We were a grey nation, our „welcome to freedom“ was an empty term
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Antonín Hříbal was born on 2 January 1967 in Beroun. He grew up in Rudná near Prague. He lived with his mother, Jarmila Hříbalová, and his grandparents, František and Oldřiška Knapp, in a gardener‘s house on the grounds of the castle garden. He did not know his father, Václav - his parents divorced shortly after his birth, and his father died soon after. He did not learn that he had three more children until adulthood. His mother remarried, and he spent part of his childhood on a housing estate in Příbram. His mother was a manual worker. She worked, for example, on the railway, in a construction plant or a meat factory, and she had problems with alcohol. Antonín Hříbal wanted to be a locomotive engineer, so he entered a railway apprenticeship as an electrician and electromechanic for machinery and equipment. His hobby was rocket modelling. After his apprenticeship, he did inspections of electric locomotives in the railway depot Praha střed (Masarykovo nádraží). He served his compulsory military service in the Border Guard, but he did not get to the border. He operated an electric power station at the Main Administration of the Border Guard in Prague. After the war, in the spring of 1989, at the age of 22, he became the youngest tram driver in Prague, and as a tram driver, he experienced the November Revolution and the General Strike. In the mid-1990s, he joined the company ECS Tools and was involved in the production of ECGs, pulse oximeters and hot air soldering sets. The company also produced a micro-accelerometer that was placed on the Czech satellite Mimosa, which was to study the Earth‘s atmosphere. Later, he worked for ABW Sequana Tuning, a company dedicated to „tuning“, increasing the performance of cars by making changes to the engine control program. In 2006, he moved to the Tachov region with his family, his wife Jitka and three sons, and joined the Tachov Daily newspaper as an editor. Currently (2023), he is working as a web editor for three editorial offices (Sokolov, Karlovy Vary and Cheb). Among his journalistic work, his favourites are video tours, short commented videos about the sights and nature of Tachov, Domažlice and Cheb regions, which he started filming during the Covid pandemic.
