Long before all the hunting yarns, even before the chilling accounts of life behind the Iron Curtain, Mike Voldrich knew his father was special.
What he later learned was just how much so. When the Morrison resident contacted me a couple of months ago, it was with the notion of a story about a dedicated sportsman who has hunted Colorado elk for half a century.
A few months shy of his 80th birthday, Rudy Voldrich still climbs Colorado’s slopes with a vigor of men half his age, still processes by hand the animal he almost invariably bags each year, still thrills to the chance for a trout in a mountain stream.
“I have also been witness to his stamina on pheasant and quail hunts when he just wouldn’t quit,” son Mike said.
Then, looking beneath this patina of outdoor passion, a writer discovered not merely the hunter, but the man.
There was that thing with the Cold War, the night flight, the gunfire, the dying all around him. How Rudy Voldrich came to America is a classic of the old immigration, the way things used to be: working as a mechanic in an army motor pool in Germany, an appeal for immigrant status, finally given approval to join a sister sponsor who had married a soldier and settled in eastern Kansas.
Not many men can boast of a father like Rudy, simply because so few would have survived his circumstances to produce progeny. Born in what is now the Czech Republic, Rudy came to adulthood under a repressive communist regime that took away his bookkeeper’s pen and gave him a shovel.
He escaped to occupied Germany, then made two trips back to Czechoslovakia to lead friends and family to freedom. The last try turned bad.
“We had 22 people coming across to Germany, but somehow we had a spy in our midst,” he recounted last week in a voice still heavy with the Old Country. “They were waiting for us on the border.”
Rudy had retrieved a small suitcase from home that held photos of his family.
“They started shooting and I began to run. They put holes in my suitcase and I dropped it. From the pictures they found my family and put my father in jail.”
Rudy reached safety two days later, but never heard from the others.
“I don’t know how many survived,” he said.
He arrived in the United States in 1950, stayed briefly in New Jersey with a soldier he had met and then joined his sister in Kansas, where he makes his home in the town of Wamego, near Manhattan. He has remained in the same house for 43 years, since Mike was 5, raising a daughter and three sons.
A nordic combined ski competitor, he soon began regular trips to Winter Park, because the ski jump reminded him of the one back home. He later served as a jumping judge at the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley.
Rudy made his first hunting trip to Colorado in 1953 for deer. Three years later, he discovered elk and a lifetime obsession. He never would bother with deer again.
“Next fall will be my 50th year for elk. I missed only one year,” Rudy said of a quest that now involves mostly cows for the meat.
“The biggest was a big five-point that I got mounted. I shot a six-point, but it had a broken horn. I wanted to shoot a royal bull and did see two- or three-point, but never got a chance to shoot.”
For years, he has hunted in a camp with friends in Unit 12, south of Hayden. In what stands as an almost precise manifestation of the American dream, he continues to operate his auto transmission repair shop and also owns businesses that install swimming pools and sell golf carts.
“I tried to get him to move to Colorado, but he won’t budge,” Mike said.
But he’ll be here in autumn, when elk bugle and leaves begin to fall.
“I’m just waiting for my license to arrive,” said Rudy, who’ll celebrate his 80th birthday a few days after the hunt.
On Father’s Day 2007, that’s very special indeed.
Staff writer Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
