Václav Martínek

"We received from Czechoslovakia from my mother's parents, that is, from my grandfather and grandmother, they always sent us a book for Christmas. And amongst those I once got a book for Christmas called Emil Holan: A spark, that conquered the world. And was written for young people about electrical engineering. And I was so intrigued because there were various instructions, experiments, etc. None of that worked for me, because I couldn't get the parts anywhere at the time. But I just enjoyed it and I was very interested. And somehow, a friend and I got interested in class to study electrical engineering. My Dad, because he succeeded in music, and not to forget I still have a brother five years younger, so as soon as we started going to school at the age of six, he let us teach playing violin. It was the easiest musical instrument to achieve. So we practiced, at first we were quite annoyed I remember that. It's much harder to be able to play a song than for example piano. It takes much longer to achieve that. The first years we played out of curiosity, but then it really annoyed us to practice and we didn't want to do that anymore. But Dad pushed us and said, 'Look, with music, you can travel all over the world. The notes are the same all over the world. So you can manage anywhere as long as you know the music.'"