“Supposedly, we’d received a letter from the main office, but I can’t prove that any more, that we were being reassigned as Water Scouts. The Těrlicko Reservoir hadn’t been built yet. Supposedly, Baštík wrote back, thanking for the honour, as we regarded Water Scouts as being something better than what we were, but that he had to ask that they commission a river for us. And they found grounds for affront. Of course, if they were normal Scouts, they’d laugh it off, they’d say: ‘He’s got a point.’ But they considered this a real insult, so they simply dissolved us.”
“Strange grounds for conviction! Nowadays, we’d say they were completely ridiculous... He [my father] was devout Christian and a member of the People’s Party [a Christian democratic party established after World War I - trans.]; as you know, that was the only party [besides the Communists] that was allowed under Communism, Plojhar was a minister... And he - Dad - was in the People’s Party [PP], but he didn’t want to be in the so-called National Front, that meant that the PP committee was subordinate to it, and he didn’t want that, so they got together, he, a butcher named Farník, teacher Jaroš, postmaster Káňa, and they established an illegal committee of the People’s Party. And they locked all four of them up, declaring they’d been doing seditious activities.”
Composer PhDr. Leon Juřica was born on 2 May 1935 in Orlová. His mother Božena Juřicová, née Valicová, was highly educated for her times. His father František Juřica (1904-1995) was a miner, later a gatekeeper and courtyard manager at Evžen Mine. Already as a child Leon had an affinity for music; after the war he also joined an Orel (meaning Eagle, a Catholic sports movement) Scout troop. His father could not accept the political development after the Communist coup in February 1948, and so he established an illegal four-man committee of the People’s Party. However, the committee members were arrested in 1958. With his father convicted, Leon was expelled from his studies of medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in Olomouc. He then tried his hand at several menial jobs, such as that of a coke oven worker at Karolina Coke Plant, a worker at metalworks cooperative in Rychvald, or an absentee catcher at Antonín Zápotocký Mine in Lazy. He later found employment as an archivist at Czechoslovak Radio’s Ostrava branch and gradually started cooperating with the radio’s music department. He completed a distance course in musicology in Brno. He then began teaching at Janáček Conservatoire in Ostrava. His most famous works are his children’s operas and compositions, he also wrote a melodrama based on the last letter of Milada Horáková. His opera Žáby (Frogs), which lasts two minutes, earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Leon Juřica cooperated with Ostrava University, he was the chairman of the Ostrava branch of the Association of Music Artists, and a professor emeritus of Janáček Conservatoire in Ostrava. PhDr. Leon Juřica died on 31 August 2014 in Orlová.
