As the son of an immigrant — his father came to the United States from Scotland at age 4 — Walter Gallacher knows newcomers arrive with more than their luggage and dreams.
So Gallacher, a Glenwood Springs man who retired four years ago from his job as director of marketing for Colorado Mountain College, proposed the idea of recording immigrants’ stories and airing them on KDNK, a public radio station in Carbondale. The stories also are posted online at .
“One thing that troubled me in particular was the pejorative associated with ‘immigrant,’ ” Gallacher said.
“The word ‘illegal’ is a terrible way to identify them. We wanted to remind the community that we all are immigrants. Everyone, once, was called names.”
So Gallacher seeks out immigrants from Aspen to Parachute, bringing his portable recording studio — a laptop computer and a digital recording program. Then he spends 30 minutes to 2 hours listening and asking questions.
His subjects range from El Salvador native Ana Ariza, who was 5 when war tore apart her home country, to Klaus Obermeyer, the German who came to the U.S. in 1947 and created an international ski clothing empire.
Among the more extraordinary stories is a multiple-part interview with Chechen immigrant Ilias Satouev, who now works for the nonprofit Mountain Valley Development Services in Edwards. In Chechnya, his impetuous younger brother leapt at the chance to fight for his country when the Russians revived an aggressive Chechen genocide program in 1994.
Satouev, who spent five years as a college student in Siberia, was just as passionately anti-war. After his brother ran away in late 1994, Satouev began searching for him.
He found his brother, suffering from injuries that later required nine operations, in May 1995, and contrived a rescue that included two trips through the war zone and some adroit conversation with Russian guards.
Satouev immigrated to the U.S. a year later, where he revived a tenuous friendship with Don Kaufman, a Glenwood Springs man he briefly met in Moscow in 1991. Kaufman, a newly minted lawyer, secured amnesty for Satouev, only days after U.S. State Department staff witnessed 20 Chechen men — all unsuccessful amnesty applicants — fatally machine- gunned by Russian soldiers.
“All these folks are heroes,” Gallacher said. He has produced more than 80 “Immigrant Stories” interviews to date.
“And Ilias in particular. There’s another part to his story: He went back to Chechnya to rescue his mother and his wounded brother. You hear their stories, and it gives people pause. What it’s done for people in the community — and it’s what we hoped the project would do — is have people see their neighbors in a different way. You see Ilias in the grocery store, and it makes you wonder what the story is of each of the other people you see there.”
Hear more immigrant stories: Go online to . and click on “Our Projects,” then “Immigrant Stories.”
