John Cech
On their driving tour across the United States, Pierre Barbero, far left, and Jean-Louis Cech spent two days in Helena with Victoria and John Cech, the friends they met by accident on the Web.
On Dec. 4, 2013, John Cech went snowshoeing in the Elkhorn Mountains near his home in Clancy, accompanied by his two golden retrievers.
It was a beautiful day, so he snapped a few pictures on his iPhone, and when he got back home he thought he’d post a photo or two on Facebook. He sent the photos from his phone to his laptop via Gmail for easier posting.
A few minutes later, he received an email response from another John Cech—Jean-Louis Cech in Orange, France—who said, “Gee, it looks cold out there. Do I know you?”
John Cech is still not sure what happened, but the two men have Gmail accounts that differ by just one letter. However the email misfired, it touched off a friendship capped by a visit from Jean-Louis to John’s home in Clancy this fall, and it sparked in John Cech a heightened interest in genealogy.
“It was just kind of a storybook meeting,” John Cech said. “We kept laughing, saying it was the fate of Google that we connected.”
For his part, Jean-Louis wrote on the blog recounting his travels through the United States (translation by Google): “If the email routing laws are sometimes fragile, with luck, they can lead to encounters both unexpected and delicious. Long live the mistakes.”
John Cech lived in Billings for many years before being named deputy commissioner for two-year and community college education with the Montana University System in 2010, when he moved to Clancy, about 10 miles south of Helena. In Billings, he was a teacher and administrator at Rocky Mountain College for 13 years and dean of the MSU Billings College of Technology from 2002 to 2010.
After that initial accidental encounter, the two Cechs stayed in touch, learning more about their respective family histories. Both their families once lived in or near Bohemia, which later became part of Czechoslovakia and which now makes up most of the Czech Republic.
John Cech’s great-grandfather immigrated to northern Minnesota in the early 1870s. John Cech said his ancestor was a devout Catholic and may have left what was then Breslau, Germany, because of intense anti-Catholicism at the time.
His father went to France in 1945, shortly after the end of the war, so he could learn French and teach that language back in Czechoslovakia. His parents were in France in January 1948 when Joseph Stalin, the Soviet ruler, toppled the Czech government and installed a Communist puppet.
His parents had planned to return home, Jean-Louis said, “but my father was intelligent enough to understand that Stalin was not the way to go.” They settled in France and Jean-Louis was born there a year after the Communist coup.
“We have no idea if we’re related,” John Cech said. “If you went back centuries, there could be a connection. We’ll probably never know.”
In addition to talking family history, the two Cechs learned more about each other. One thing John learned about Jean-Louis was that he harbored a dream of taking a cross-country road trip around the United States.
John and his wife, Victoria Cech, learned last summer that Jean-Louis’ dream would soon be coming true, and that he planned to pay them a visit. In October, Jean-Louis and his friend, Pierre Barbero, landed in Philadelphia and set out in the car Jean-Louis had sent over—a bright-red Citroen, built in 1985 but based on the 1963 model, a vehicle reminiscent of a VW Bug of the same vintage.
John Cech
Jean-Louis Cech poses next to his Citroen outside Chubby’s Bar and Grill in Clancy.
“It was quite old and primitive, but it was pretty cool,” John Cech said. “They wanted to have it as a conversation starter as they drove across the country … and it most certainly was.”
Jean-Louis, who spoke by phone Tuesday from Philadelphia, the day before he was to fly back to France, said he wanted to drive across the country because he had previously seen almost nothing of America but the East Coast. He visited the United States several times in the late 1960s and mid-70s, then worked for Raytheon as an electronics engineer in Philadelphia from 1979 to 1981.
He wanted to stay in the United States permanently, Jean-Louis said, but his wife, a teacher, couldn’t find an equivalent job here, so they went back to France.
“I had a glimpse at the paradise,” he said, “but I couldn’t settle there.”
He came back many times over the years but still stayed close to the East Coast. On this year’s driving trip, he wanted to see the Midwest and the Rockies, to visit California and Las Vegas.
“Even though it’s not my America,” he said of Vegas. “My America is the blue-collar America. Although an engineer is white collar, I still put my hands in grease.”
He had also planned to do the trip alone, but decided to go with his friend Barbero, a wine broker who works seven days a week for six months, then takes half a year off until the next season begins.
“He also loves the United States, like I do,” Jean-Louis said. “So he joined the one-man bandwagon and we became a team.”
Jean-Louis Cech posted a map of his travels on a blog detailing his cross-country trip.
They drove through the Great Lakes region, across the Great Plains and up to Montana, passing through Billings on Nov. 22. They spent Nov. 23 and 24 with John and Victoria Cech in Clancy. John Cech said they didn’t do much sightseeing with their guests, mostly because he and Victoria had to work both days. Also, he said, John-Louis and Pierre wanted to rest and to work on the Citroen.
“I think that was kind of a theme of the trip—continually working on the Citroen,” he said.
They had a few good meals together and did lots of talking, and “they managed to bring several bottles of French wine with them,” John Cech said—bottles of very fine wine from the south of France.
The pair had been racing to stay ahead of the first blast of winter, which was rolling through the country in mid-November. They had planned to stay in Helena for three days, but John Cech warned them they’d better get across MacDonald Pass before the storm hit. Even as it was, they barely made it over the pass.
“The last mile was terrifying,” Jean-Louis said.
They had hoped to go through the Southwest and South, then swing down to the Florida Keys before heading up the East Coast, but the Citroen’s gear box broke down in Los Angeles. Jean-Louis said he could have fixed it, but it would have taken a week and they were already well behind schedule.
So, he shipped the car home and he and Pierre flew back to Philadelphia on Christmas Day. Jean-Louis said the trip, though abbreviated, was everything he had hoped for.
“It’s been absolutely magnificent,” he said. “And if the car had done her work properly, I’d still be on the road today.”
He did, however, have complaints about how the United States has changed since 9/11. He was very angry over how the U.S. government failed to respond to his application for an extended tourist visa—though he paid $230 to file it and no longer needs it—and over certain aspects of heightened security.
Near the start of the trip, he said, he was taking photos of his Citroen, with the White House half a mile in the background, when an agent “with a nasty attitude,” driving a car marked “Secret Service,” aggressively chased him off.
“I do not look like a terrorist on the warpath,” Jean-Louis said, still bristling at the memory, and he still can’t believe the agent was in a marked car.
“You do not write ‘Secret Service’ on your car when you are in the Secret Service,” he said. “That is absolutely ridiculous.”
He continues to love the United States, Jean-Louis said, “but your administration is spoiling the image I had of your country.”
John Cech, meanwhile, said he and Victoria hope to visit Jean-Louis in France sometime in the next couple of years.
“Frankly, I think it will be a connection that we will keep the rest of our lives,” he said.
He is also looking forward to doing more research into his family’s history. He has always had some interest in genealogy, John Cech said, but previously his research focused on his mother’s family, who were from Italy.
“I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about or researching my father’s side,” he said. “So this sort of happenstance cyber connection … really sparked an interest there and is something I think I’ll pursue a bit more. Who knows? It might make a nice retirement project.”
