Life after the tourist mark
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Jan Horáček was born on October 26, 1933 in Hlubočinka near Prague into a butcher’s family. He trained as a toolmaker in Prague and then studied at a continuing industrial school in Liberec, where he specialized in textile engineering. He served the war with radio operators in Kralovice in the Pilsen region. He remembers these two years fondly, because together with other conscripts from his unit he played in a military swing band. After the war in 1957, he returned to Liberec, specifically to Chrastava, and joined the Totex company as a designer of textile machines. Thanks to his work, he visited Tashkent in the 1950s, which was then part of the Soviet Union, and taught local technicians how to handle Totex products. He was not very involved in politics. The only exception he made was during the Prague Spring in 1968, during which he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) to be part of the upcoming changes. In the 1970s, he fell into tourism and became actively involved in the tourist committee. He co-founded the Chrastavská šlápota long-distance march, and organized a number of tours and events for other tourists. After 1989, he most welcomed the opportunity to go abroad. He worked at the Totex company until 1999, after which he retired and continued to participate in the marches and expeditions of tourists from Chrastava.
