Vladimír Pechar

"Around 1960 I was a leader of a Dixieland band. One of my musicians was a bad trombonist, and thus I exchanged him for a better one, but still I didn't want to kick him out, because he was a good friend of mine. He tried contrabass and since that time he began playing it. And since as a contrabass player he could now use his mouth, too, he began singing, and well, he sang so well, that later he became that famous Jiří Grossmann. It was me who later paired him up with Sláva Šimek, who was an absolutely unknown guy at that time. That happened when we played at the opening of the club Olympic, we had a student performance there, kind of modeled on the Semafor theatre performances, and its co-author was this Šimek, and I introduced them to one another during that opening celebration. I still keep a pamphlet from that time where it says that the authors of the performance were Sláva Šimek and Vladimír Bystrov, and my name is written there as the band leader. Basically, I put these two boys together during that evening, and they eventually went on to form this famous duo."

"In the intervals when Scouting was not allowed and when we grew older, we were hitchhiking throughout the country as students. We had summer vacation, so we would get our backpacks and off we went. I would always take my guitar with me, and this way we would wander for as long as three weeks. Our record time on the road was five weeks in a row, hitchhiking all over Czechoslovakia. At first I went only with Vašek Podlaha for two weeks, we made a circle around Bohemia, as close to the state borders as we could, and then we headed to Moravia. After two weeks we had a rendezvous with another couple of friends in Ostrava, because one of the guys had his grandma there. We had agreed to meet in his grandma’s place and wait for each other there, and then we went to Slovakia for another four weeks, all the way eastward to Košice. Thus the two of us, Vašek Podlaha and I, were on the road for six weeks, and we set a record, for normally we were going just for four or five weeks. We traveled freely, without lugging any tents around, just a blanket sewn together, because after the war there were no sleeping bags yet. We only carried that hard, ugly, army-issued blanket, which was sewn together on the side so that we wouldn’t roll out of it when sleeping in a strawstack. That was the best time – roaming free and wild, no buses or trains, just hitchhiking. There was not that much road traffic at that time, and there was no risk involved – nor for us, that something would happen to us, nor for the drivers, like that we would rob them or something. Cars would even stop by themselves when we were not even asking a ride. We would be walking on the curb and chatting, and suddenly we would hear vrouuuum, bang, and a car would stop behind us: ´Boys, get in! Get in for a ride!´"

"We were building a road in the Sokolov region. You couldn’t even make a fire there. There was no wood and it was an open plain, nothing grew there, and we had nothing to make fire with. It was in November and December and the temperature was minus twenty degrees; I still remember it. We stayed in wooden barracks on pillars, and wind was thus blowing underneath the floor, gusts of wind half a meter under you, and a simple floor with cracks between the planks. Wind from the field was thus normally passing through our room. That’s where we had to sleep. There was a stove, but the fire would die at ten o'clock , because no wood was added, there wasn’t any. During the day, we were digging the frozen ground in minus twenty degrees. On top of that, we had no kitchen there, and they were thus bringing food for us in kettles, which were leaking. In the morning they would thus bring us frozen coffee with a layer of ice on top. Soup was frozen, too, we didn’t even eat it, and we were eating frozen dumplings."

"One of the experiences I personally like to remember was when we had the ceremonial campfire and the troop leader came there to say good-bye to us and to announce that he was ending his Scouting activity. He told this to us by the campfire, which we had on a riverbank about a kilometer from the camp. There was a beautiful rock towering above the river; the place just had a very romantic atmosphere. As we were coming back to the camp in darkness along the river, we had to walk on a bad path, where you might get killed if you slipped down; well, or at least break your leg. We walked in the darkness without flashlights, and we had to feel the terrain in front of us in order not to fall in the water and all of a sudden someone grabbed my hand. I could only feel that it was a big hand, an adult's hand. And so we walked together, and I held firmly to that adult man, and well, I was no little boy, I was fifteen, but still it felt quite good that somebody offered you his hand and you could feel that it was a big hand. Only when we walked further, I saw that the person holding me was our leader, the one who had come to say good-bye. For me, it felt a little weird, and pleasant at the same time. It was a chilling moment: his leaving, when he told us about it – unfortunately, for financial reasons, he had to quit Scouting – I think he was moving to another city to study – and his hand when he reached out for me in the darkness. For me, this gesture was very pleasant, but at the same time it was also chilling. It was a farewell, it was our last handshake."