Word: bedrich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...August 1968, ten days after Soviet tanks crunched into Czechoslovakia, an electrician named Bedrich Gabriel fled the country with his two young children, leaving his wife behind. He settled with his mother in Yucaipa, Calif., 15 miles from San Bernardino. It seemed a poignant displacement of the cold war, nothing more. Gabriel's wife Vlasta, a component designer for a construction firm, opted to stay in Czechoslovakia, where she won a divorce and legal custody of the children. When Bedrich died in 1969, Vlasta, who had remarried, decided to ask U.S. courts for custody of the kids. The father...
August 1968 was a traumatic month for all Czechs, but it was piquantly and privately so for Vlasta Gabriel, the young mother of two small children. Ten days after Warsaw Pact armies rumbled into Czechoslovakia. Vlasta's husband Bedrich, an electrician and occasional truck driver in Decin, bundled the couple's children into the family car and defected to the West. He eventually settled with his émigré mother in Yucaipa, Calif., (pop. 26,000) and died of lung cancer not long after. Vlasta plunged into a lonely, uphill custody battle for her son and daughter...
First Round. The divorce and decree theoretically awarding Vlasta custody were granted in October of 1968, and she later remarried. There the matter would probably have rested had not Bedrich died, since it is unlikely that a U.S. court would have ordered the children home while their father was living. But his death left the children wards of the court, since his mother was unable to care for them...
During Gabriel's illness, the children-named after their parents, Bedrich, now 7, and Vlasta, 8-were often cared for by a local couple, Mr. and Mrs. Roy Smith. Smith, an Air Force Reserve sergeant, and his wife, a nurse's aide, eagerly added them to their own household of three children upon Gabriel's death and filed suit for legal guardianship. The couple's claim was based on Gabriel's deathbed wish that the children remain in the U.S., and also on the argument that they were too Americanized to return home. Vlasta pressed...