Cary O. Fischer

TINMOUTH - Cary Otakar Fischer of Tinmouth died on March 26, 2013, after a brief illness, at age 86.

Mr. Fischer was born in 1926, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. His teenage years were spent under the Nazi occupation. He immigrated to the United States in 1947, just before the communist takeover of the Czechoslovak government, and became a U.S. citizen along with the rest of his immediate family.

Mr. Fischer graduated from Stanford University in California, and worked for several years as a freelance journalist. He reported from Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. During his career as a political scientist in Washington D.C., he worked for the State Department under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, taught at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and was an editor of the U.S. State Department's periodical, "Problems of Communism." He moved to New York City in 1969 and worked at the Harper & Row publishing house as an editor of Eastern European dissident literature. He later taught history and political science at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Mr. Fischer returned frequently to the Czech Republic and acted as an inofficial political consultant to members - often old friends - of the new democratic government of Václav Havel.

In 1965, he bought a farmhouse in Tinmouth, and lived in Vermont permanently for the last twenty years.

In his youth, Mr. Fischer was an avid skier and tennis player, and throughout his life he was a connoisseur of fine food and a true companion of several dogs and cats.

He is survived by his devoted wife of twenty years, Sidonia Fischer, of Tinmouth; his daughter, Eva Gonova, of Essex Junction; his son, Jan Otakar Fischer, of Berlin, Germany (his child from a first marriage); his granddaughter, Sonja Fischer, of Berlin, Germany; and his sister, Helena Wulsin, of Geneva, Switzerland.

A memorial service will be held later in the spring.