Each of us has dreamed of what it would be like to be an outstanding person. To discover the unknown, to experience something that no one else can experience, to have no boundaries and to move on incessantly. With a view of inspiring people or taking a piece of Slovakia to the Moon.
It might sound too challenging, but all of this was achieved by E. A. Cernan, a prominent descendant of the natives of Vysoká nad Kysucou and the man that the village of Vysoká nad Kysucou and the whole of Slovakia can be proud of.
A memorial room created in his honour was opened by him during his second visit to Slovakia in 1994 when he was accompanied by his sister Dolores and daughter Tracy. The memorial room of E. A. Cernan is placed at the Municipal Office building in Vysoká nad Kysucou. The interior of the room was graphically and aesthetically designed by an academic painter Miroslav Cipár. The walls of the room are covered with historical photographs of Kysuce and a number of documents recording the life of Cernan. A display of a few fragments of the Apollo 17 spacecraft can be seen in the room .
The memorial room of E. A. Cernan can be visited every working day from 7:15 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., on other days upon a request of a reservation made at the mayor's office by calling 0905 884 634 or by e-mail:
Virtual visit:
The life of the Cernan family
Life in Kysuce has always been extremely difficult. The fight against poverty and oppression forced people to leave the country and search for work abroad. From 1899 to 1913 alone, almost 2.5 million people emigrated from Slovakia, a vast majority of the emigrants were from the north parts of Slovakia. In 1903, Štefan Čerňan and his wife Anna, née Lúčanova, left the starving Kysuce, one of the most underdeveloped region at the time, to seek their fortune in America, believing that they would return to Vysoká nad Kysucou sometime in the future. However, that never came true. The family stayed in America, despite many hardships at the beginning. Having settled in the Chicago area, they started working there in 1903, and next year, on June 16, 1904, their son Andrew (Eugene's father)was born.
The parents tried to push their son forwards to make his life better, and they succeeded in doing so. Andrew worked as a clerk and married Rozália Anna Chihlářová, whose parents came from the Czech town of Tábor. They had two children - son Eugene and daughter Dolores.
Eugene Andrew Cernan
Eugene Andrew was born on March 14, 1943 in Bellwood, Illinois. He spent a significant part of his childhood with his grandfather on the farm where he learned much about a purposeful and hard life. Most of all, his grandfather led young Eugene to love for his homeland – for Slovakia and Kysuce through his nostalgic memories of home.
Eugene was a diligent student. He received the title "Bachelor" in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and a Doctor of Science (Master of Science) in Aeronautical Engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Having completed his studies, he went to the services of NASA, where he continued his studies and became a fighter pilot.
In 1964, E. A. Cernan was selected from a group of fourteen best pilots to join the family of astronauts. In the service of NASA, Eugene Andrew Cernan spent 566 hours and 16 minutes in space, including about 100 hours in the lunar region.
Eugene´s grandparents did not live long enough to see their grandson's greatest fame - grandmother Anna died in 1949 and grandfather Štefan in 1959. His father Andrew witnessed the astronautic "rendezvous" (the meeting of two or more satellites in orbit) and Eugene´s first space flight on GEMINI 9. However, never saw it land on the moon.
Visits
At the age of forty, he visited Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1974, and at this occasion, he was a guest of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and Smolenice. In discussions with our scientists from the fields of astronomy and geophysics, he informed about the planned joint flight of the American and Soviet astronauts (at that time, Cernan was entrusted with the task of preparing the aforementioned joint flight in Moscow, on the way from Moscow he made a short unofficial stop in the homeland of his ancestors).
After twenty years, in 1994, he visited Slovakia for the second time. At that time, the President M. Kováč awarded him the highest Slovak honour - the Order of the White Double Cross as the first holder ever. He visited Martin, Vysoká nad Kysucou, Čadca (he was awarded honorary citizenship here) and Vychylovka.
E. A. Cernan made his third visit to Slovakia at the age of seventy. On September 29, 2004, he visited Bratislava. He opened the exhibition named Man on the Moon at the Bratislava Castle. He also had a meeting with the President of the SR Ivan Gašparovič, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate honoris causa at the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava.
ou can watch the broadcast of the program Space Questions from the memorial room of E. A. Cernan at this link.
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