Good Bye Vic! Miss You Already

[Fishcher photo from a University webpage
which no longer is working.] 

I believe this is a picture of Vic when he was a delegate at the Alaska Constitutional Convention.  

Like his good friend Lidia Selkregg, he was someone who made everyone he talked to feel special.  

 

 Here's some of what I wrote about Vic's autobiography - To Russia With Love - on his 95th birthday, four years ago. 

"There's something of a Forrest Gump quality to Vic Fischer's life - he lived through many historic moments in the history of the 20th Century, and played important roles in a number of them.  His father was the famous journalist, Louis Fischer, who was married to a Russian writer.  He was born in Berlin in 1924 spent his early years in Berlin and Moscow, escaping from Stalin purges through intervention from Eleanor Roosevelt in 1939."

Many remarkable men and women have made Alaska their home.  None of their lives was more remarkable than Vic's.  

 

Vic at his 95th birthday party in May 2019.

In the legislative halls of Juneau 2010

Vic was at the rally to gather signatures for the Dunleavy recall in 2019.  I'm pretty sure Dunleavy would have been recalled if it hadn't been for COVID.  The organizers got the required 28,000 signatures in two weeks.  That's phenomenal.  So getting the recall petition certified was easy.  But the next round required another petition to get it on the ballot.  And as the group was ready to start the second petition, COVID shut everything down.  No gatherings.  People weren't going places like the library or the DMV where it was easy to get signatures.  And the recall movement died of COVID.

Here's Vic in Juneau talking to Rep. David Gutenberg.  I was blogging the legislature and a question had come up about what was intended in the Alaska Constitution regarding the Boundary Commission.  Vic, who'd been a member of the Constitutional Convention was there and I was able to get his interpretation of what the Constitution intended on that issue.  Unfortunately, that video is a blank on the page, so I can't post it now.  [I saved some videos on Vidler which eventually started charging.  They did help me by sending me all the video I had up there, but it was a complicated process of redoing them all.  I got a number redone and up on YouTube, but not all.  I'm guessing that's what happened to this one.]

But I do have this video of Vic speaking at the "It's Our Oil" rally in 2013.  You can see the whole video (with other speakers) at the original post.

Alaskans have lost one of our greatest statesmen and a great human being..