Letters Home: An American in China, 1939 to 1944

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Immediately after graduating from Carleton College (in Northfield, Minnesota) in June 1939, John Hlavacek sailed for China to teach English at the Carleton-in-China Middle School in Fenchow, Shansi Province. 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 Japanese- occupied China. John spent two years teaching English in Shansi and Szechwan, then took a job driving Red Cross trucks to deliver medical supplies to foreign mission hospitals. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, John joined the American Military Attache 's office in China's wartime capital of Chungking. In 1944 he left that post to join United Press as a war correspondent. After China, John continued his foreign reporting from India, Jamaica and Cuba. He was an Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations during the 1957-58 academic year, studying at the Russian Institute of Columbia University. Today, John resides with his wife, Pegge, in Omaha, Nebraska. More Hlavacek family history can be found in two books written by Pegge: Diapers on a Dateline and Alias Pegge Parker. Both books are available through iUniverse. Diapers on a Dateline tells the story of Pegge and John's family life in India from 1952 to 1957. Pegge continued to write while raising five children, interviewing a fascinating array of celebrities. Spanning a time period from 1941 to 1961, Alias