Lubomír Peške

"By some twist of fate, I bought tickets to see the Manfred Mann band, who came here for the jazz festival at the Congress Palace. It wasn't the sixty-seventh year that everything started to loosen up, as I had thought until recently. I traced it back to the year sixty-five. The first English group from London to come here. They weren't quite number one, maybe fourth on the charts, but they were a great band. They had a little boy with a tambourine singing with them. Paul Jones was his name. The concert was as part of Jazz Days, that's why they had jazz bands playing in front of them. And the Congress Palace had seats, like a cinema, but there were a lot of empty chairs in the back in several rows. Nowadays, no rock concert promoter could imagine having free chairs in the hall. Of course, the people there were excited. They had seen footage of rock concerts in the West and for a long time they were not happy that there were various jazzmen playing and blues singing. Everybody was waiting for the band and they were fantastic. But at the end, when people got up, the chairs started flying. They weren't secured at all. The cops got in and pushed us up against a huge glass wall and glass door. Of course, it broke and it was the cops' fault for pushing us in. It was a mess. Then they chased us around Holešovice in Julius Fučík Park. Where the wing of the Congress Palace later burned down."

"It was the seventy-fourth time that some other young people came in. So we founded the Socialist Youth Union (SSM). From my point of view, it was a responsibility to that society. To that community of those people. So I was the chairman of the Union, and there was this curious situation that I was signing as a guarantor... Because every new communist needed to have three guarantors. In that waiting period. About a year or two. That was the waiting period. And I was a non-communist, as chairman, signing to people who were joining the Communist Party that I was a guarantor. So I got their resumes and their proposals. These were colleagues from the institute. It was a universal thing with them. They studied archaeology. They wanted to do archaeology and they knew the reality of the times. So they had to join it. People don't really understand that. For one thing, the community wanted to. For one thing, it kept the ones who were kicked out. Even with the salary they didn't cut down. And that they actually wanted someone else. So I thought, okay. That's all I'm gonna do for you, the Union. But I will. I was chairman. Then I was vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Trade Unions (ROH). I covered all the so-called non-party members training. So I've always sort of skimped it. Then, when the eighty-ninth came along, everybody wanted me."

"Back then there was an exhibition by the Swedish company Hasselblad, which equipped American astronauts for the moon with cameras and cameras with large film trays. The technology was so advanced that it made possible what I also wanted to do. I used to say to colleagues, 'If you want to go somewhere, I'm not going to make you a plane, but I'm going to make you something to get you there,' so I just made a Peškeblad. And that was just the system I needed a remote control for. The rewind there was based on a clockwork mechanism that was triggered by sensors." - "Peškeblad? What was that then?" - "It was a little box with an electric motor. About the size of a ball. It must have been wrapped in soft foam because it made a little whirring noise. There was a sort of meter-long bovden leading from it to another box with the camera attached to it. There were all sorts of pulls to roll it over, stretch it and lower it."