29.01.2015

George Kalinika 1938 - 2014

We have just received the sad news that George Kalinka, a pioneering district manager for UpRight International from the early 1990s to around 2004, died in early December after a two year battle with cancer. He was 76.

Kalinka was born in Hungary during the cold war and grew up under communist rule behind the Iron Curtain. He took a keen interest in western culture and used to listen to the BBC and other western radio programmes, managing to circumvent the bans in place at the time. He would also watch western films at the British Council.

In 1956, the year of the Hungarian Uprising he realised that things were unlikely to get better and managed to smuggle himself out of the country hiding in the back of a small car and travelled to the UK. Having studied economics at Budapest University, he succeeded in exploiting his knowledge of Central and Eastern Europe to start a career in export, beginning with Marconi.
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George Kalinka

After periods with Mullard and OMC, he came to the access industry, joining Upright International as Eastern European export manager, helping set up the company’s distributor network across the region at a time when alloy scaffold towers and self-propelled aerial lifts were almost unheard of. In some countries, Hungary being one of them, he encouraged his dealers to start renting platforms, in order to help develop the market.
Some of those businesses are still going today, in one form or another.

He retired around 2004 but continued to do some consulting work after that.
He was in his mid-70s and is survived by his wife Nuala and son Alex.