Peeking Behind the Iron Curtain: A 76-Day Eastern European Adventure with 2 Working Journalists, 4 Kids, and a Volkswagen Bus (1967)

The 76-day summer expedition behind Eastern Europe’s Iron Curtain took a new twist for globe-trotting foreign correspondents John and Pegge Hlavacek. They loaded four of their five preteen and teenage kids and armloads of cameras and recording equipment into a rented Volkswagen bus… This not-so-typical American family zipped through checkpoints and sped down autobahns and explored back roads, collective farms, and quaint villages in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland—snapping photos and recording the human side and political climate, sending back film and filing stories almost nightly for broadcast on KMTV in Omaha. The opportunity of a lifetime to travel to Communist countries behind the heretofore mysterious Iron Curtain—now open to Americans because of President Lyndon Johnson’s new policy of détente—provided a dramatic backdrop for cutting edge reporting, recorded in words and pictures through the sharp lens of the Hlavacek family. This truly remarkable adventure began even before the family set foot on European soil with a surprise VIP coming aboard their Europe-bound jetliner in New York.