Half a century in the editorial board of Mladá fronta
Karel Pacner was born on 29 March 1936 in Janovice nad Úhlavou. As a boy he had participated in the first renewal of the Czech Scout organization Junák. Between 1949 and 1951 he and his colleagues from the club had been publishing magazine Pochodeň (Torch). During his grammar school studies in Klatovy he wrote articles for the daily Práce. Following graduation in 1954 he studied at the University of Economics in Prague where he graduated in 1962. Ever since mid-1950s he collaborated with Mladá fronta publishing house, becoming a member of the editorial board first in the summer of 1959 and then again after concluding his military service in 1961. Since the turn of the 1950s he has been an active popularizer of natural sciences, later focusing further on astronautics. In the late-1960s he began exploring the topic of espionage. In the 1970s and 80s he took part in the production of a TV series on astronautics and wrote a number of popular science books on the space program. During the Velvet Revolution he was a member of Mladá fronta’s temporary management. In 1990 he contributed to its independence, privatization and sale to a foreign investor. In the 1990s he prepared documentation for a TV series on Czechoslovak espionage of the Czech TV. He had left the editorial board of Mladá fronta DNES in 2001. He was active as an author of popular science literature and he also published on the blog www.karelpacner.cz until the end of his life. Karel Pacner died on 7 April 2021.
