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:
