jill.hoffman@roanoke.com 381-1679
   
   Eberhard "Alex" Baer spent hours pouring over European history in library-borrowed books.
   But the former Virginia Tech library employee, who died Tuesday at the age of 74, lived through his own chapter of the continent's history.
   Baer was born in Oelsnitz, Germany - what became the Eastern bloc before the Berlin Wall fell.
   At 18, he attempted to cross the border to the American zone, but Soviet border patrol guards caught Baer and held him in a Soviet jail for several days.
   "It was very dangerous," said Baer's widow, Eva, from her home in Blacksburg.
   On his second try a week later, Baer made it across to freedom, leaving his mother, stepfather and relatives behind.
   He lived for a year in Wiesbaden, working for the American government, until an American surgeon sponsored him so he could emigrate to Los Angeles in 1948.
   At the outbreak of the Korean War, Baer volunteered for the U.S. Air Force and served four years at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas.
   The GI Bill paid for his studies at UCLA, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley where he earned master's degrees in Russian and Slavic languages, literature and library science. As a librarian for UCLA, he met Eva, a native of Hungary, while she visited a friend, who also worked at the library.
   "I thought he was very generous and nice and kind and took me to San Francisco and Las Vegas," she said.
   When he proposed a year later, Eva, who had only seen him a few weeks in person during overseas trips and who was divorced with a 6-year-old at the time, waited a year to say "yes."
   "I don't think we really knew each other," Eva said. "Lottery in some ways."
   But the pair had common values, Eva said, and "he was absolutely one of the most decent people I could think of."
   The couple ocean-hopped over the years so Baer could work at Konstanz and Regensburg universities and at the Slavic and Eastern European Studies Center in Washington, D.C.
   In 1974, the couple settled in Blacksburg, and Baer served as associate director of Virginia Tech's libraries. Over 22 years there, Baer worked in the public services and humanities departments and as a cataloger.
   "He was really devoted to developing the collection," said Harry Kriz, director of inter-library services for the university.
   Baer was an introvert who was comfortable burying himself in books. His stepdaughter, Susan Gurley, assistant dean for Georgetown University Law Center's international graduate program, said Baer's shyness was sometimes misunderstood as aloofness.
   "He was very interested in what other people had to say, but he didn't always know how to engage other people in conversation," Gurley said.
   She said he was "100 percent" a father figure to her: "Absolutely. In every way. The good and the bad."
   When her mother encouraged her to live at home in Blacksburg while she went to Virginia Tech, Baer insisted that his stepdaughter get the American college experience and live on campus and in apartments.
   "He really pushed me to have my own life, even though we lived in town," Gurley said.
   As a retiree, Baer hiked every Thursday with a local group and listened to classical and jazz music. He wrote detective stories and maintained a lifelong passion for politics - so much so that he requested an absentee ballot to vote in the Democratic Primary, in his last days.
   "As an immigrant, he took his civic responsibility very seriously," Gurley said. "As one of his last acts, he voted."