Hungarian immigrant gladly details the life that brought him to Pa.

The former Hungarian tank commander has a strong hatred for Communists.

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) — On days when the weather cooperates, when it’s not too hot and not too cold, you are likely to find Stephen Tordy working on his car. A chocolate brown 1973 Ford LTD. A big, sturdy tank of a car.

They don’t make cars like this anymore — the ones with big, blustery personalities and powered with a lot of vroom-vroom. A little like Tordy himself. It is fitting, therefore, that this 78-year-old former Hungarian tank commander should choose this model as his first car in America.

If you just pass him by, all you will see is an elderly man who wheels himself around on a motorized scooter. Its front wire basket is filled with wrenches, rags and brushes that he might need for his repair work on his car.

But if you stop to chat, he will open up the folded map of his life and talk about the miles he has traveled.

“I am just a little Hungarian shoemaker,” he will tell you.

As he sands rough putty into a smooth patch for the car’s side door, he tells you he’s working on his “baby.” That’s what Tordy calls the car he has cared for since it was spanking new and shiny and ready to travel life’s gritty, potholed roads.

Despite the wear and tear, the 34-year-old car still looks pretty good. Tordy buffs the exterior to a glossy shine and tweaks things under the hood with the same detail and attention he was taught when he was called Istvan and apprenticed as a shoemaker in Hungary.

Look carefully just below the hood ornament and you will see a tiny Hungarian flag that’s smaller than a thumbprint. Tordy put it there.

It is clear Tordy is not from here. He opens his mouth and the words rumble and roll thickly off his tongue.

“I born Hungarian. I always Hungarian,” he says.

On this day, it is already hot and steamy by midmorning and Tordy is forced to cut his time with his baby that’s parked outside the high-rise where he lives.

On an upper floor, inside the small, two-bedroom apartment he shares with his Hungarian wife, Elizabeth, the air conditioner is barely functioning and blows like hot breath.

A cowboy movie with Charlton Heston plays on the television in a corner of the compact living and dining area.

“I like the war pictures and the boom-boom pictures,” Tordy says.

Tordy is a talker. Loud and boisterous, he is quick to tease and laugh with whomever he speaks. He jokes about his thick, sometimes impenetrable, accent and blames the listener for not understanding him.

He sits on the sofa in the living room decorated here and there with tourist trinkets and religious items from Hungary, framed photographs of his wife and their granddaughter, whom they reared as their child.

“We adoption her,” he says. Tordy will not say much about her mother — his daughter — who was an infant, and his ex-wife, who were left behind when he escaped Hungary in 1957.

Nor was life easy when Germany occupied Hungary during World War II. Tordy remembers hiding in bomb shelters in Budapest when he was 14 to escape the twice-daily Allied bombings to root out the German soldiers.

He remembers helping three Jewish men hide from an SS soldier who came looking for them.

He remembers sweating with fear when he intentionally misled the soldier to go down another street.

And he’s still angry at the United States for dropping bombs on his city. It’s just slightly less than his enmity toward Germany for invading Hungary and the Soviets for occupying his country for decades after that.

Twice he was drafted into the Soviet-led Hungarian army, which is where he learned to drive a tank. When tensions intensified between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Tordy and 55 other tank drivers were ordered to drive to the border between Hungary and Yugoslavia.

“The dirty Russians wanted us to fight. I told my driver, ’When we go to the Yugoslavia border, open the doors and put a white flag in front of our tank.’ Then we turned back to town,” Tordy says.

“This is the turning point,” he says. “Twelve years under the Communists. We can do no more.” On Oct. 23, 1956, Tordy took part in the Hungarian revolution. He said he was part of a group of roughly 50 men and women who stormed Radio Budapest. He was armed with a submachine gun, a pistol and two hand grenades. A woman in the group commandeered the microphone and announced to Hungarians that they were overthrowing the Communist government.

“It was the mouse and the elephant,” Tordy laughs heartily. Tordy and others hunted down leading Communists, including a woman known for conducting sadistic tortures for the secret police. But they never found her.

To this day, he still has a burning hatred of Communists. He cannot mention the word without unleashing a string of invectives, too. He doesn’t hold back his anger toward other groups of people he dislikes.

He is embittered toward Eisenhower for promising to help the revolutionaries at the time but not following through. The revolution failed and Tordy and his co-revolutionaries were not safe. Several months later, Tordy trekked across Hungary for eight frigid nights to gain freedom over the Austrian border, leaving behind a wife and daughter, parents and brothers and sisters. He spent two years in Austrian refugee camps.

“I lose everything,” he says.

When Tordy had the opportunity to leave the camp, he was offered sanctuary in Australia, where he lived for two years before immigrating to the U.S. to join Elizabeth, his second wife, whom he met in one of the camps. He landed at John F. Kennedy Airport on Dec. 31, 1960, a brisk winter day he remembers well because it contrasted so greatly with Melbourne’s oppressive heat.

Tordy passed up an opportunity to join his two aunts who lived in a rural part of Long Island, preferring instead the city life. He and Elizabeth settled in Allentown where her sister, brother, aunt and uncle lived. Two days later, Tordy, armed with a Hungarian-English dictionary, looked for work in downtown Allentown. Wetherhold and Metzger, a shoe store that used to be in the 700 block of Hamilton Street, was reluctant to hire him because of his limited English.

“Tell me, I have to talking or working?” he asked the owner in broken English. He was promptly hired.

There were more than 40 shoemakers in the Allentown area in the 1960s and Tordy worked for several of them over the years, including those who operated inside of the Green’s and McCrory’s 5-and-10 stores on Hamilton Street. Eventually he saved enough money to buy what he calls his “dreaming home,” a fixer-upper rowhouse at 205 N. Sixth Street where he could move his family and live above the shoe store he wanted to open. He spent years renovating the building himself, but realized it was time to leave in the early 1990s when the neighborhood turned bad.

He ran Tordy Shoe Repair out of his first floor storefront for more than 20 years, beginning in 1969. He notes, it was a time when people still repaired their possessions.

And tomorrow, if the weather cooperates, and it is not too hot and not too cold, you will see the elderly man return to work on his car.

And if you stop to chat, he might start his story, “I am just a little Hungarian shoemaker.”