In 1966, Czechoslovakia natives Dr. Vaclav A. Vokac and his wife, Alena, stood at a crossroads.
The communist Czech government that had sent them to work for the World Health Organization in Tunisia for a year, which they had stretched into three, now had ordered them home.
To them, the nearby Sahara was a better place than oppressive Prague, where his lawyer-father was "retired" at 53 because he would not join the Communist Party and her father had been imprisoned for speaking out against the government and lost his business, said their daughter, Dr. Michelle C. Lynam of Midlothian
They decided to flee to the freedom of the United States to give their future children the freedoms they never had enjoyed.
Dr. Vokac, who worked in the medical research program of A.H. Robins Co. for 23 years and later practiced general and family medicine with Dr. Stuart Grandis on Laburnum Avenue and Dr. Frank Sasser in Montpelier, will be honored at a memorial service today, Saturday. It will be held at 10 a.m. at Westhampton Memorial Park Mausoleum, 10000 Patterson Ave.
The 83-year-old Henrico resident, whom patients fondly called Dr. V, died at home June 25 after a battle with Lewy body disease.
Born in Usti nad Labem in northwest Czechoslovakia, Dr. Vokac earned degrees from Charles University in Prague and soon amassed an impressive résumé of research articles and medical patents, Lynam wrote in an email.
At work, he met a lab technician whom he married in 1958.
Loving travel and adventure, they went to work in Tunisia in a government deal where the Czech government was paid in hard currency for the labor of its medical personnel.
"Vaclav and Alena were treated like royalty," Lynam wrote. "Thankful patients would often bring dinner. But in Northern Africa at the time, many people did not have refrigeration. When they brought you dinner, it was a live animal. Before long they had a gazelle and more rabbits than they could count running around their backyard."
When they decided to leave Tunisia, they sought refuge with Dr. Vokac's relatives near Pittsburgh. They arrived by boat in New York with their car, little money, their belongings and medical samples he had procured in Tunisia. Seeing the samples, customs officers "thought they had a drug dealer entering the U.S. and stripped their new car down to the chassis," Lynam wrote. They went free when no illegal drugs were found.
The Czech government blacklisted the Vokacs, who corresponded with family under assumed names. They were unable to obtain visas to visit home and parents until 1985 — and then, only for Alena and their children.
Dr. Vokac received a visa in 1989, but his parents had died by then.
Dr. Vokac worked at Robins on well-known drugs, such as Reglan. He passed his American medical boards in 1972.
"He thrived taking care of anything from a brittle diabetic to sewing up a laceration," Lynam said. "He wouldn't just tell someone to take a medicine, he would go into great detail and explain why." If medicine didn't help, his sense of humor often did, she said.
Proud of his U.S. citizenship, he took his family camping around the United States every summer and loved to take photographs.
In addition to his wife and daughter, survivors include a son, Dr. Charles W. Vokac of Glen Allen; and five grandchildren.
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