Bojan Čermák

* 1941

  • "The matter was such, that we came together, by my rules, at that Císařská louka, and that we talked about it. If the older ones met up somewhere else, it's possible. And now, that we need two teams, we decided, that there would be two teams going against each other and firstly we decided on the names of those teams. And so Pacík thought, that we would be The Wild Men, and we had this on our T-shirts, and our competitors still couldn't think something up, and so they then decided on... Jesus Christ, Pacík definitely told you that name. And we said, that these two teams would be the ISBA, and tthat Pacík would be with that Standa and the others. And there I was not one of the ones who came up with the names. I was this kind of basically a perfectionist, as in reagrds to the rules.. I had them learned off by heart right from the top and I played as the pitcher."

  • "When I was supposed to go back, then all sorts of random relatives, who were thrown all over the place, told me: 'Look here, don't be stupid.' And so I wanted to call home, and when my mother replied, I realized, that no. I told her: 'Look here, no.' And then that professor De Vries, who I had come to before, what kind of options did I have, and he said: 'Not at the school here, but I can get you a place in Twente Entschede, because that's being founded right now. Well, but that was I fell off from that idea. And I realized, me and the professor until his death only ever sent each other Christmas cards and so on, but I realized that he basically also grew up with his career in a foreign land, where a person for let us say three months has nothing to do but their own work and in the evening only that, which is connected to that work."

  • "You see, when they demolished it, shot it to pieces, then there came also one from that group, not completely basic, not from that Scout, but from that group, with which we skied, Libor Dudek, he was one of the construction workers, who were supposed to demolish it a bit. But the moustache and medals were gone, they were probably gone before they even began with the demolition. He actually somehow even gained the medal or something good like that for the slalom at Petráška, that was at Klínovky, and I think it was actually won by Honza Špalek, who was a PE teacher through skiing and is in Switzerland. But anyway, exactly after he took it, then immediately we started running there and managed to only get some ordinary rock, which didn't even have a hole drilled in, didn't even have a nice shape, and so it wasn't even halfway decent then, but I think, that it also got a wooden sign with a commemoration."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 22.06.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:57:57
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Praha, 30.07.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 02:01:24
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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I did almost everything for softball

Bojan Čermák in the 60s
Bojan Čermák in the 60s
photo: archiv pamětníka

Bojan Čermák was born on the 6th of December 1941 in Prague. After the year 1948 he entered a yachting troop, which was originally the 5th Sea Scout Harbor. The troop, led by Jaroslav Novák-Braťka, retained its Scouting spirit even in the years when the ban on Scouting was in place. With his friends from the troop he founded the joke softball association ISBA (International Softball and Baseball Association) in the year 1961, which still functions to this day. Bojan studied at a grammar school and at a physics-mathematics faculty. A few days after the invasion in August 1968 he managed to go to Holland, where he spent more than a year at the university in Eindhoven. His whole life he worked as a mathematician and physicist and after the events of the year 1989 he founded his own company that dried uranium.