A man from Dolne Paseky from the upper end
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František Drápala was born on 22 December 1940 in Dolní Paseky, part of Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, in Wallachia. He grew up in the house of his grandparents Frnka. In the 1950s, both his father Jaroslav and his uncle František resigned from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. František then had problems getting into the forestry school he dreamed of attending. Since his youth he was interested in nature - he caught snakes and beetles and liked to be alone in the forest or in the meadow. Eventually he trained as an electrician. But he often had heated moments at the boarding school in Vrchlabí. For example, when he and his friends were shooting from the window with a pistol that one of them had taken from his father at home. František managed to hit an electric wire and half of Vrchlabí went out at once. The incident was subsequently investigated by the State Security Service, and František earned a C in conduct and a conditional expulsion from school as a juvenile. By contrast, his compulsory military service was a success and he spent it partly in Bechyně and partly in Šumava as a ski instructor for army officers. He worked all his life in the Tesla Rožnov company - he started as a regular electrician and ended as a central maintenance foreman in 2000. During the second renewal of Junák he co-founded a scout troop in Rožnov. He used to play amateur theatre and in recent years he has contributed his memories to collections of stories such as Unforgettably lived life of “Teslaks” or Green years: what it was like in the army. He has also published a biographical memoir on the history, customs and life in the Rožnov pastures under the title “Tam pod Bačovým vrchem”. His son, Daniel Drápala, is the head of the Institute of European Ethnology at Masaryk University in Brno. In 2022, the witness lived at Dolní Paseky in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm.
