František Stránský

* 1946

  • "We had a very passionate teacher. She said it bluntly in front of the children: 'That's the son of a tradesman.' The children were devoted to the teacher and prejudiced against me. One classmate even spat on my jacket saying, 'Oh yeah, daddy's rich. He'll buy you a new one!' I felt the bias. The kids were worked up. We called the teacher 'Russophile'. I suffered for it for years. Yet my dad, when he was working, my mom would say, 'If someone doesn't come to fix their bike, we won't have meat for lunch.'"

  • "There was a coniferous tree opposite, I think, a silver spruce. My father had tied the steering wheel of a tricycle to it with a belt to make it go round and round. He started it up, put me on it, and had it circle the spruce so that lots of people would see it and make the tricycle popular. Back then, it was still called OS-KAR - like a cart on wheels."

  • "My father used to take the moped to Pilsen, and when he arrived in Pilsen, he was often stiff. He wanted to see his family often, so he commuted. Then he got healthily angry and said he wanted something that wouldn't fall all the time. He had knowledge from the industrial school. So he came up with something that would protect him from rain and wouldn't fall. He already had an idea that would be cheap and not too much work. He had welding at home, and tubing was available. Many times, I saw there was a real shortage of those tubes. But he was able to weld up a section like that from a few tubes. He made, for example, a trailer for a car or a tricycle in those days, which was welded on one section from small tubes, so you couldn't even tell. When I looked at it, I thought, 'I wouldn't think of welding a piece like that out of many tubes.'"

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Dad commuted three hundred kilometers on a moped, so he invented the Velorex

František Stránský, 1970s
František Stránský, 1970s
zdroj: witness archive

František Stránský was born on 10 September 1946 in Dolní Sloupnice. He lived all his life in Česká Třebová. His father, František Stránský (1914- 1954), had a locksmith‘s workshop and a store with motorcycle parts, and he was also the designer of the Velorex motor tricycle. His mother, Ludmila (1923-1996), helped her husband in the shop. František also had a sister, Oldřiška, born in 1944. Father built the first vehicles in the late 1930s. He and his brother Mojmír patented a motor tricycle called OS-KAR in 1945. After 1948, the communists nationalized the Stránský family workshop and incorporated it into the Hradec Králové Velo union. František Stránský became a capitalist. Not only the father suffered from surveillance and oppression, but also the son, who was mocked by children at school. In order to produce the tricycle in series, it received the designation of a vehicle for invalids in 1950, and the company moved in 1952 to the Velorex Solnice Production Cooperative. In January 1954, two of the closest people in the family died - father and grandfather. František was going through the worst time in his life and felt lonely for a long time. Only his apprenticeship as a toolmaker and independent creative work, which he enjoyed, gave him security. He could not establish a closer relationship with his mother‘s new partner but was very fond of his half-sisters Blanka and Alena. In the same year, OS-KAR was renamed Velorex. In 1966-1967 František Stránský was in the military, and then in 1971, he married Věra Valiková (1953-2010), together they had three sons, born in 1971, 1974, and 1977. He worked at Strojtex Česká Třebová, then at his uncle Mojmír‘s communal plastics workshop. After 1989, František Stránský went to work in Austria, and for 17 years, he commuted there during the week doing construction work. He found shelter there with his cousin, who emigrated there in the 1980s. As a religious person, he knows that no matter what he experienced in his life, he always had a protective hand over him.