Ing. Ivan Hubáček

"Havel and Tříská were here on the radio. They were broadcasting from Ještěd, there were TV people in the house downstairs. It looked like... The Russians were pointing at it and saying it was some kind of missile base with a missile. So it was scary whether they were going to shoot it down, shoot it up or not. It was all very tense. So my dad ran with both Tříska and Havel. And it turned out well. We didn't know either... there was shooting. It was a tough year. There were both Russians and Ukrainians, so everybody came at that time."

"That really was a tremendous award. I think he was the fourth one to get it, not to be taken at my word, I don't know exactly. But he really appreciated it very much. The fact that he couldn't go for it, he said, because they kept delaying his visa, and they gave it to him on the last day, so of course he couldn't make it there. But I've also heard that somehow the Argentina side defended themselves, that they couldn't agree on something else, so you really don't know. The truth is, they didn't let my dad in for the prize. And then it came in the mail."

"As far as the work on Jěštěd and with companies is concerned, there were no problems. Because those companies were happy at the time that it was all jiskchum for those companies as well. And they were happy to take part in it, because it was getting out of the grey of communism, socialism. But as far as the problems were concerned, it was these political problems from that 1970 onwards, it was deliberate throwing of sticks under the feet of stupid people."

"The problem was the period 1970-1972, when normalisation came. My dad had huge problems with Ještěd because it couldn't be finished somehow. It wasn't like the fifties, sixties, but it was a terrible time, the normalization. So he wrote to all sorts of parties, he wrote to Husák, he wrote to Šubek, all over the place. And the only thing that worked was that he wrote to Ludvík Svoboda, and then things got moving and they started to finish Ještěd. Everybody thought that Ještěd was finished, because the shell was finished, but nothing was finished inside. So that time was a terrible time for my dad, it was a terrible time. The State Security officers were standing outside the house, always on duty, writing down stupid things: 'Son came home from school, he worked in the garden, father went home, he went for a walk with mother.' Stupid things."

"Because he was a 1924, he and his friend Franta Strejček were sent to the factory to drill holes, as he said. Eventually he returned with the American army to Plzeň, to Rokycany. There they met my mother in Pilsen. He got on an armed train and they went to Prague for the Prague Uprising. And as Dad said, 'I fired only once and I broke the roof of the Valdez factory right away. So I quit because I was sorry.'"