Bill Lascher 4/1/14 Bill Lascher 4/1/14

Paying the Price for a Smoking Gun

By the time I had the confidential State Department documents in my hands, I was five days into my research trip to Washington, D.C., I'd flipped through hundreds, maybe thousands of pages of dusty, sometimes crumbling government documents, private letters from publishing luminaries, and even water-stained diaries from hungry, stranded soldiers unaware of a coming death march through mosquito-infested, sweltering jungles.

Now I need your help to keep looking.

Bill Lascher 3/18/14 Bill Lascher 3/18/14

March 18, 1942. Somewhere At Sea

Bill Lascher 12/25/13 Bill Lascher 12/25/13

Happy Holidays From Mel

Here's how Melville Jacoby celebrated the holidays when he was in China as an exchange student in 1936-37: with custom-made holiday cards from Canton, where he studied at Lingnan University.

Bill Lascher 11/26/13 Bill Lascher 11/26/13

A Wedding At The Brink of War

For a brief moment after the wedding, the world fell away from Mel and Annalee. That they didn't have the traditional wedding their friends in the Chinese government wanted to throw for them back in Chungking didn't matter. That all their things — including most of Annalee's clothes — were on a ship that would end up diverted from Manila when the war started didn't matter. They were two young reporters in love.

Bill Lascher 8/8/13 Bill Lascher 8/8/13

Mel on the Run

Melville Jacoby on the island of Cebu in the Philippines while he, his wife Annalee, and the A.P.'s Clark Lee were on the run from the Japanese in March, 1942. (apologies for the faded scan).

Bill Lascher 8/7/13 Bill Lascher 8/7/13

Chungking

“Learning to bum cigarettes from visitors, enduring a cold water bath, eating only Chinese food, getting letters home by clipper, settling the world’s problems over rice wine, and watching the Chinese in their tremendous efforts is all part of Chungking’s fun,"

— Melville Jacoby, Summer, 1941

Bill Lascher 4/1/13 Bill Lascher 4/1/13

Notes From The Starting Line

Today brings a bloom of beginnings from a tangle of endings. Perhaps that's not surprising. I suppose beginnings and endings all occupy coterminous space. And as I write, I'm struck by how my own beginnings and my own endings weave around one another and, often, between two places — Los Angeles and Portland.

But I'm writing today to recognize one simple beginning: the redesigned, relaunched version of my website*, upon which, presumably, you're reading these words. I do so hoping to re-introduce the world to my own background as a writer and journalist and as a storyteller, and to re-pique your curiosity about Melville Jacoby, whose adventures, romance and experiences as a journalist in World War II-era China and the Philippines will be the subject of a forthcoming book.

Bill Lascher 12/7/12 Bill Lascher 12/7/12

Pearl Harbor as a Reporter Experienced it in Manila

"Manila has not yet digested the fact of war. Balloon and toy salesmen and vendors on the streets with extra editions are just appearing as fully equipped soldiers are appearing," After news reached Manila that U.S. forces had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, Melville Jacoby cabled news to his Time Magazine editors about how the Philippines capital digested news of the Japanese raids.

Bill Lascher 11/28/12 Bill Lascher 11/28/12

Introducing "Monsieur Big-Hat"

Most of my posts about Melville Jacoby focus squarely on nonfiction. He was a journalist. I am a journalist. Though Mel worked for a time as a broadcaster and was handy with a camera, he was first and foremost a writer. So it shouldn't be terribly surprising that he dabbled in fiction a bit. I found one of those stories — "Monsieur Big-Hat" — and put it together with some photos Mel took of an air raid in Chongqing to make a short ebook that's now available online. The story describes what happens when an American correspondent meets a French diplomat as bombs fall on the Chinese wartime capital in June, 1940.

Bill Lascher 10/31/12 Bill Lascher 10/31/12

Motion Picture Treat: "When The Whole World Is So Upset"

For the first time ever, I'm able to share a movie of Melville Jacoby himself. These snippets of 16mm movies were shot in the 1930s and are accompanied by excerpts from a moving letter he wrote his mother in early 1941 about why he pursued his dangerous careert.Mel was on a boat from China bound for Manila and, eventually, to the United States. He had just finished a year's work as a stringer in China and the region of Southeast Asia then known as Indochina. There, in the city of Haiphong (a part of modern-day Vietnam), Mel had been arrested and briefly detained by the Japanese, who'd accused him of being a spy. As he traveled back to the United States, he wrote a moving letter to his Mother in which he attempted to reassure her about the risks he'd taken in the previous year. Check out the full post to see the video.