Shoes and Democracy

When I first started working in Maryland in 1993, one of the early projects on which I worked was to help the Bata Shoes plant in Belcamp schedule the machines that they used for making rubber boots. It was an interesting problem but we didn't get very far with the company, for reasons that I don't remember now (maybe they just didn't trust a 26-year-old with a Ph.D. on which the ink wasn't dry!). I just found out that the plant shut down around 2001. Maybe they should have used my scheduling algorithm! :-)

I hadn't thought much about them recently, but Friday's Washington Post had an obituary for Thomas Bata, the Czech who started Bata shoes. Mr. Bata died September 1 in Toronto.

Mr. Bata left Czechoslovakia to get away from the Nazis. He served in the Canadian army during World War II. He was forced to leave Czechoslovakia again by the Communists. According to the obituary:

Mr. Bata broadcast support to the dissident movement on Radio Free Europe and offered his business as an example of what could be "so that people would see that the democratic system, based on democratic economy, would be the most advantageous for them."