Vacation again, in Borik again, routinely. I think this was the year when we first pulled the trick of granny and me going to the supermarket and returning with two full totes through the side entrance, while mom and dad went through the reception and opened a stay bill... for just two people, car and tent. The car was the new škodilak, and the tent was the old one which dad bought from Janči.
Over the first few days nothing much happened, but then the gang formed. Rudolf and Bruno came, with that decrepit old Mercedes 180D, Tejka with her folks was in the other end of the camp, near Nisla's house, Veca and Sneca and uncle Staja with their families, and about a dozen of dutch and german girls. And a couple of boys, I'd guess, didn't notice much. Lots of repeat appearances from last year. The epicentre of events was the space between Rudolf and Bruno's tent and the Mercedes, which served as their kitchen and usually held about a dozen people, when we weren't on the beach. Amazingly, I managed to get through the whole five weeks (I think this is the year when dad used all of his vacation) with just one roll of slides - which turned out right, but makes me wonder what I missed. (wrong, diary says just a little short of four weeks)
The disco is mentioned frequently. It was actually a local community center, a sailors' club of sorts, with the main hall adjusted to be a discotheque. Cheap remodeling but well done - plywood cubes with a metal frame on top with milky glass as a tabletop, with colored lights inside. The best light show I ever saw (including the following decades!) was just a dozen 250W conical bulbs with mirrored backs and color fronts, in four colors (RGB and yellow), somehow driven by sound, so the red would fire only when it was the loudest, green would fire on lots of bass, blue and yellow would cover the middle.
The sound was great: later I heard the story that it was the sound equipment stolen at home from Dom and sold here... True, the brand and model were the same, and there was a case of missing equipment as of couple of months before. But then I sort of remember they had equipment the year before - now was it the same or not, who'd know.
A bit of a side story: that professor, who was (ostensibly?) house friends with Milivoje, hooked on this year as well. Pressed on the camp director too, strangled him with all kinds of stories. Nisla later told this as „and he said you can get laid in Moscow for just one set of underwear... and the point wasn't in the low price, it was to show that he still can“. And so it happened that he locked the keys inside his car, on the sunny parking by the fortress wall at the marketplace in Zadar. Found a mechanic somehow, and the guy came, threaded the loop or whatever he had through a crack, and unlocked it, two hundred dinars. The prof immediately went into a rant, what do you mean two hundred for five minutes work, I could have done it myself, bla bla bla. The majstor didn't say a word, just locked the door again, turned around and started walking. Now the prof really panicked (paniced? panicced?) and... didn't end up paying 400 dinars, only 300.
One evening we just couldn't avoid him strangling everyone with tales from gimnazija, on hard position of education workers, how the salaries lag behind inflation, to no end. There uncle Staja topped him with „I understand you completely, I worked in education“. There he earned much respect, specially for omitting that he was the house majstor in that school.
Luckily, he wasn't teaching us, he always picked the humanities classes, we science types would just slam his lack of logic. He graduated theology, which was still the recipe for poor peasant kids to get a diploma and be professors. And he wasn't the only one among the staff. A girl from the generation before ours once told me how he wasted half an hour of his class to explain how he got a new Opel Kadett, freshly imported, and crashed it in Stajićevo, in a mild and clear curve, and drew the diagram of the situation, all in order to prove that the crash couldn't possibly be his fault, and drove the point with a final „and, in the end of ends, I'm not crazy to crash a brand new car“. Someone said „the other guy also wasn't crazy to crash an old one“.