March 18, 1942. Somewhere At Sea

“Whether I'll ever arrive at a point where this letter can be mailed is still a matter of fate. So far we've been scared plenty but very lucky — and I'm knocking on wood. We slid out of one island hideout just a bare two hours ahead of one of Mr. Tojo's destroyers and have been seeing dim outlines on the horizon ever since. But all that will be a story later, I guess.”

-Melville Jacoby, March 18, 1942, Somewhere at Sea

Happy Holidays From Mel

View fullsize

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.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

A Wedding At The Brink of War

View fullsize

Mel and Annalee walking together through Manila on their wedding day.

Seventy-two years ago today, mere days before Pearl Harbor, two young journalists from California married as war clouds gathered over Manila. Melville and Annalee Jacoby had met at Stanford and reconnected in the Spring of 1942 when Mel briefly went home to the United States. Annalee arrived in Chongqing n September, 1941, and the couple quickly fell in love. Mel proposed as the couple raced through Chongqing's steep streets on rickshaws, their drivers dodging crowds and bomb-blast potholes, but the next day Time asked him to transfer to Manila. Annalee had work to finish and wouldn't join him for two months. They got married the day she arrived in Manila, Nov. 26, 1941. Their romance is one for the ages, and it's the heart of the book I'm working on about Mel. Here's an excerpt from that book about the wedding day that I've adapted a bit for this space). Happy Anniversary!

That day, Mel waited on the shoreline for her plane to land. The approach to the beach seemed to Annalee to take hours. The entire time she eyed Mel by the side of the water in his gleaming white suit, white shirt and yellow tie.

As soon as Annalee stepped off the plane, Mel whisked her off to the Union Church of Manila. Her wedding gown a casual white nylon dress covered in prints of palm trees, ukuleles, pineapples and leis, Annalee strolled along a Manila street with one hand clutching Mel's arm and a yellow, broad-brimmed straw hat tucked under her other arm. She beamed as she looked up at him. He strode confidently, almost smugly.

“It was just like I'd always hoped it would be,” Annalee said.

Mel had wanted a justice of the peace, but the search for one who could speak English had ended up a comedy of errors and cultural clashes, so he chose the Union Church’s Reverend Walter Books Foley. Foley performed the ceremony in a small room off the chapel decorated with white flowers and green drapes. Mel had spent $746 on two rings: a simple platinum band, and another with a square 1 ½ carat diamond head and small diamonds branching off along its platinum mount.

“Looks like half a milk bottle it is so big,” Mel told his parents.

Life photographer Carl Mydans was Mel’s best man. Mydans’s wife, Shelley, a writer for Time and Life and a mutual friend of Mel and Annalee from Stanford, was the matron of honor. The only other guest at the ceremony was Allan Michie, another Time reporter. After the ceremony, other friends of Mel's met the newlyweds at the Bay View Hotel, where they danced around a portable phonograph, called home and celebrated.

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.

“He types on the desk, and I type on the dressing table, and we both feel awfully sorry for the people next door,” Annalee told Mel’s parents.

View fullsize

Mel and Annalee Jacoby's Wedding at the Union Church of Manila.

Mel and Annalee slipped away for a brief honeymoon at a cabin near the Philippine town of Tagaytay, as much a tourist destination then as it is today. Their cabin overlooked the stunning lake Taal and the volcanic island at its center. The shack's electricity didn't stay on through the night and the faucet dripped, but they were happy to be able to escape — if just for a weekend — from a war that was then just days away.

Tied up next to the cabin were two baby giant pandas. Madame Chiang had entrusted Mel and Annalee with the animals’ care — not an easy feat — until they could be loaded onto the Calvin Coolidge, the last passenger ship to leave the Philippines before the war began.

Aside from the Pandas, the couple received a bevy of luxurious and stately gifts from their friends and contacts in China. These included red satin blankets, elaborate vases and piles of greetings from other journalists they knew in Chungking. Hollington Tong — China’s information minister and Mel’s former boss — gave them cash because he couldn't throw a “Red Sedan” wedding for the Jacobys. Such a traditional ceremony would have involved drummers, fine clothing and an elaborate chair. But the conflict made that celebration impossible.

Despite headaches caused by caring for the pandas, the intermittent services at the cabin and a rainstorm, the Jacobys were not dismayed, as Annalee explained in a letter to Mel's parents:

“The running water worked only at intervals, the electricity blinked on and off all one evening, and it poured, but it was still the most wonderful honeymoon anyone ever had.”

Mel on the Run

View fullsize

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).

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 on Chungking (Chongqing), China in the Summer of 1941

Notes From The Starting Line

A signed photo from Captain Saunders on the S.S. Melville Jacoby

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.

Thinking about Mel, I'm reminded that a year ago today, two friends of mine and I clambered across miles of rocky shoreline beneath the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Despite a cloudless sky, sharp breezes whipped our bodies as we strode along the edge of a continent. In search of history, we found rusted strips of metal that nearly fifty years of waves had torn from a ship once known as the S.S. Melville Jacoby. That day last year when I finally climbed atop one of the oxidized hulks left on the shore, I stared across the Pacific and thought I'd reached the culmination of one of my journeys. I thought I would soon finish a Kickstarter campaign in which I'd hoped to raise $25,000 to fund my effort to tell Mel's story. Unfortunately, my deadline arrived five days later and I hadn't met my goal, even if I did raise more than $13,000 in pledges. Not the ending I'd hoped for, but it turned out not to matter. With many of my backers' support I continued to work on making the book happen. Today, as I'll soon explain, I'm far closer to that goal.

Opening Days

Baseball in tree

But there's a more obvious reason to think about beginnings today. This is Major League Baseball's Opening Day. For baseball fans and players, it's the beginning of a new season full of promise and opportunity. As clichéd as it sounds, for a moment, anything is possible.

I'm a lifelong fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers (and of Vin Scully, their magical announcer of 62 years). Opening Day always brings a sense of renewal to me almost more powerful than does the arrival of Spring in the natural world (though the beautiful weekend that just passed in Portland underscores the marvels of seasonal change). Thus, it seems especially fitting to re-launch my website today.

But it wasn't baseball on my mind when I first started writing this post.

Two weeks ago, I accomplished something that I wouldn't have imagined on that rocky beach last year: I ran the Los Angeles marathon.

This was my first marathon. Despite the sore legs immediately afterward and a certain degree of post-race malaise these past two weeks, the experience was, simply, fantastic. Four hours, 22 minutes and 36 seconds brought me from Dodger Stadium (where else?) to Santa Monica's California Incline. Crossing the finish line brought more than the end of a race. The moment brought the culmination of four long, sometimes painful, occasionally tedious, but often revelatory months of training.

Crowds gather at the starting line of the 2013 Los Angeles Marathon.

Just a week before the race a barista asked me how I felt about this training regime. Without thinking I told her "this has been the best four months of my life." As shocked as I was to hear myself say that, I quickly realized I was speaking honestly.

At first, though, that seemed absurd. Those four months were grueling, even when I felt confident in or energized by my running. Shortly before I began training in earnest, I injured the medial collateral ligament of my left knee. I couldn't run for weeks, but it was early enough that I recovered before my first official training run. My knee protested for some time, but I kept running.

Still, other aspects of my life were far from ideal. The same week I kicked off my training, I got dumped, my apartment flooded into the unit below mine, I froze on stage in the middle of a story for a night of mass transit tales, and I got food poisoning. Meanwhile, rejection letters continued to fill my inbox from agents I'd queried regarding Mel's book.

But I kept running. I kept running through more rejections. I kept running as editors turned down freelance pitches. I kept running as romances fizzled as quickly as they sparked. Through pouring rain, plummeting temperatures, and darkening nights, I kept running.

Then, shortly before Christmas, I twisted my ankle and had to suspend my training again. Home for the holiday, I could barely walk up and down the stairs at my mother's house. For weeks, even a short walk around the block — let alone the miles I needed to start adding to my training regime — left me in tremendous pain. The training had sustained me before the injury, had given me a groove into which I could find solace from personal and financial and professional turmoil, and I was jarred by losing so quickly that rhythm and structure I'd built.

But still, I kept running, and the pain subsided. In its place emerged a renewed focus that spilled over from the running into other areas of my life, perhaps most notably into my writing. Indeed, it already had. All those other changes as I began my training — I'd even sold my car in November — coincided with a new focus on my book. Soon I'd re-written my literary proposal, and by the beginning of February — as my long training runs pushed 16, then 18, then 20 miles — I'd found an agent for my book. After four months of rejections, here was someone who recognized how great Mel's story is, and someone confident I'm the one to tell it.

The Cover Page from the first draft of Melville Jacoby's Book

My race isn't over with the book. My agent and I still need to sell the idea, and I still need to write the book. But as we prepare to submit the project to editors, I realize that while I kept running, I also kept writing. Through the disappointments and heartbreak and injuries (not to mention a horrendous allergic reaction I suffered just over a week before the marathon), I kept writing, first in snippets, then in longer stretches. Perhaps it's no coincidence that I signed my agent just as my training reached its peak. Perhaps the proposal revisions and sample chapter overhauls I've just finished are the long runs in the training cycle of writing a book.

One race has ended. Perhaps another starting line is approaching.

Willing to help nudge me along with a dollar or two?

Buy Me Some Typewriter Ribbon

Pearl Harbor as a Reporter Experienced it in Manila

Today marks the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor. Popular history places Dec. 7, 1941 — the day that would live in infamy — as the start of the U.S. involvement in World War II. Of course, the situation was more complicated than that. Reporters like Melville Jacoby saw war coming for some time. They witnessed rising tensions in the days and weeks that preceded Pearl Harbor and speculated when (and where), not if, war would come. In his role as Time Magazine's Far East bureau chief, Mel relayed those reports that seemed most credible and his analysis of the news collected across Asia to the magazine's editors in New York City. These editors, in turn, synthesized Mel's cables for news updates in Time (and, at times, Luce's other publications, LIFE and Fortune) and drew upon them as background for future stories.

This week, as December 7 approached, I tweeted bits of the cables Mel wrote during that last week of "peace." Now, I'd like to share pieces of what Mel cabled the day of the attacks (which, because the Philippines are on the other side of the International Date Line, meant it was Dec. 8, 1941 when Manila heard about the attacks).

At first, Mel cabled, the the gravity of the situation didn't seem to register in the Filipino capital:

"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."

That first cable, sent from Manila at 10 a.m. to Time's David Hulburd, confirmed bombing raids at three locations across the Philippines, though at that point there hadn't yet been raids, or even alarms, in the city. However, American military officials prepared to fight.

"MacArthur's headquarters were the grimmest place at dawn this morning when the war staff was aroused to face war [and] send troops to their battle stations. Extra headquarters guards arrived at 9.A.M. as officers began donning helmets and gas masks while grabbing hurried gulps of coffee and sandwiches."

As officers began to study maps and reporters crowded into press rooms, rumors began to spread across the city.

"The whole thing has busted here like one bombshell, though, as previous cables showed the military has been alert over the week."

In only a few hours, though, the city began to realize what was happening, as Mel wrote in another cable that day:

"War feeling hit the populace about noon time when there were full runs on banks, grocery stores, gas stations. All taxis and garage cars were taken by the military, clogging transport systems. Our own planes overhead are drawing thousands of eyes now, while they didn't earlier this morning..."

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. Some of that fiction is pretty good, though it was never published. Take "Monsieur Big-Hat." That's a short story Mel wrote in 1940 while he was working in Chongqing, China's wartime capital (then known as Chungking). Written at a time when the Japanese were pounding Chongqing with bomb upon bomb, "Monsieur Big-Hat" describes an American correspondent's encounter with a French diplomat who was just about to leave China to return to Paris after years away. The two meet during an air raid in a shelter dug deep beneath Chongqing. Just as dark news reports arrive from France, the diplomat — so eager to return to his wife and son — makes a fateful decision amid the rattled nerves and thunderous blasts of the raid. It's a poignant glimpse of life during wartime with descriptions of the attacks so vivid that they were clearly informed by Jacoby's own experience in the Chinese city.

Mel also took a number of compelling photos of the air raids on Chongqing. I took the story and put it together with some of these photos in a short eBook that's now available online (an MP3 audiobook is also available). I've given the book as a gift to everyone who contributed to One Last Assignment, but now anyone else who wants a copy can get one, too. It's available for just $2 in a variety of formats at my new store at lascheratlarge.com/store and on most many of the other places online where one buys books. That's currently the only item on sale in my store*, but I hope to add other projects soon.

However, if you're looking for something lovely as a Christmas gift, any shot from my entire photography portfolio can now be ordered as a print online. Click here to see those photos or here to place an order.**

* This was the case in 2012 when I first wrote this post. As of February, 2023, more items are available in the store and it presumably will continue to change over time.

** Photo sales are temporarily unavailable as of February, 2023, but per the note above, this is likely to change.

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!

On Jan. 8, 1941, Melville Jacoby 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 then called 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.

Listen to excerpts from that letter as you watch this video, which features snippets of Mel when he was a young man in China. This is just a minute's worth of footage from the more than an hour and a half of Mel's films that have been digitized. Your contributions make it possible for me to find and process these amazing artifacts. They allow me to present a richer version of Mel's story and the way they show a young man laughing with friends and capturing his wonder at the places he saw humanize him as well. If you haven't yet, please contribute today.

Sponsor My Work

Not even pandas could spoil this honeymoon

Pandas at the National Zoo. Credit: Ann Batdorf, National Zoological Park, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/PhotoGallery/GiantPandas/default.cfm

This week's news of a panda cub's birth at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. reminds me of one of of the more comical aspects of Melville Jacoby's story. Shortly after Mel proposed to Annalee Whitmore he was transferred by TIME to Manila to cover the brewing war. After wrapping up her work with Madame Chiang's United China Relief, Annalee joined Mel and the two were married shortly before Thanksgiving, 1941. But the couple didn't end up in the Philippines unaccompanied, even after their nuptials.

"They slipped away for a two-day rainy honeymoon in a cottage on Tagaytay," wrote TIME in its May 11, 1942 obituary of Mel [Sorry for the paywalled link] . "But they were not alone; they had to see to the care & feeding of two baby giant pandas, gifts of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek en route to the U.S." Madame Chiang offered the pandas as gifts to the children of America in an early example of what's come to be known as panda diplomacy. After the pandas safely arrived in the U.S. in early 1942, United China Relief and the New York Zoological Society (now known as the Wildlife Conservation Society) sponsored a contest for children across the U.S. to name them. Nancy Lostutter II of Columbus Ind. won the contest with the names "Pan-dah" and "Pan-dee." In a bizarre twist, though the pandas were thought to be a male and female, zoo officials realized a few years after they arrived and didn't mate that they were both, indeed, female [again, sorry, pay-walled].

Mel and Annalee were tasked with watching over the yet-unnamed pandas until zoologist John Tee-Van could ferry them out of the Philippines and across the Pacific (ultimately, the bears made it out on the last convoy from Manila to the U.S. before the city's collapse). The pandas were enough of a headache that Mel dedicated a paragraph of a Nov. 15, 1941 letter home to venting about them.

"I've been going wild again over the Panda situation," Mel wrote to his parents. "Two of them arriving with the Zoo keeper tomorrow and I've had to do everything from hire station wagons, to finding places for them to stay, to getting special kinds of bamboo and sugar cane flown down from the provinces in a chartered plane. What a business. People phoning all the time wanting to see the animals, or borrow them, sell insurance, an air conditioning plant, grape jiuce [sic] and everything imaginable."

Two weeks later, Mel and Annalee each sent letters to Mel's parents describing their wedding and brief honeymoon. In her note, Annalee describes their beautiful lakeside escape, and how the pandas even came along for their honeymoon.

"After a subdued dinner we drove to Tagaytay for two days -- a cottage next to the pandas, overlooking a huge island-dotted lake in what used to be a volcano crater. The running water worked only at intervals, the electricity blinked on and off all one evening, and it poured, but it was still the most wonderful honeymoon anyone ever had."