"During the vetting committee, we were mainly blamed for not preventing the formation of the equestrian section, because in the sixties there was a great advent of mechanization, especially tractors, and the horse as a pulling force and the greatest helper in agriculture ceased to be used and horse covers began to be liquidated. So most of those villages then used those lighter breeds to start riding troops. And we here at the agricultural school, the agricultural technical school... we also saw that rescue as being for the youth and especially the horses, so they wouldn't all go to slaughter."
"The tracks, the wooden tracks they were there. And speaking of dormitories, I lived in two and then ten and we had to heat with coal there. Split the wood and in every one of those rooms you had a normal stove for heating. And such a bad experience was that the bedbugs would stick in the cracks of those wooden houses. Also when the track administration disinfected it, but still they didn't always kill the bedbugs, so we had difficulty with that then, especially at night when we were sleeping, that it would wake us up."
"We were still kind of excited as boys that there was an army mobilization the year before, in the fall of '38, and everywhere they were like moving soldiers, whether cavalry, but already mechanized units, and as a boy I remember. I can show you where they were stopping because I have a sketch of the village of Zagorje here. That's where my family cottage is, and that's where the village well was. So this is where the mechanized troops would stop and the soldiers would get out of those trucks and like refresh themselves with that water or wash themselves and especially like get out and get on those truck bodies."
František Randa was born on 9 April 1932 in Záhoří near Humpolec. In Záhoří he lived through the mobilization in 1938 and the bombing at the end of the war. After studying at the secondary school in Humpolec, he entered the University of Agriculture in Prague. After his return, he started teaching at the Agricultural High School in Humpolec and in 1961 became its headmaster. He was dismissed from the school as part of the vetting process at the beginning of the normalisation because he was accused of trying to establish the so-called Peasant Ride. In the 1960s, he and his colleagues founded a riding club to save horses from slaughter due to the mechanisation of agriculture. He worked as an agronomist for twenty years and in the 1990s he set up a consultancy firm. In 2024 he was living in Humpolec.
