When Simon Ross took off from Moscow and wound up in Vancouver, it was a bit like Valery Chkalov’s itinerary in 1937.
Unlike the famed Soviet aviator, however, Ross stayed here for a while.
Now a Seattle resident, Ross returned to Vancouver on June 20 for the 80th anniversary of Chkalov’s trailblazing flight. Ross and some friends honored the technological triumph of the first transpolar flight by celebrating another mechanical milestone of the Soviet era: the Lada automobile.
Ross is a member of a club that collects vintage Lada cars, the most visible product of the Soviet auto industry. The group of seven vehicles gathered in Tacoma at about 5 a.m. and arrived in Vancouver at around 8:30 a.m. — precisely 80 years after Chkalov and two other Soviet airmen landed at Pearson Field on June 20, 1937.
The trip also gave Ross a chance to mark his own personal journey, he said.
“I was 23 years old when I immigrated to the U.S. in 1992,” he said. Ross and his wife arrived with two suitcases and their 18-month-old child.
“I felt a bit like Chkalov,” he said, something that was echoed by the family’s home in east Vancouver.
“We were living very close to Chkalov Drive,” he said.
“I went to Clark College to study English,” which is where he took another step on behalf of his new home.
“I legally changed my name on the second day of college. The teacher was having a difficult time pronouncing ‘Khvorostukhin.'”
So he took the “Ros” from the middle of his last name and Americanized it by adding another “s.”
The family eventually relocated to the Seattle area, where Ross is a businessman. But Ross still has a bit of childhood heritage to keep him in touch with his origins. The car he drove to Vancouver is a bright blue 1974 Lada.
“It’s a same (type of) car my father was driving when I was little kid, a Lada 2102,”Ross said. “The exact same color he drove.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
