Wendy Luers

„As Bill said earlier, this was a life-changing experience for us because we could bring these famous American writers and painters and everybody. I was just talking actually to somebody yesterday about the fact that when John Updike came, we would always have them either go to the Čapek bookstore where they would sign the walls and people would come with their string bags with their precious volumes of the novels by Bill Styron or Kurt Vonnegut or wohomever it was, and get these people to sign it. With Updike, we invited Antonín Přidal from Brno, who had been his translator, and Přidal was so nervous about meeting his hero, that he had translated, that he was just dripping in sweat. John actually signed books in the American embassy, inside that tunnel as you walk in, and StB were across the street fotographing every single person who came in and nobody cared, they still stood there with their bags and they waited for hours to meet these American authors.“

„The other story, actually, was 1985, 4th of July, our national day. We had brought out white ice cream carts that former ambassadors' wife had had build. We had all the embassy kids serving American ice cream and we had the ballons tied to the fingers of the putti on the roof flying up. We had 2000 people, on our lawn. We invited every Charter 77 spokesperson: Hájek, Havel and everybody else. Johanes, who was a deputy for foreign minister, came in and our number two in the embassy, Bill Farrand, was now standing in line, because my hands have gotten so swollen from people shaking, so Bill and I went out to talk to people, and Johanes said: ´We´re leaving. You invited them.´ Bill Farrand looked at him and said: ´But it´s a free country, isn´t it?´ So, we had some extraordinary moments.“

„When we arrived here in 1983 in a dark December afternoon, I had never been here before. My daughters were 11 and 13, or 9 and 11 at that point, and we arrived from New York to Frankfurt to change planes with two dogs except the dogs didn´t arrive. So I had two weeping daughters who didn´t want to go until the dogs arrived and they knew they were coming on a later plane. But the communist people were waiting at the airport, at Ruzyně airport, to greet the new American ambassador. So after we checked out the glistening vererinary hospital in the basement of the Frankfurt airport and the girls have decided the dogs would be OK, we got on the plane and came to Prague. It was dark, it was dirty, it was grim. As we came down Leninova street, now Evropská, and we got to this beautiful Petschek palace and crunched up the drive way and there were all the staff lined up waiting to greet us and I thought: ´Well, maybe this is not gonna be so bad.´ That´s how we arrived.“