Pegge Parker lived two lives. Her second life was as a wife, mother and freelance journalist, but her first was the wild adventure of a courageous young woman traveling the world on her writing skills alone. In a time before cell phones or email, when the world seemed much larger, Pegge moved from Washington D.C., where she was a newspaper columnist, to live in places such as Alaska, China, India, and the rest of Europe, making a living as a freelance reporter. Communication took days or weeks at a time. World War II was raging. Governments were collapsing and being reborn from the ashes. The...

Pegge Parker lived two lives. Her first life as a journalist in D.C., and Alaska took her by Slow Boat to China (the first book in the series) where her gutsy adventures landed her in China on her writing skills alone. Slow Boat to Pakistan picks up after her husband Doug Mackiernan, a CIA operative, was killed on the Tibetan border escaping from China. Now a mother and a widow, and needing to make a living, Pegge left their baby twins with Doug's parents in Boston and embarked on another slow boat, this time through the Suez Canal to Pakistan where she began a new career as Vice Consul and...

What's it like to cover news events and famous people while living in one of the world's most picturesque hideaways? John and Pegge (Parker) Hlavacek describe an exotic lifestyle of which most writers only dream. After living and working in India during the first five years of their marriage (1952-1957), the Hlavaceks moved their five children and Indian nanny to New York when John accepted a one-year fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations. When the fellowship ended, the Hlavaceks moved to Jamaica where John and Pegge supported the family by providing freelance writing and...

How does a humble, Midwestern boy from Illinois end up reporting world events from India for United Press? He comes by way of boat, but only after reporting from Japanese-occupied China during the Communist takeover. Such is the life story of John Hlavacek, foreign war correspondent for NBC News and Time-Life. John left his post with the American Military Attache's Office to join United Press as a war correspondent. He reported world events from India from 1944-1952. During John's time as a war correspondent, he was witness to the transformation of British colonies into the free countries of...

Immediately after graduating from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in June of 1939, John Hlavacek sailed to China to teach English at the Carleton-in-China Middle School in Fenchow, Shansi Province. As John describes it, his Uncle Frank -was not impressed, - as many Midwesterners then had little knowledge of China, other than that it was ravaged by famine, disease, and war. Other friends, however, thought it was quite an honor. After five weeks of training in Chinese at a language school in Peking, John and a fellow teacher traveled to the mission compound in what was then...

John Hlavacek and Pegge Parker toted still and motion cameras, tape recorders and microphones to record the sights and sounds of emerging African nations for midwestern TV and radio audiences on her broadcast on KMA and his daily broadcast on KMTV in Omaha. Their itinerary spanned the African continent from the Horn and Ethiopia through Kenya, the Congo, around South Africa and along the coast of Western Africa. In-country transportation was hit and miss, so the Hlavaceks found themselves literally hitchhiking their way across the continent. They captured timely talks with Ethiopian Emperor...

This is the full-color edition of 1968: A Year of War and Uncertainty.
In 1968, journalist couple John Hlavacek and Pegge Parker Hlavacek traveled the world to bring us the real stories from a year of social, political and cultural upheaval unlike any other year in the 20th Century. That year, we saw the first live televised pictures from outer space, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy assassinated, and live anti-war protests in the States, while the Hlavaceks were covering the Tet Offensive and the Vietnam War, environmental science in Antarctica, and huge shifts in the...