“We were really sad. We genuinely loved president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Every year on March 7, we remembered his name day and had a little school celebration. And invariably, in his honour we would end up singing the folk song: ,Our old father, pray, your hair is now grey, while you are still with us, no misfortune can befall us, our old father grey.’ And when we heard on the radio that he had passed away, we were genuinely heartbroken. I’ll never forget seeing our teacher walking down the school corridor, crying openly, loudly and inconsolably. Yes, we never stopped remembering him. Everybody loved him, both young and old.”
“One family – he was a police officer – bought a brand-new radio-set. It was the very first radio-set in the village. And their little girl went to the same school as us, so did their little boy, and they said: ,Come to check out our new radio!’ And so we went, we’d been invited and so we went. There was a small kind of box on the table. Suddenly, there was this crackling sound and then music started playing. We were all staring in disbelief, we turned the box upside down, we checked it from the side, we checked it all over, looking for the musicians. We knew enough about music to know that when Mr Černohorský and his band were playing, they had large instruments such as the helicon, trumpet, saxophone, and clarinet. Where were the musicians hiding? How come their music was coming out of the box? And our hosts turned the button and the music stopped, and then they turned the button again, and the music started playing again. And so we finally realised that it was just a machine, not a real band: that it was a piece of ingenious technology. Needless to say, we were exhilarated, literally beside ourselves. And from then on, we always knew what was happening. The moment there was some breaking news, we found out from the radio. It was incredible!”
Milena Macháčková, nee Brendlová, was born on April 3, 1925, in Staré Ždánice, a village not far from Pardubice. Her family comprising her parents, three brothers and grandmother, lived in a company flat. Her mother was a housewife who tended the farm and her father worked at Skoda Works, Hradec Králové, as a cauldron-riveting specialist. Right after a local Sokol branch had been founded in their village, Milena and her siblings started attending all events. Milena’s character had been shaped by family upbringing, her teachers’ example, sports, and the president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk as her role model. After secondary school, she went to People’s Agricultural School in Ždánice. Later, she worked as a teacher at a shelter for the harvesters’ children (the equivalent of today’s day-care centre) and as an assistant at the children’s home in Horažďovice. She followed her interest in working with young children and in 1943, joined a training course organised by the Czechoslovak Mothers’ and Children’s Wellbeing at Krč hospital in Prague. In 1947, she married Vlastimil Macháček, with whom she had four children. In 1958, she graduated from a secondary nursing school and started working as a nurse in the Opočno hospital. Having gained experience at a children’s doctor’s surgery in Dobruška, in 1966 she started working as a nursery teacher and stayed on the job until her retirement. After 1989, she joined the renewed Sokol movement in the local branch in Nové Město nad Metují. She became the local Sokol head, participated on the Sokol “Slet” (general convention) in 1994, and did not stop exercising and doing sports until 2018. She was also active in the local community’s affairs and regularly visited the elderly with whom she shared her optimistic worldview. Milena Macháčková died on April 16, 2021.
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