One Last Assignment One More Time

After much anticipation, last week I released a new video describing Melville Jacoby's fantastic life. It also reintroduces the work I'm doing to tell his story. I'm really proud of this video. I'd love to hear your opinion in the comments, or by email or social media, and for you to share it with anyone interested in wartime journalism, storytelling, or 1930s and 40s nostalgia.

Meanwhile, I've extended my fundraising deadline for Melville Jacoby's story through the summer. If you haven't had a chance to donate, now's a great time to do so.

Next week, I'll be boarding a train to Southern California. There, I have two major projects scheduled. First of all, I'll finally meet 97-year-old George T.M. Ching, who Mel befriended when he was an exchange student at Lingnan University. I can't wait to hear first-hand from one of Mel's friends what it was like to study and travel with him. Actually, I'm looking forward to whatever George has to say.

My other goal is also pretty exciting for me, and very important to this project. I'm going to visit my grandmother's house for the first time since I formally started working on Mel's story (Why my grandmother? Because Mel was her cousin, and she ended up with all the various artifacts Mel's mother, Elza, kept after he died). That means access to many, many more primary source documents, photographs, recordings and other materials that either belonged to Mel or involved him. For the first time I'll be able to thoroughly and systematically inventory everything she has available so I can then better identify what gaps I need to fill in my research.

Since I'll be in the greater L.A. area, I'll also be able to conduct other research as it arises and take advantage of a few resources unique to the area.

Your support will help pay for this trip and the work I'll do while I'm there. As I did on my recent trip to the Bay Area, I'll do my best to blog, tweet and record my trip.

Thanks again to those of you who have already helped out.

Discovering One More Friend of Melville Jacoby's

This world is tiny.

By now, anyone closely following Melville Jacoby's story knows a little bit about Chan Ka Yik. For newcomers, Chan (who later adopted the Americanized "George K.Y. Chan") was Mel's roommate while the two studied at China's Lingnan University during the 1936-37 academic year. Last week, a few members of my family and I met Chan's daughters for something of a reunion between our two families.

As I've already described, the visit was lovely. But it also stirred up a fantastic coincidence, one that could reshape how I tell this story, and which I think will provide a truly unique glimpse on Mel's time as an exchange student in China.

Seeing who steps out of the woodworks has been a big part of this project. Last year I tried to find some hint of Chan Ka Yik during a day-long layover in San Francisco. A few days later, his daughter, Emmy, called me to respond to a longshot email I'd sent to a cousin I'd found a few weeks earlier. That first call put our two families in touch and laid the groundwork for last week's reunion.

This Spring, a man named Darrow Carson reached out to me. Carson's grandfather, Lew, was a fellow passenger on the Doña Nati, the ship that took Mel, Annalee and Clark Lee on the final leg of their escape from the Philippines. As Clark Lee explained in 1943's "They Call it Pacific," with American forces deploying to the Pacific, hotel rooms were scarce when the group arrived in Australia. Lew Carson finally found the group beds after they'd spent weeks sleeping on freighter decks.

But the coincidence in Palo Alto is something else entirely. During our lunch with Chan Ka Yik's daughters, my grandma told the stories she'd heard about her cousin Mel and his time in China, and about the people he knew. One was Chan. Another was a man named George Ta-Min Ching. Many of the photos Mel took in China, including the one attached to this post, featured Ching, a handsome man who often appeared in sharp suits (Of course, who among Mel's contemporaries, himself included, wasn't utterly dashing or stunningly beautiful?).

Chan's daughters all knew about Ching. They called him "Uncle Ching" and had met him multiple times when he'd visit their father's Dim Sum restaurant in San Francisco. George T.M. Ching had moved to Los Angeles in 1951. Indeed, he even called on Elza Meyberg (Melville's mother) multiple times over the years. It was from him that Chan first learned of Mel's tragic death.

George Ching was a success in America. He was a co-founder of Cathay Bank, which the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California says aimed to provide financial services and capital to L.A.'s growing Chinese American community. The bank has grown significantly since then and is the oldest Chinese American bank in the country.

In addition to his professional success, Ching raised two daughters in Silverlake. That fact caught the attention of my aunt's husband Mike, who grew up near Silverlake around the same time. "Was one of them named Debbie?" Mike asked, remembering a high school friend with whom he remains in touch. Sure enough, one was, and Mike emailed a photo to his friend.

The next day Debbie Ching responded, flabbergasted why he'd have a picture of her father as a college student. Mike explained that his mother-in-law Peggy (my grandmother) was a cousin of a good friend of Debbie's father when they were young. Debbie, in turn, recalled her fathers frequent fond stories of a many he referred to always as just "Jacoby."

What's most amazing, though? Three quarters of a century after he and Mel met, Ching is still alive at 97-years-old. Apparently, he has seen the pictures Mike sent to Debbie and he may be willing to speak with me and/or my grandmother about Mel. I'm floored by this news because the chance to speak to one of Mel's contemporaries would be extraordinary. I'll certainly keep you posted about how this goes.

Your support is what made it possible for me to make this discovery. Will you help make it make more discoveries before it's no longer possible? If so, Please make a contribution , and you can always learn more about Mel and my effort to tell his story on my central page about him at lascheratlarge.com/melville.

Won't You Be My Mrs. Luce?

Earlier this afternoon I shared the first in a series of stories about my visit to Palo Alto last week to further study Melville Jacoby. As much as I hope you enjoyed it, I need your help today to keep telling these stories and finish telling the story Mel died trying to tell. Last week, at lunch with the children of Chan Ka Yik, my grandma described how Melville Jacoby became a China specialist. It began while he was an exchange student at Lingnan University and deepened after he returned to Stanford. There, he penned columns for the Stanford Daily about the war erupting between China and Japan and studied the way the media covered conflict in Asia. As I've described elsewhere, Mel returned to China upon graduation and strung together a career for himself.

"[Mel and other young journalists in China] didn't have anything like Kickstarter," My grandmother told our new friends. "What they had was this opportunity to talk on the radio to America, and to send home material, because he was learning. Gradually he became very expert on his subject."

She turned and looked at me "He was you at that stage of the game," my grandmother said. "It was a different way, but that's a story too. How does a young reporter like Bill Lascher get started?"

This is how. By not letting go. Two weeks ago I completed a quarter teaching a community college class on multimedia journalism and turned in the last of two small freelance assignments on my plate. All that's left for me is what I'm doing now: throwing all that I have on the table in pursuit of this one last assignment. Everything I have, everything I can be is now focused on this account of the first Time Magazine reporter killed in the line of duty, this tale of Melville Jacoby, this story of my family's beloved cousin and this man who lived so fantastically before he died so tragically.

"He had the good luck to be on an airplane with Mrs.[Clare Booth] Luce [the wife of Time Magazine founder Henry Luce, who was also on that plane], who was impressed with him." my grandmother said. "You have to be on an airplane with someone who will be impressed with you."

Won't you be my Mrs. Luce? I'll do everything I can to impress you. You don't even have to board an airplane, you can just make a secure online donation right here:

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This is Our War

Are we disconnected, or just different? This month marked the beginning of my full-time focus on Melville Jacoby. June marked my latest birthday. May marked three years since I received my master's degree.

In many ways I haven't lived a normal life since.

I'm 32. My last "normal" job ended four years ago, and did so only three years after I started my first full-time position in my chosen profession. Let that sink in. Less than 10 percent of my time on this Earth has been spent in a professional workplace. The vast majority of my life has been spent not working on my career, not plugging away in an office day-in and day-out, not doing what I thought "it" was all leading toward. Life so far has seemed more about creating and recreating myself. It has been about making something of myself rather than actually being something.

And here I am trying to write a book about someone else, trying to tell someone else's story. The something I am making of myself depends on the something Melville Jacoby made of himself, and of the something of his that was denied.

And it was denied when Mel was just 25. That's the same age I was when I got that first "real" job. By that time Mel had made friends around the world. He'd dodged bullets. He'd made daring escapes. He'd met and impressed some of history's most prominent figures. He'd completed his education and made his way into a fantastic job. He'd been a heartthrob, he'd loved and lost, and, finally, he'd married an astounding woman.

Mel's life was short, but full. When I compare it with mine, it's difficult not to feel something missing. I wonder if that sense of disappointment is of my own making or a product of this era. I drafted the first version of this post in early June. That day, WePay — the site I use to process donations in support of my project (please donate, by the way) — crashed. It went down the victim of a Denial of Service, or DoS, attack. What's more, it took place just a day after WePay highlighted my project on its gallery of featured donation campaigns.

At the time, the shutdown was the latest in a series of frustrations. Death by a thousand cuts. A month earlier, I'd finally felt comfortable enough with my finances to purchase a new laptop. Two weeks later, that computer stopped powering up. I was out the system for another two weeks as it received warranty repairs. Then its return didn't go smoothly and I lost quite a few photos I'd thought I'd backed up. Fortunately, these weren't photos related to Mel's project, but nevertheless, their loss represented the latest in a series of obstacles I'd battled this Spring. Some of these obstacles were technical, some professional, some financial, some personal. Among the most noticeable was not reaching my Kickstarter goal. They all stung, but like I've mentioned about facing other failings, what option did I have but to keep pursuing the things that matter most to me?

And are these really challenges? Life, of course, is not horrible. None of these obstacles represent much more than modern life, or so I tell myself. I often think "What the bleep? How is this at all compared to war, to disease, to sleeping on the deck of boats praying that the shape you you've been seeing in the distance as you slip between darkened islands in the dead of night is not a hostile battleship? How was this at all comparable to Mel's experience?"

But then I think perhaps this is our horror. We do not face bombing raids and artillery barrages because this is our time. Yes, some in this world — indeed too many — certainly do face such violence and destruction. The bullet and the bomb still haunt many millions. Journalists continue to face very mortal dangers for the work they do (Particularly just over our Southern border, as a powerful On the Media episode recently detailed). For more than a decade our own society has been at war. When I taught last quarter, two of my students were veterans, one from each war. Yet they still seemed younger than I felt, even though they'd had these experiences I couldn't begin to conceptualize.

We berate ourselves for lamenting the petty annoyances that shape our lives. Much of our contemporary cultural discourse discusses how disconnected Americans are from the surrounding world, how insulated we are from modern times, how inoculated we are from current events. We toss around the term "first world problems" to acknowledge our privilege. We strive to simplify and slow down. We advocate for purity and healing. We seek cooperation and authenticity.

But we occupy a different world. We're quick to dismiss this world as mundanity. My obstacles are remarkable in their lack of note: Failed computer systems, broken hearts, fading identity, un-acknowledged job applications, friends battling serious illness, mounting debt, loneliness. All of these are our battlefronts. They rarely involve our own survival and yet they besiege us. They may not be romantic, but they are our enemies. Call it bourgeois, call it privilege, call it sad, call it whatever you want, but it this is our reality.

This is our war.

Help me fight my war

I need your help today to keep telling Mel's story. Any amount you can contribute makes a tremendous difference, and there are many incentives I'm offering in exchange for your support (find out more here or here. If you can't afford to donate, perhaps you have frequent traveler points for trains and planes, lodging, or other resources you can share. But if you can make a donation, please do so below and spread the word.

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