Few can say what Robert Fries can about Antarctica: Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
This summer, more than six decades after he spent 13 months at the South Pole, Fries handed the child-sized shirt, emblazoned with “Operation Deep Freeze,” to Isaac King. The 88-year-old retired Anderson University astronomy and physics professor, and King, a 24-year-old filmmaker from Landrum, met at a gas station in Anderson. King had purchased the T-shirt from Fries on Facebook Marketplace.
Then King got the real treasure — 1,400 feet of film Fries shot documenting his polar experiences in 1962 and ’63.
“We got to talking, and the subject of the film came up,” said Fries, whose last name is pronounced like the name of the operation. “I don’t know why I mentioned it, but I did. And then it turned out he was a filmmaker.”
“I was really pretty blown away at some of the stuff included in the footage,” said King, who also works in film restoration. Of the Kodachrome frames, he added: “They are spectacular.”
The effort it took to get those images could easily have left Fries and his 21 fellow scientists and U.S. Navy sailors dead.
“It was minus-80 degrees and a wind chill that doesn’t even compute, doesn’t even make any sense,” Fries said of the temperatures outside Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
As the “aurora scientist,” he studied the ionospheric light shows that can wreak havoc on long-range communications and manned spaceflight — a top priority during the Cold War.
The expedition began in October 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Russians pointed nuclear weapons at the U.S. from the island nation just 90 miles from Key West, Florida.
“There was no question that we were still on the verge of war. And that was very sobering,” he said. On the plane trip south, the person sitting next to him on the plane said: “‘Well, where we’re going, we should be safe, but will anybody be alive to retrieve us a year later?’”
Likewise, rescue was impossible. Aviation fuel congeals in those temperatures.
“We had many things go wrong that could have been fatal. But we persevered through it,” he said. He applauded the leadership of then-Lt. Col. Don Bessinger Jr., the officer-in-charge and a Navy doctor who retired as a colonel and died in Greenville in 2021.
In a land where the sun sets in March and doesn’t rise again for six months, Fries and his military and civilian counterparts worked, researched and even played — they organized a “South Pole Bowl,” a football game with a basketball. Outdoors. Navy’s team iced the scientists.
Fries also remembered some special downtime.
“I had a chance to do a lot of reading, including the spiritual side. I do remember thinking about the passages in the Bible where it speaks about God being with us in the outermost parts of the world,” he said. “And I thought, the writer couldn’t have imagined that there actually would be people in such a place — but there are, and I’m one of them.”
King plans to send his film-restoration work to a colleague at the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections in Columbia. The result, he said, should run approximately 50 minutes.
Meanwhile, Fries relishes replaying his time at the bottom of the world with people at the top of their game.
“One of the things that I thought was very notable was the friendliness of all the people, one to the other, a cooperative attitude,” he said. “We all knew it was a difficult environment, and we all did our part.”
