RUTHFULLY YOURS

The tidy beige house in Des Plaines. The office job in Glenview. The beautiful wife and two athletic sons. The Weber grill in the backyard. And the well-worn basketball hoop on the garage.

They are the ordinary details of an American life so easily taken for granted. But Walter Polovchak takes none of it for granted. For all of this, every day, Polovchak counts his blessings.

“Great neighbors, comfortable life,” he said, looking at the American flag decorations left over from the Fourth of July. “I’m blessed and thankful to God every day for what we have.”

Thirty years ago, this suburban dad became a household name when, as a 12-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, he bolted from his family’s apartment near Fullerton and Central when he learned his parents planned to return the family to what was then the communist Soviet Union.

On July 21, 1980, young Walter Polovchak was granted asylum to stay in the United States, setting off a Cold War legal skirmish that saw Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, accuse the United States of “scandalous tyranny and lawlessness” by usurping the elder Polovchaks’ parental rights.

Povolchak was sworn in as a United States citizen after he turned 18.

“I know many, many people take freedom for granted,” he said before taking his citizenship oath. “But I never will.”

The international drama waned, the Cold War ended. Polovchak got married, had kids, found a job, bought a house. Now, the memories are stored in his basement, where three dusty boxes are filled with newspaper clippings and videocassettes of interviews with the likes of Joan Rivers and Geraldo Rivera.

It took years for Polovchak to repair his fractured relationship with his family and more than a decade to bring his younger brother to the United States on a green card.

He reminds his U.S.-born sons, Alec, 16, and Kyler, 8, to be grateful for their opportunities but knows they live in a different world than he did.

“I guess it was a bigger thing, now that I’m older, maturer and I look back at everything that transpired to me staying here,” he said.

The boy once nicknamed “the littlest defector” — who vowed “Never I go back” — is all grown up.

These days, people are more likely to mistake Polovchak for bald actor Michael Chiklis of “The Shield” fame than to recognize him as the tween who wore an “I’m Happy to Be in America” T-shirt. But the name Polovchak still gets people’s attention.

“Sometimes you hear, ‘Gosh that name sounds so familiar,’ ” his wife, Margaret, said. “The minute you say the little boy who didn’t want to go home, they’re all, ‘Yeah!’ ”

The name meant nothing to her when she met Walter at work.

“I was pretty clueless to current events. But the minute I said his name to my mother, she was, like, ‘Oh! We prayed for him.’ “

At 42, Walter Polovchak is now older than his father, Michael, was when he moved his family — wife Anna, daughter Nataly and sons Walter and Michael — to Chicago. A bus driver in the Ukraine, Michael Polovchak found Chicago overwhelming.

“My father couldn’t get used to life, change, language, country,” Polovchak said. “He was just brought up in a different, old Soviet-era system.”

But where his father saw dead ends, young Walter saw opportunity.

“There was unlimited freedom of movement, freedom to go to church, freedom to live anywhere you want to go, freedom to travel.”

His older sister, 17 then, decided to stay. Their parents agreed. But when 12-year-old Walter made the same declaration, they fought to reunite him with the family in Ukraine.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said. “It was at that time in the midst of the Cold War. I did speak out against the Russian government and against communism and against gulags and some of the potential things that could have happened to me should I have been sent back.”

For a decade after he decided to stay in the United States, he and his family exchanged only two or three letters. The phone was expensive, the mail slow, and “there was some anger from both sides.”

Watching the Berlin Wall fall, though, he knew he wanted to return to his homeland, to see his family, which now included a younger sister, Julie, born in Ukraine after his family returned there. His first trip back was in 1993. He has returned every two years since.

“I’ve rebuilt my relationships with my brother and my father and sister and my mother,” he said. “Not that we see eye to eye and agree on everything. We have a different understanding of each other and appreciation.”

His last visit was more than a year ago, when his father died.

“I think part of Walter really feels like he missed out on that aspect of family life, maybe was even angry for a long time at his father,” his wife said. “He really came to terms and developed a relationship with him. It was very satisfying to Walter when his father said to him, ‘I probably made a very big mistake,” about five or six years ago.”

Walter’s younger brother Michael was 5 when the family returned to Ukraine. At 24, he applied for a green card to come live in Des Plaines.

“This was the best opportunity to do something,” Michael, now 35, said. “To change my life.”

He thought it would take two years to get his green card. It took more than 10.

Walter Polovchak calls “it frustrating that people cross the border on a daily basis illegally here, where somebody like myself spent 10 and a half years investing time, effort, energy and financial resources to help Michael come here legally. People don’t want to wait 10 years.”

Michael, who drives a cab in Park Ridge, admires his brother.

“He do something different, change his life,” he said in broken English. “Probably everybody wants to change his life.”