Jiří Drofa

“Tomáš Baťa came around with his flawless instinct for the advantages of element standardization. It all came down to him wanting every bricklayer, worker and just about any employee at the construction to have a thought-out work planned ahead of him. He must have had the material, the tools, not to lose a minute wondering. And this was Baťa’s spirit. Be it construction, shoe manufacturing, machinery or later even aviation. This generation of twenty- or twenty-five-year-old boys who arrived with a few months of training from various local builders in the meanwhile grew up to the extent that they were able to manage an independent construction abroad with all the consequences and advantages attached to it.”

“The architects would do the project evaluation but the budget was always important. For instance, Karfík’s skyscraper, so-called Zlín’s ‘Twenty-one’ was a prime example of functionalism. But when Karfík finished the construction, they rebuked him that the floors were too costly. These had been produced in Napajedla in Fatra, in Zlínolit company. Director Čipera sent Karfík to work for three months in sales in there, to realize what was the firm spending for.”

young boy passed it to me, telling me that education was bad in our country. I told him: ‘I will sign this but I cross this out because education is good here. I saw the American boys who were sitting right next to me. And tell whoever wrote it there that they are stupid.’ The training was reasonable; in fact, it went back to the Baťa’s. When I began to draw something extra, the architect would immediately warn me: ‘Jiří, what you see here are constructions which are uncommon in America. And if you draw some complicated detail for them, you will never build it. Because fifty to sixty percent of the costs are composed of wages and salaries. And if you give the worker such a complicated detail… He knows only what he has standardized and if he is about to do an atypical detail, you will pay a bunch. So I thought to myself that Baťa knew this in 1920 already. And for this reason, there had been results in Zlín.”

“He was a director who worked in Zlín during the nazi era. He did various things secretly, for the Germans not to see into it. Instead of new ones, they exported spare parts; one could also say that they carried out sabotages. They helped the resistance and the partisans in various ways. During the Slovak National Uprising, they supported the partisans a lot. The German manager who was there, who was actually placed there by Baťa, suspected it but turned a blind eye to it.”

“That was a difficult, really difficult decision to make. The firm where I worked at offered me a job and even help in obtaining the green card. On the other hand, I saw old Baťa’s people in Bel Camp who were already aged sixty, sixty-five. Their children were all gone and if they were not single, it was only them and their wives there. They wrote me from the company to come back with signatures of the people who signed my travel permit back then in 1968. And when I looked at a boy, a builder who sat next to me and saw the experience he had, I thought: ‘Why should I spend my whole life floundering in a foreign environment when on the other hand I am at home in a company which operates abroad. And if I return with knowledge of English, I will have a shot there.’ It was a difficult decision making until the very last moment and obviously, I had no contact with my parents. I could not argue about staying or not staying. So I returned eventually. Back then, the Jubo 707 flights were starting. So I bought a ticket to this one and flew to Paris. And I took another month for a train journey back home. When I look at it in retrospect, I have not regretted it.”