Albert Lea has had many photographers, both professional and amateur, in the past. A list of these people would include Ken Wangen, Bidney Bergie, June Wells, Robert Church and a former Tribune photographer named John Polis. And of these local photographers of the past, Polis likely had the most interesting and unusual life history.

The late John Polis was born during 1933 in Valka, Latvia. For the first seven years of his life he lived in an independent nation. This changed in June 1940 when the Russian Communists of what was then the Soviet Union took over the Republic of Latvia. Then a year later the Nazi Germans invaded the Soviet Union and for nearly three years the Latvians had to contend with another brutal regime. In 1944 the Germans started to retreat from the Baltic region. The Polis family had the choice to leave with the Germans or live again under the Soviet Russians. The family decided to leave their home and go to Germany.

At the end of World War II the Polis family was in a camp for displaced people. Then in 1949 the family came to the U.S. as refugees and settled in Kiester.

Polis graduated from Kiester High School and later Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. After serving as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, Polis worked for a few months for the Winona Daily News and from 1961 to 1967 was a photographer, reporter and sports editor for the Tribune.

In 1967 he became a studio and freelance photographer, plus insurance salesman and worked out of his home on Chestnut Street.

On several occasions he managed to make trips back to Latvia to visit relatives and renew childhood memories. On one of these trips he traveled with the Rev. Milton Ost of Albert Lea, who was very fluent in the German language.

Polis once commented that each visit to Latvia indicated that Soviet control of the nation was gradually fading away. Finally, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and Latvia, located between Estonia and Lithuania, became an independent republic again.

In the 1990s Polis even moved back to Latvia, but this didn’t quite work out and he returned to Albert Lea where he died on Sept. 1, 1999.

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