīga, they saw Jeļena Ostapenko eating at Lido.

Egons also became active in the Sadarbība ar Latviju charity and chaired the committee for years until his diagnosis. Several of the public lectures I delivered to the Washington, D.C. Association of Latvian Fraternities and Sororities were used as fundraisers for this enterprise. He was also a major figure in Lettonia.

Dad and I talked for an hour or so every day on the telephone from his diagnosis in January 2020 until his passing in September, and Kris dialed in from London every Sunday. The subject matter oscillated, but was typically driven by current events — personal and otherwise. We discussed family news. We spoke about his business. We spoke about Roberts’s school and his tennis exploits. We spoke about Dad’s chemo treatments. We talked a lot about our shared past. One day Kris said he was thinking about buying a remake of the ARP 2600 synthesizer dad used to have, and noted that the original had been used to make all of the R2D2 sounds in Star Wars, the first movie he and dad saw together in the theater.

We spoke about my work. Egons keenly followed the progress of my career and is probably the only person in the world besides Kris who read my 2019-2020 Faculty Activity Report and all 52 attachments. But I don’t think dad was ever more proud of me than when, in May 2020, the Latvian-language translation of my book, Nazi Collaborators on Trial during the Cold War: Viktors Arajs and the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police, was published. 

Egons was also gratified, during what turned out to be the last months of his life, that we were able to substantiate a story that time and deaths had reduced to mere family lore. We had a notion that a relative of ours had been tortured and killed by the NKVD during the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940-41. With the help of the Occupation Museum in Rīga; an amateur genealogist in Latvia; and Vecāmāte’s sister, the redoubtable Alma Rusley and her nearly supernatural mental acuity at the age of 99; we not only validated the story with documentation, but learned new details. In the summer of 1941, my great-grandmother went to identify the remains of Soviet victims that had been dug up by the invading Germans. She was accompanying my grandfather’s sister Elza, the wife of the tortured and murdered man whose body they were looking for. His name was Juris Buce, and he had been so disfigured that Elza could only recognize the decoration she had sewn into the shirt he was wearing. The young woman who would become my Vecāmāte fainted. The only reason anyone could think of that the Soviets killed him was that he read German-language magazines. Now a Museum, Egons and his sons all visited the Stūra Māja KGB headquarters in the summer of 2018, where Juris’s body had been discovered, with many others.

That generation of our family that fled Latvia knew through bitter experience the horror that results from the weaponization of hatred and fantasies for political ends. They found freedom in America and appreciated its ability to project strength and foster democratic ideals internationally. Egons was a child of the Cold War and, while socially liberal, the contemporary Republican narrative around individual rights, fiscal responsibility, and international leadership through NATO would always resonate with him. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the reestablishment of Latvia as a sovereign state was, for him, a testament to the conservative agenda he held dear. 

My own politics grew out of a respect for dad’s views but was ultimately and inevitably directed by my own experience. The real coalescence of my adult worldview began while working as an Editorial Assistant for Harcourt School Publishers in 2005 and 2006, between Stetson and Chapel Hill. Life as a bottom-rung hourly office drone and the simultaneous explosion of the leftwing netroots during the George W. Bush Administration and the Iraq War set my opinions on their path. I demonstrated more than once in Washington, D.C., with hundreds of thousands of others, between 2005 and 2008. Once I was even arrested at the White House together with 370 other people. Over the years, political differences provided the only persistent source of friction between dad and I. 

However, starting in 2015, a period of political accord developed between my dad, my brother Kris, and I because of our shared views about the dangers of the trend towards nationalist populism both at home and abroad. We were concerned about Trump, about the accelerating transformation of the Republican Party, about Putin, about Brexit, and about democratic decline in the West. We were concerned about the lack of domestic and international leadership during the growing pandemic. This was not the conservatism he knew and respected and he emphatically differentiated himself from it. 

Our regular telephone conversations only served to reinforce this growing consonance of political perspectives, and the evolving dialog sustained all three of us right up to the last weeks of Egons’s life.

Before we left the house in Garrett Park in September 2020, by unspoken agreement, Kris and I felt ourselves and one another entitled to an object connecting dad to us through history: he chose an original copy of the January 1977 Carnegie Hall program. I chose a piece of art: a carved wooden disk bearing the corporate emblem of Procter & Gamble in light, soft wood. On the back are carved his initials in Latin script: E.A.P., followed by: Новосибирск Aпрель-95. “Novosibirsk, April, 1995,” shortly before we left Russia. In addition to its “Man in the Moon” motif, the logo carried 13 Stars for the original 13 Colonies: Procter & Gamble really did represent America. So too had Egons. 

All his life since his start with P&G, dad occupied a progression of home office headquarters, each with the same desk blotter, handwritten memo pad for the budget, and the same letter opener. After 1995, this wooden disk was the sigil of Egons’s HQ: in the last phase of his life, a poorly-lit, poorly insulated, poorly ventilated attic room enclosed by closets, its slanting peaked roof at no place comfortably admitting a man of his height. To me, it also seemed like a map-room that charted Egons’s past. From 1960s-vintage model tanks he assembled as a kid to group photographs of the P&G staff of his office in Yemen backdropped by the Arabian desert, it contained the records of his passage and doubtlessly was where he had planned his future.

Now, Kris lives and works in London with his partner Jogita, visiting Latvia with her regularly. I am earning tenure as Assistant Professor of History at Florida Southern College and this very month am moving into my own first house with my fiancé Andrea. In 2021, Roberts will be leaving the house in Garrett Park for university.

Kris and I share a bond through music and through the discussion of history and politics, and we bond with Roberts over music and sport. Egons gave all three of us these things, and we hope to share them with each other for longer lives than his. Each of us is powerfully connected to Latvia in his own way. The humor that our father imparted to the three of us I am not capable of describing here. If I were more able, I would dearly wish to convey a sense of it. But since I am not, it will be part of Egons my brothers and I alone will cultivate and enjoy.

Dr. Richards Plavnieks
Lakeland, Florida
November 2020