The story of one cellar (1959-1960)

       Thanks to my colleague Andrzej Bogunia of TVN I found this very interesting website which you, Ryszard, run. Interesting to me in particular, because on it I came across many names of friends from the '50s and '60s. As it happened, in 1953 I came to Nowa Huta as a boy and attended Secondary School No. 14 (now No. 11).

       Though not a musician myself, I was nevertheless very interested in music. Combining it with my basic interests, electrical and radio, I kept up constant radio monitoring and recorded music from stations such as Radio Luxembourg, Monaco, and above all Conover's Jazz Hour on the VOA, onto a tape recorder, or rather a tape attachment placed on the turntable of a record player. In 1955 there were no tape recorders in today's sense yet, but there were already inventions like that. Of course the amplifier and loudspeakers had to be made. It was not easy, because parts were not to be had in the shops. One relied on old German valves left over from the war and other components one managed to get hold of.

       The musical episode I want to describe began in 1959 and concerns the creation of the Cellar in which we organised dances and listened to music. It had its origins in the revival of scouting after 1956 and the setting up of the Nowa Huta ZHP scout district in premises on the Ogrodowe estate. There the district commander, Juliusz Langner, suggested to us, the older scouts, that we organise something like a music club.

       We obtained the administration's consent to adapt the room beneath the Markiza cake shop, and that is where we set about turning the premises into - as we would say today - a discotheque. My part in the work consisted in building the amplifier and loudspeakers and the lighting installation in the cellar. Dismay reigned in my family, because instead of studying for the school-leaving exams that I was to sit in May, I was sitting in a cellar or soldering an amplifier.

       Fortunately everything worked out, I passed my exams and even got into the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the AGH. The Cellar was opened on 12 April 1959, on the name day of our commander Juliusz, and it ran until the end of June 1959. One of its aims was also to raise money for the sailing camp in Masuria that we dreamed of, as the scout district could do little to help us.

       So we sold tickets, coffee, orangeade. There was no cola in those days. Among the friends who were there with me I remember Niewodowski and the brothers Podermański - Leszek and Bogdan. Others who passed through the Cellar were Wincenty Faber, poet and lyricist, and Józek Krzeczek (later of Czerwono-Czarni), who went to secondary school with me and lived in the same courtyard. I brought recordings and records and we played every day. Nor did it pass without protests from residents and picketing, by scandalised ladies, of this terrible den of debauchery.

       At the end of June we packed up and went off to the camp in Masuria, on Lake Gardeńskie (Ogrodowe) near Mikołajki. After the holidays we did not reopen the Cellar, and the whole crowd moved to the Wiolinka Club, mentioned in your materials. Thanks to my second hobby, photography, there survive photographs from the Cellar and from school dances, which were often held in gymnasiums. These photographs were taken in 1959 and 1960. Perhaps someone will recognise themselves and get in touch..