Books, Melville Jacoby, History, Photography Bill Lascher Books, Melville Jacoby, History, Photography Bill Lascher

Introducing A Danger Shared

Read an excerpt and view photos from the book A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (Blacksmith Books, 2024), which features photography by wartime foreign correspondent Melville Jacoby and accompanying text by Bill Lascher.

The following text and images were excerpted from the introductory chapter to the book A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (Blacksmith Books, 2024), which features photography by wartime foreign correspondent Melville Jacoby and accompanying text by Bill Lascher, who wrote about Jacoby in the critically acclaimed 2016 book Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two WWII Correspondents and Their Epic Escape Across the Pacific (William Morrow & Co.).

The 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War had just passed when I began writing this introduction on September 11, 2020. That date also marked 104 years to the day since the birth of Melville Jacoby, the American foreign correspondent whose images of the war comprise the majority of those included in this book. Mel’s life was short but impactful, capped by a career a close friend called “as brilliant as it was brief.” That brilliance Mel devoted to covering the war and bridging the distance between two physically and culturally distant lands: the United States and Asia.

Mel documented the war and its impact as part of a broader mission to help Americans better understand China (and, later, the Philippines and the place then known as French Indochina). Having studied, lived and worked in China, Mel was understandably interested in how coverage of the war might influence Americans’ sympathy, or lack thereof, for his Chinese friends, neighbors, and colleagues. He also foresaw the weighty implications of the conflict for the United States. Interdependencies and connections had been evolving between Pacific-facing nations before the war. Mel understood this impact on the Pacific and how the conflict between the people and societies on one side of it increasingly mattered to those on its opposite shores.

That morning in 2020 I was, of course, writing amid another crisis: the Covid-19 pandemic. The coronavirus outbreak and responses to it were widening pre-existing political, social, and cultural rifts. This reminded me of a similar crisis, the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920, which claimed Mel’s father’s life when Mel was just two years old. I put this collection together because our lives are more connected than we often realize or care to admit. Wherever and whenever we live, we deserve to have our stories remembered. Our memories are intrinsically valuable, but we are also better able to highlight our connections when we take effort to surface and preserve not just our own stories, but those around us.

The anniversary of the Second World War’s end passed quietly. Our year of contagion, political unrest, and climate catastrophe obscured any inspiring observances of the victory over fascism, moving appearances by veterans, or somber reflections upon atrocity and sacrifice that might have been. What could have been a year of remembrance instead was drowned out by the noise of “2020,” a term that became popular shorthand for calamity and left little room for memory.

Tens of millions of people were killed and displaced during the war in Asia, where the conflict’s global consequences still resonate. Still, Asia’s experience of the war remains largely an afterthought in other parts of the world. Even before the pandemic, the war in Asia was not widely remembered elsewhere. For three quarters of a century, countless tomes about World War II have dissected every nuance of the struggle for Europe, and most of those that don’t instead address America’s crusade through the Pacific. In the Americas and Europe at least, comparatively few titles document the conflict’s massive human and economic toll in Asia, where fighting began two years before Germany invaded Poland and four years before that infamous Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Melville Jacoby at the Press Hostel

Melville Jacoby sits in front of the ruins of the Press Hostel in Chungking in the summer of 1941. In the photo, Mel clasps a flashlight, suggesting he’d just returned from one of the city’s dark, dingy air raid shelters or was prepared to enter one at short notice.

Melville J. Jacoby Press Hostel calling card (fron

The Chinese-language side of Jacoby’s card

Press Hostel calling card (reverse)

Melville Jacoby’s calling card while working in Chungking (Chongqing), China, circa 1940-1941

This collection can’t fix that reality, but it may help resurface the story of Asia’s experience of the war while reviving the memory of those who tried to chronicle it. Many of the images you see within this collection have never been published. Curating and interpreting them has expanded my knowledge of World War II, shifted my understanding of war in general, and deepened my appreciation for those who sacrifice their lives to document world-rending moments.

The Faces I see every day

A photograph of mostly Chinese nationals photographed by Melville Jacoby, who wrote “The Faces I See Every Day” on the back of the print. Mel likely made this image while a student at Lingnan University in Canton (Guangzhou), China, in the 1936-1937 school year.

That deepening began twenty years ago, when my grandmother — Mel’s cousin — gave me a typewriter that used to belong to him. I was in my early twenties. As I learned more over the ensuing years, that story has maintained a presence in my mental landscape. Learning about Mel was at first an excuse for me to spend time with my grandmother. She’d ended up with most of his possessions, and each time I visited, I learned a bit more about him. By 2016 I’d gathered enough material to write my first book, Eve of a Hundred Midnights (William Morrow), which describes Mel’s life, his romance with the equally remarkable journalist Annalee Whitmore Jacoby, and their escape together from the doomed Philippines.

As interesting as those two were, there was a bigger story to tell. That book really only touched upon a small segment of what’s contained in the hundreds, maybe thousands of photographs, letters, and notebooks of Mel’s I’d grown to look forward to seeing at my grandmother’s house (let alone elsewhere). Mel and Annalee’s story was worthy of a book, but leaving out all this other material did a disservice to the work they and the people close to them produced. These young, passionate reporters had written exhausting, illuminating accounts of the war — both for private and public audiences. They also captured vivid images of conflict as well as the beguiling way everyday life persists in spite of it. What good were these chronicles they’d devoted their lives to capturing if they remained stuffed in some closet in California for decades?

I regularly reflect on what didn’t make it into my book’s pages. I’ve focused on telling other stories since, but part of me still thinks about the ones Mel told, the ones he didn’t tell, and the ones nobody had a chance to tell. More than any of that, I wonder about what stories I don’t even know about, which stories were left untold and forgotten by the world.

This volume offers a chance to revisit some of these stories. Though Melville Jacoby worked primarily as a writer, he rarely went anywhere without a camera. The images he made over the course of his time in Asia reflect increasing comfort behind the lens. After closely examining thousands of his prints and negatives and other related collections, I’ve selected an assortment of pictures that I believe convey a sense of the world he and millions of people whose lives he chronicled experienced.

The images Mel captured reflect increasingly intimate portraits of China and its neighbors, even in their most dire moments. Candid depictions of everyday life seem ever more natural over time, though occasionally Mel’s lens reflects faces frozen in discomfort under his gaze. In some images, Chungkingers pause amid piles of rubble and chaos-filled streets — sometimes seemingly while racing to or from a barrage of bombs — to gawk at the westerner stopping to take their pictures amid the peril. It’s never quite clear whether they’re bothered, or even offended, by his presence, if other concerns have furrowed their brows, or if expressions that appear frozen for eternity as troubled looks were in fact transitory moments that passed as quickly as the shutter’s snap.

This is an imperfect and unbalanced collection. Like any storyteller’s, visual or otherwise, Mel’s career — and his eye — evolved. Hence: “A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War.” Would that Mel had taken as many pictures of Japan when he visited it at the outset of the war as he would in Chungking three years later. I wish I didn’t have to wonder which subjects Mel simply overlooked and which he elided out of fear of losing tenuous employment. It will remain a mystery what images from Southeast Asia might have survived had Mel’s dogged work not made him wary after death threats and an arrest outside Haiphong on espionage charges. And, of course, we’ll never know what was lost on New Year’s Eve, 1941, when Japanese forces approached Manila, leaving Mel and his Time Inc. colleague Carl Mydans with no option but to incinerate their reporting material in a hotel basement. For that matter, even though Mel provided the first pictures most Americans saw of their countrymen’s desperate fighting on the Philippines’ Bataan peninsula and of those soldiers’ stubborn resistance on Corregidor, I wish I could see what images of these and other embattled places he lost during his final perilous escape from the Philippines when he was forced to ditch everything but what he could carry.

War Map of China

Residents of Chungking study a large public map of China with information about aerial battles, bombing raids, and other updates about the war with Japan

Soldiers marching

A column of Chinese soldiers parade through a city street somewhere in China, likely Chungking, circa 1940-1941

Woman cooking in Chungking

A woman prepares blocks of tofu while other food cooks at a stall in Chungking

While I am originally a writer and reporter, the time I’ve spent examining Mel’s life and work sparked a personal interest in photography, archival work and preservation. I mention this to emphasize that while I’ve done my best to faithfully capture the originality of the images presented here, I have little prior professional experience in these fields. I have digitally removed dust and scratch marks introduced while scanning images, slightly adjusted tone where necessary for some images, and, with a handful, made minor crops that don’t change what I believe were the pictures’ intended composition or content. I’ve clearly labeled the few instances where I’ve made any significant adjustments. I took great care to remain faithful to each original and I think I was successful in doing so, but I also think it’s essential that I note that these are not totally untouched images.

What you see here is an incomplete record, as is any history or other collection of images and text. My understanding of Mel and the world he witnessed comes from examining his work, his correspondence, and what personal ephemera survived decades of travel, war, relocation, death and everyday life. I managed to glean invaluable perspective through conversations with a few people who met Mel and survived long enough for me to meet them. I augmented my knowledge of the context in which he worked (and the context that situates this collection) with primary sources from dozens of archival collections from journalists, academics, soldiers, sailors, politicians, and business people who grew up, lived, worked, loved or fought throughout Asia. That context was then deepened by readings from and discussions with countless other authors, historians, scholars and storytellers.

Soldiers with Stretchers

Chinese soldiers gather with stretchers on a rubble-strewn Chungking street after an air raid circa 1940-1941

Sisters on steps

China’s powerful “Soong Sisters,” Soong Mayling, Soong Ai-ling, and Soong Chingling during a tour of Chungking in April, 1940. The tour was part of a heavily publicized reunion of the sisters aimed at boosting Chinese morale during the war and cultivating sympathy from potential allies, including the United States

I cannot with complete certainty claim what any one image in this collection depicts, nor can I answer the countless questions each provokes. What was Mel trying to capture with a given photo? What moment had he hoped to record when he clicked the shutter button? Who were the people in front of his lens? Where were the places they occupied? Why were people in some images sifting through rubble or running from flames in others? Why were faces in some pictures full of tears and others brightened by smiles? What might have been left out of a frame? Where can such omissions be traced to Mel’s own actions as a photographer, and which can be explained by the haste and danger of war? What about entire images that might have been omitted? Which were left out because of Mel’s own decisions and which omissions can I attribute to the simple havoc wrought upon memory and history by the passing of years?

Multiple lenses filter my understanding of World War II in general and the war in Asia specifically. These filters include Mel’s own decision-making about what images and events to record as well as the time that passed between these decisions and my first learning of Mel’s story decades later. I mention these layers of filtration neither to excuse mistakes nor evade scrutiny, but to acknowledge that I don’t intend this collection as a definitive record of either the war or Mel’s career. Instead, I hope this project serves to prompt discussion and examination.

Hanoi canal

Residents of Hanoi, Tonkin, French Indochina (present-day Vietnam) walk along a dirt road next to a canal in the fall of 1940

I’ve been able to confirm what some of these images depict by triangulating Mel’s work with other sources, but some were more difficult to assess. Where I can confidently identify someone, or some place, or some moment, I have done so. Where I have a strong hunch of how to label an image, yet lack certainty, I have so indicated. Other images will be left to interpretation, but I included them because they remain intrinsically powerful. Perhaps you’ll wonder, for example, why sorrow seems to shadow some faces, while others betray a joy that seems impossible among all the destruction and horror. Maybe the way moments of serenity seem to persist even as tumult surrounds people will remind you of similar dichotomies in your own life. Perhaps there will be emotions on some of these faces with which you can identify, as I have many times.

Japanese tank in Hanoi

Onlookers watch a Japanese tank drive through Hanoi in the fall of 1940. After briefly resisting Japan’s efforts to move troops into French Indochina (present-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), French colonial forces controlled by the Vichy regime acceded to Japanese pressure. Following its signing of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, Japan moved thousands of troops into Indochina to cut off China’s access to munitions and other supplies

Flower seller in Hanoi

A vendor at a flower stall in Hanoi looks at a bouquet of light-colored flowers. Fall, 1940

Guerrilla with rifle

A man in local attire poses with a rifle on a bridge somewhere in French Indochina, likely near the Mekong River along the border of Laos and Thailand in December, 1940

French soldiers marching with rifles

French soldiers march with service rifles slung over their shoulders after a skirmish with Japanese troops near the town of Langson at the border of French Indochina and China in September 1940

Ultimately, I hope this collection reignites interest in a period and region worthy of deeper, sustained, and expansive discussion. We live in an an era when, I believe, we all would benefit from reflecting on history. Perhaps this collection will also prompt readers to think about stories in their own worlds that remain untold or under-appreciated, and to reflect upon how our past provides perspective on our present and informs our future.

Philippine villagers on the shore

Residents of a village somewhere in the Philippines (likely Pola, Mindoro Oriental) watch from a beach as passengers of the freighter Princessa de Cebu escaping from the fortified island of Corregidor sail to shore. Among those escapees were Mel and Annalee Jacoby

Our contemporary world often feels fraught with hostility, fear, and tragedy. Sometimes I think the shadows darkening our time are akin to those that roiled Mel’s. Ideally, this volume will help illuminate a corner of the world as it was, as it is, and as it could be. There are others who can more precisely describe and interpret what happened in Asia (and elsewhere) during the period examined in this volume. This work admittedly interprets a recollection that has passed through three generations of my family’s memory and has been informed by my own professional experience as a journalist. It is not a removed, impersonal analysis. Even if it were, I didn’t experience the war, nor do I have direct connections to the cultures examined in this volume or the people who did.

Mel and his colleagues strived to accurately cover the war despite real threats and dangers. He risked everything to continue telling this story, he understood that doing so required professionalism, and he knew that expertise mattered because it strengthened value of the reports and images he and his peers recorded.

Aware of that intention as well as my own limitations, I have taken care to fairly and truthfully present these images in order to maintain that value. We must still fight to keep the story Mel helped tell visible and to retell it, even imperfectly, lest we risk repeating its darkest chapters.

Bill Lascher

September, 2023

Mel and Annalee in Uniform

Melville and Annalee Jacoby sitting together in a blacked-out hotel room somewhere in Australia (likely Menzies Hotel in Melbourne), April 1942, shortly after their escape from the Philippines aboard a blockade runner. Each wears uniforms issued by the U.S. Army to accredited correspondents, as indicated by the embroidered “C” visible on Mel’s shoulder. Annalee, then a contributor to Liberty Magazine, was the first woman accredited by the army in the Pacific Theater. Mel was Time Magazine’s Far East Bureau Chief.

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The Scenic Route, Video Games Bill Lascher The Scenic Route, Video Games Bill Lascher

Returning to the Solitude of Hyrule

How the 2017 video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and its 2023 sequel The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom fulfilled a pandemic-driven need for quiet I hadn’t known I had.

The character Link takes in a vista of the land of Hyrule in this screenshot from the Nintendo Switch version of the video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, published in 2017 by Nintendo.

How a video game landscape offered a refuge I didn’t know I needed

Quiet.

Loneliness.

Solitude.

These words keep coming back to me when I think about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the massively popular open-world video game published by Nintendo in 2017.

Quiet.

Quiet.

Quiet.

I first experienced the sprawling adventure that is Breath of the Wild in the summer of 2020. I set out on that adventure alone, privately, in late corners of the night stolen away from pandemics and bottle feedings, extrajudicial killings and book drafts, tear gas and baby tears, wildfire smoke and sleep training. Those precious moments of escape brought me to a place I hadn’t realized I’d longed to visit, a place of rich detail full of possibility and the promise of freedom. I hadn’t expected any of that in a virtual world, nor had I expected the characteristics of that world that I now treasure most: its quiet and the particular sense of peace that quiet delivered.

I’m the chatty one in my relationship. The loud one, so my partner will probably be mystified by the following claim (as may other close friends and family): quiet nourishes me despite my extroverted tendencies. Only in that cacophonous year when everything changed did I realize this. Actually, even then I didn’t know how much I craved quiet, nor had I yet recognized that I’d turned so often to Breath of the Wild in the months and years following the pandemic’s onset because of the role it played in satisfying that craving.

Of all of Breath of the Wild’s impressive features — the openness of its world, its visual beauty, the flexibility that came with abundant quests for the player to pursue — the impression that lingers most for me is the intentionality of its soundscape. A certain noiselessness pervades the game despite its wealth of creatures, monsters, and characters, and that noiselessness immerses players in the aftermath of a tragedy that has left the land of Hyrule — the game’s setting — ravaged and lonely. The quiet underscores Hyrule’s desolation, but also a resilient, simple beauty persisting despite tragedy to emerge throughout the world should one only look closely. The game balances stillness and dynamism, with its sound, or lack thereof, often maintaining that balance. I enjoyed Breath of the Wild for many reasons, but I savored playing it because I could get lost in its noiselessness.

I wouldn’t have thought to find such sensory nourishment in Hyrule, which has served as the Legend of Zelda’s primary setting since its 1986 introduction on the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, but that’s where I found it. The world I discovered through Breath of the Wild felt like a place only I knew. It felt like I was the only one there. It was my world.

Millions had experienced Hyrule’s many forms already. Many had visited this specific iteration of it years before I did. Though I’d avidly played the original NES game and its early esequels, by the time I arrived in Breath of the Wild’s “Shrine of Resurrection” I knew little about those who had been there already and even less about those whose own voyages to Hyrule were also just beginning. In that first summer of this new world of ours, surely others found solace in this incarnation of an old familiarity, but by then I’d come to feel as if everyone was drifting silently away from one another, flung from life as we recognized it by cataclysm upon cataclysm.

Link and Zelda explore an underground cavern in a screenshot from the opening cinematic of the 2023 video game for the Nintendo Switch, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, published by Nintendo.

This May, three years after I first played Breath of the Wild and six years after its release, Nintendo released its sequel: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. In a departure from previous Zelda games’ re-imaginings of Hyrule, Tears built off the same fictional landscape its predecessor introduced. Only then, after I’d returned to that world this Spring, did I realize what this version of Hyrule had meant to me when I’d started playing Breath of the Wild and what it means to me now.

That realization didn’t come while I was playing either game. Instead I was on a walk. It was late on a Friday, one of those amazing warm late spring nights when the feeling of daytime heat blends into the comfort of evening warmth. I was slowly meandering to a pinball bar where I wanted to practice before an upcoming playoff match scheduled for my bar league team. Tears of the Kingdom had been released less than 24 hours prior. I wondered why I’d left my home when I’d waited so long to return to Hyrule and see how it might have changed, but I also knew that had I stayed home I’d have wondered why I wasn’t out enjoying the nice weather and a chance to play pinball nearby.

While I was walking, I noticed the night’s stillness and the sense of possibility it promised. Summer’s approach was tangible. The weekend had begun. Lights glowed from living room windows. I could see people laughing in front of television sets and scurrying casually around their kitchens, but I could not hear them. Everyone was living in their own little worlds. I had no knowledge of what they’d traveled through to reach this point and where they might be headed, but I could see how alive everyone I saw was in that moment.

I felt alive as well. I could have been at home. I could have been doing any number of things, but I savored the quiet of my walk. Then, thinking about Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild again, I finally realized the role the latter had played for me and wondered if the former could play a similar role. Three years after 2020, the what-once-was of life before that year has transformed into the what-could-never-be-again, while the what-could-be has become the what-is. This vastly-different existence has, at least for me, become familiar, even normal.

A windswept mountain in the land of Hyrule as seen in this screenshot from the Nintendo Switch version of the 2017 video game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, from Nintendo.

Anticipation and Payoff

Breath of the Wild hadn’t just provided an escape with its noiselessness, it reignited my long-dormant interest in video games. When it was finally time to revisit Hyrule via Tears of the Kingdom, I wouldn’t return alone. Instead, I experienced something I’d rarely experienced before: the payoff of sharing the long-anticipated return of a beloved cultural entity with a community that cherishes it as much as I do.

In the early nineties, I’d experienced similar anticipation and satisfaction when I became a fan of the rock band U2. I first connected with their music a bit after the release of their landmark 1991 album Achtung Baby. Not only had I found what would become my favorite band, I’d discovered the sensation of discovering music. This discovery was well timed: I became a U2 fan just in time to anticipate Zooropa, the band’s 1993 followup to Achtung Baby.

What had been for me a 1-2 punch of musical discovery coincided with a 1-2 punch of personal and global upheaval. Globally, the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union shifted a world I’d grown up perceiving as static. During the same period, my dad died, I started middle school, and my life lurched from the static tranquility of childhood into adolescent uncertainty. The what-was now wasn’t.

Finding music, from U2 and elsewhere, provided a similar refuge to what Hyrule would offer three decades later amid new global and personal upheaval. They didn’t play identical roles, however. For one thing, in 2020, my personal life pivoted for a far more positive reason: the birth of my first and only child. Moreover, my foray into the contemporary version of Hyrule was not my first foray into video games (nor even Hyrule). Before U2, however, music had never really “stuck” for me. I wasn’t returning to anything (and yes, I do realize that Zelda and U2 are each massively popularly and commercially successful, but I can’t control those facts and they shouldn’t diminish my interest in either).

When Tears of the Kingdom first arrived I joined Zelda fans in discussing it and my discoveries in social media. I don’t remember ever entering the public discussion of other games’ releases like that. But my participation in that discussion soon tapered off as I found that my most compelling moments playing the new game were ones I experienced by myself, and willingly so. I liked the private joy of these discoveries. I treasured how I didn’t have to share them. Though I have returned to Hyrule under different circumstances than I had three years earlier, I still prize its quiet, solitary moments. Tears of the Kingdom feels unimaginably expansive, yet for me at least, the experience of playing it often feels deeply intimate and private.

My world in 2023 looks familiar to that which existed before 2020, yet it has vastly changed. I recognize the place where we are, but it’s not what was, just as the Hyrule of Tears of the Kingdom has subtly changed from that of Breath of the Wild. This Hyrule has been deepened and elevated (literally, as the game’s setting involves vast underground caverns and airborne “sky islands”). It is a land of filled-in outlines. It is also a land recovering from tragedy, yet not fully repaired, even as it faces new, more complicated challenges.

The character Link stands in shadow at the edge of a “Sky Island” in this screenshot from the 2023 Nintendo Switch video game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, from Nintendo.

Insider and Outsider

In 1987, for Halloween, I dressed as Link, the primary protagonist of the Legend of Zelda series. The original NES game had captivated me earlier in the year and my costume extended the wonder it inspired. Yet a tangible awkwardness I’d also felt wearing it still colors my memory of trick or treating that year (amid a torrential Halloween rainstorm rare for my Southern California childhood). Though I loved the costume and knew even then how popular the game that inspired it was, I still felt very alone so publicly declaring my interest in video games.

The costume had certainly been my choice and I knew other kids who liked video games, even Zelda, but I didn’t meet anyone during my childhood who shared quite the same passion for games I felt. In my teens, college years, and beyond, I would meet others who would openly discuss their own passion for games. Whenever I did, it felt liberating and revelatory because it reminded me that I wasn’t alone.

Today, it’s not unusual for someone to admit to enjoying games, yet I missed out on much of the hobby’s normalization as I pursued other interests and experiences in my twenties and thirties. I continued to play video games quite often, but I didn’t keep tabs on new releases and I usually played on my own. Gaming wasn’t something I talked about in much depth with friends or family, except a few who I knew liked at least some games or with whom I had specific experiences or memories of playing games. I enjoyed games, and I knew they were growing in popularity, but I couldn’t keep up. I also still felt a bit of stigma for liking them. It took me years to shake that sense and even now it’s not completely gone.

Meanwhile, as gaming became a nuanced and complex subculture, I discovered I couldn’t find a place in it where I felt any more comfortable than I did outside of it. I’d long felt like an outsider because of how much I liked video games only to later feel like an outsider because I’d missed out on the evolution of video games and the game-playing community and because I wasn’t bought into its subcultural trappings (despite my childhood Link costume). Like so many interests of mine, I’ve come to feel neither here nor there. I don’t quite have the language one needs to be an insider, though I’m interested enough that I don’t want to exclude it from my life. Fortunately, i’m increasingly less interested in being an insider in any world.

The Private Medium

Except, perhaps, in my own world. I think I’m finally settling in there. I was a lonely kid, though content from a fairly early age with finding my own fun. When Nintendo and the NES arrived in North America in the mid-eighties, I felt almost as if it was crafted specifically for me. The NES was this massively popular and seemingly revolutionary product, yet to me it felt so personal and so very much ... mine (as much as I may have discussed it with others). I was the baby of my family and video games were really the first passion of mine that I chased on my own.

Now that I have a child of my own I’m realizing, maybe this very moment, how crucial that was. My kid’s an only child and still a preschooler, yet he’s already picked up many interests from me, my partner, and his peers at day care. I’m always excited when he enjoys something I like, but I revel most in the enthusiasms toward which he’s found his own way — even the interests of his that I don’t enjoy — especially when I can’t figure out what might have inspired these independent passions.

If that personal passion of my child is so important to me, why do the passions that so defined my first decade of life feel so distant in my fifth? Why does it feel like something I have to explain or justify? So much has been written about nostalgia’s role in culture, often with dismissive or at least qualifying undertones, yet gaming seems to only recently be included in those discussions.

Perhaps the very privateness of my connection to games is what makes my discussing that interest so challenging. Perhaps there’s something about the medium itself that’s complicating things for me. Perhaps the intimacy involved with video games is what’s at play here.

Playing a video game was largely and almost exclusively a private experience when I was young. Especially for a child, few options existed in the 1980s to play with others besides games with “local” (i.e. in-person) multiplayer features. Yes, “multi-user dungeons,” or MUDs, and similar text-based games existed on dial-up “bulletin board systems,” or BBSs, and video arcades with competitive multiplayer games were common in that period, but as the decade progressed one increasingly experienced video games at home with one’s own controller.

No two people can experience playing the same video game in quite the same way they might experience attending the same concert or viewing the same painting. Yes, all art is subjective and one’s experience of art depends upon one’s unique situational perspective, but individuals can’t influence performances or change artworks after they’ve been produced in ways whose results only they can experience. On the other hand, the experience of a video game is universal before play begins, but as soon as one interacts with it a game becomes an individual experience mediated by how they manipulate its controls (or otherwise interface with it). Even watching someone play a game is a fundamentally different experience from playing one.

I’m getting rather abstract here, but now that I’m rediscovering my interest in video games I’m reminded how private the experience feels to me. Others might have played Breath of the Wild long before I did, but I found it when I needed it, when I needed to expand into some other space beyond my day-to-day and couldn’t do so. Just like when I was a kid, video games allowed that expansion to occur inward. In those late nights of 2020, that space was mine and mine alone.

Hyrule Castle rises in the distance in this screenshot from the 2023 video game for the Nintendo Switch The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, published by Nintendo.

This Noisy World

That night in May, as I walked home from pinball practice, I stopped at a corner to add some thoughts to a note I’d started brainstorming all these thoughts I was having about Zelda, video games, quiet, and the peace they brought me in a troubled time.

Then an unmistakable sound.

Bang

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

A yell. Maybe angry. Maybe Despairing. Unmistakably raw whatever emotion.

Silence returned for the briefest of instants. Then a siren. Then another. More sirens, and more, and yet more. Engines roared as car after car raced down North Lombard Street, blue and red lights streaking past the houses between them and me. Still not fast enough to save a young man’s life.

A night’s potential takes many forms, not all welcome. For all the noise and chaos and stress I might have wanted to escape these past three years, the challenges I face (real as they may be) differ dramatically from the calamities inundating so many of my neighbors and fellow humans. I can escape to video games, pinball, earnest bands from Ireland and long walks on summery nights. Can everyone? Where do those with no escape find peace? What treasured moments from childhood provide them solace?

Whatever other worlds one visits, one cannot completely escape this one and the noise that heralds its pain. What we can do is savor the joys we experience. We can treasure the life we live, for we only live it once. The beauty we encounter may not return again.

Once, not long after I started playing Breath of the Wild, I talked about it with a friend who’d played it before me.

“I wish I could experience it for the first time again,” he told me. I understood immediately.

Whether the first minutes of a video game adventure, the initial notes of a piece of a transformative piece of music, the first glimpse of a vista never previously seen, we only get one first time for everything in this life, but we get many chances for new first times, for whatever escapes we’re able to make.

I returned home from my walk safely. I was likely never in danger, but the experience had reminded me of the fear and uncertainty of the summer of 2020. Instead of going to bed, I went downstairs, turned on my Nintendo Switch, and returned to Hyrule. There in the dark corners of the night I felt a sense of awakening, aware that as much as this world was mine, it is also ours. It is there for anyone who wants to find it, just as desolate, lonely, noisy and scarred as it once was, but also just as full of quiet potential and a promise of space for each of us to build our own world.

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Journalism, Media Analysis Bill Lascher Journalism, Media Analysis Bill Lascher

Opting Out of Journalism's Race to the Bottom

If we're discussing issues like what it costs to inform the public about housing and homelessness, or awe-inspiring scientific discoveries, does it matter who makes the impact, when what matters most is whether as many people as possible hear it?

How do you properly complain about sorta going viral, especially when you're sorta going viral because of a complaint in the first place?

It's tough to know how public to be when critiquing your own profession and its labor dynamics. It's harder still for journalists. We pride ourselves on our objectivity (often to a fault, especially when we equate objectivity with mythical middle grounds rather than fairness and transparency) and thus tend to avoid or limit publicly expressing ourselves for fear of tarnishing the credibility of our work. Speaking openly about problems in the profession feels especially fraught for me because I'm currently looking for jobs and freelance opportunities (ahem, please buy my books or hire me).

Last week, I saw a job posting from The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, Washington seeking a reporter specializing in housing and homelessness. I was excited at first. News organizations need more specialized reporting in general. Complex stories about urgent issues like housing or the lack thereof require time, focus, and attention. Writing The Golden Fortress I saw how those broken and uprooted by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl environmental catastrophe were vilified as criminal and pestilent and thought of the dehumanizing ways we still cover homelessness and poverty, so I was encouraged that a local news organization seemed to value surfacing deeper, richer stories about the populations experiencing these challenges. Then I saw the investment they were willing to make: the Columbian (or more clearly, a community-funded initiative) planned to pay the new housing and homelessness reporter $37,440 a year, or about $3,100 a month, before tax and other withholdings. That's in a metro area where the median rent for a one bedroom apartment is around $1,700, and rising (to say nothing of other expenses).

Instead of signal boosting the job posting by resharing it, I commented on Columbian editor Craig Brown's LinkedIn post announcing the opportunity. I followed up my comment with a post of my own explaining why I couldn't share the opportunity in good faith. I'd hesitated to comment or write the ensuing post because I served with Craig on the board of the Oregon/Southwest Washington chapterof the Society of Professional Journalists in 2017-2018. He is a good person and a good journalist, and I didn't want my critique to read as a personal attack. I also understood that Craig is limited by what his organization and its community funding initiative budgeted for the position. 

None of that changes the reality of the situation. We can't keep buying into journalism's race to the bottom in pay. As I wrote on LinkedIn, those of us who recognize that have to speak out publicly.

My LinkedIn post elaborates why I felt I needed to speak, so I'm not going to further repeat my arguments. Instead, I thought I'd use this space to sort out how I feel about how a Twitter discussion of the Columbian's ensued.

After I wrote my LinkedIn post I tweeted about it. That tweet had a few likes and retweets from colleagues and friends. I assumed that was that. Then I started receiving a flurry of notifications on my phone alerting me to mentions of my Twitter handle. These were for more frequent mentions than I typically get in a week, let alone an afternoon.

It turned out that New York Times national correspondent Michael Baker had tweeted a screenshot of the Journalismjobs.com job posting listing the Columbian position's salary. Baker also neatly summarized (without commentary) the economic realities of Vancouver any reporter hired for that position would face. Baker ended the tweet with a "h/t" ("hat tip" for the online-abbrievation-uncertain among us) of my handle for calling his attention to the post.

Am I just selfish? 

As my phone lit up for the rest of the day with notifications of these mentions, through the second half of the week, and into the weekend, I mostly felt comforted. More people than I expected were talking about the job's inadequate salary and the broader topic of low pay for journalists. Baker's position at the Times makes his a far more visible platform than mine, and his tweet quickly went viral. The notifications I received mostly announced retweets of Baker's original tweet or responses to that tweet that kept my handle intact. They meant I was included in the discussion and could add an additional comment or two when one seemed appropriate. Having had my head down for so long on book research, writing, and promotion (to say nothing of child-rearing during a pandemic) it has been quite some time since I had been so engaged in any social media. I appreciated the chance to offer what I think was a useful contribution to conversations about media and society.

Still, each time I saw Baker's tweet retweeted — salient and concise as it was — I grew increasingly irked that he had only mentioned my handle and hadn't linked either my LinkedIn post discussing the Columbian's job advertisement or my tweet linking to that post. Perhaps I'm being selfish to care about how the discussion that did happen caught fire, but that irked feeling never went away. If Baker had linked one of my initial posts could I have been even further engaged? If someone in Baker's position amplified something I originally wrote could its underlying subject of how unsustainable salaries for journalists harms the communities we serve get greater visibility? Or did Baker's brief but detailed summary provide a digestible snapshot of the economic context surrounding the advertised position's proposed salary that nurtured discussion. He all but certainly has a better understanding of current socio-econo-political dynamics in the Pacific Northwest given his years reporting on the region. I'm not being self critical; the reality of the past decade is that I've focused my journalistic energy writing two books, researching one that didn't (yet) pan out, curating a collection of historic photography, and ghostwriting another multi-year, multi-volume project instead of focusing on daily news reporting. 

Baker's tweets (and to be clear this isn't about Baker. It's about the New York Times and institutions, just as the Columbian job's salary isn't about Craig Brown) rightfully command more engagement than mine, but sourcing matters in reporting, even if one's sourcing just a tweet or two. Is a hat tip enough? Wouldn't the "paper of record" want to have the record it produces cited fully in a similar situation? Ultimately, I suspect this issue comes down to how Times social media conventions and practices play out. That would explain its individual reporters' actions, though it wouldn't excuse its institutional oversights.

Pillars of Content Creation

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI).

A related example arose late Wednesday night (a day before I first posted anything about the Columbian job). Just before I put my phone away and went to bed I saw a tweet sharing a New York Times tweet about breathtaking new images of the so-called "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula. The pictures were the latest jaw-dropping captures by the James Webb Space Telescope released by NASA.

Like everyone else, I was duly impressed (even if I joked that they looked to me like a praying mantis). Curious if there were more pictures and eager to see how others were talking about them I opened the Times's tweet and soon saw this response. It noted the Times's watermark on the image and questioned its placement. The Times hadn't captured the images and the news organization shouldn't be credited for them, nor does it own the rights to the image. The credit goes to NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and STScI's Joseph DePasquale, Anton M. Koekemoer, and Alyssa Pagan and the images' rights are in the public domain.

We can't really put a price on the spectacular discoveries and observations these missions are generating, but any value produced belongs to all of us whose taxes funded this remarkable image. Why was the Times claiming credit for an image it had no role in producing? It's so easy to complain about boondoggles and misguided government spending, but just as journalists need to speak out when their contributions aren't properly valued, the public deserves to celebrate where its investments have strengthened society instead of ceding those investments to private entities that wouldn't hesitate to charge the public for benefits they had no hand in funding.

By no means do I think Baker was trying to exploit my tweet to go viral. He can go viral far more easily without me having anything to do with it. I don't even think the Times was trying to profit off the latest images from the Webb (I smell a content management system plunking that iconic "T" on every jpg passing through its digital cogs). I guess I just want to know how people outside of institutions like the Times can make a similar impact. If we're discussing issues like what it costs to inform the public about housing and homelessness, or awe-inspiring scientific discoveries, does it matter who makes the impact, when what matters most is whether as many people as possible hear it?

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A Selection from The Golden Fortress

A CLOUDLESS SKY BLANKETED ALTURAS as a string of sedans turned off Highway 299.

Temperatures that afternoon had briefly crept above freezing but dipped again as dusk arrived. From atop a three-story brick building at the other end of Main Street, the word HOTEL blazed against the cloudless sky. On an evening as clear as that one in early February 1936, the beacon of the signage must have been a welcome sight to the cars’ occupants as they drove those last three blocks from the highway to the Niles Hotel, hundreds of miles, two days, and a world away from home. That those last three blocks also composed the entirety of downtown Alturas said everything about how far they’d traveled.

After the men parked their cars, they might have reflexively shivered beneath their polished leather jackboots and thought of the all-year warmth and sun they’d left behind. If any of the men passed beneath the street lamp at the corner of Modoc and Main Streets, its glow might have glinted across the gold-toned badges they carried, illuminating an eagle’s wings spread above the words POLICE OFFICER and LOS ANGELES typed in blue lettering beneath, and the embossed seal that read, CITY OF LOS ANGELES. FOUNDED 1781.

The following excerpt comes from Chapter 1 of my latest book, The Golden Fortress: California’s Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees, published Aug. 9, 2022, by Chicago Review Press. If you’d like to read the rest of the chapter, and the book, I have a limited number of signed editions available for purchase here, or you can order the book from Bookshop or your favorite retailer. The audio book is also available from Libro.fm and other sellers, and ebooks are available in EPUB, PDF, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Apple Books and Google Play.

A CLOUDLESS SKY BLANKETED ALTURAS as a string of sedans turned off Highway 299.

Temperatures that afternoon had briefly crept above freezing but dipped again as dusk arrived. From atop a three-story brick building at the other end of Main Street, the word HOTEL blazed against the cloudless sky. On an evening as clear as that one in early February 1936, the beacon of the signage must have been a welcome sight to the cars’ occupants as they drove those last three blocks from the highway to the Niles Hotel, hundreds of miles, two days, and a world away from home. That those last three blocks also composed the entirety of downtown Alturas said everything about how far they’d traveled.

After the men parked their cars, they might have reflexively shivered beneath their polished leather jackboots and thought of the all-year warmth and sun they’d left behind. If any of the men passed beneath the street lamp at the corner of Modoc and Main Streets, its glow might have glinted across the gold-toned badges they carried, illuminating an eagle’s wings spread above the words POLICE OFFICER and LOS ANGELES typed in blue lettering beneath, and the embossed seal that read, CITY OF LOS ANGELES. FOUNDED 1781.

Once inside the Niles Hotel, thirteen Los Angeles police officers waited as their commanding sergeant, R. L. Bergman, checked them into the hotel. The next morning they would officially begin their new assignment here in the seat of Modoc County, six hundred miles away from the City of Angels. Somehow, despite traveling so far, the officers still hadn’t left the Golden State.

A cultural distance matched the physical distance. Alturas was Modoc County’s largest town and still remote from the nearest settlements of any size. The hotel was at the southern end of downtown, which ended a few hundred feet away at a small bridge over the gurgling Pit River. It was surrounded by the kind of businesses typical of a certain mythologized small town in the early twentieth-century American West: a coffee shop next door, a butcher down the block, a liquor store up the street, and an inn across Main Street with signage advertising BUFFALO BEER on tap. The county courthouse was just a couple blocks northeast of the hotel. A few businesses fronted East and West Carlos Street. The rest of the nearby streets were residential. The surrounding sparse, frigid, mostly undeveloped expanse where the men would work for the foresee- able future dramatically contrasted with the bustling, sun-bathed metropolis they’d left two days prior, but their task remained the same as it had been at home: protect and serve the City of Los Angeles.

Soon after the officers arrived at the Niles Hotel, a primly dressed woman walked in and introduced herself to Sergeant Bergman. She was Gertrude Payne French, the publisher of the Alturas Plaindealer. Could she just interview the sergeant for a little bit about why the police had come all the way to Modoc County from Los Angeles?

She could. Bergman knew how highly his boss, Los Angeles police chief James Edgar Davis, valued good publicity. And Homer Cross, Davis’s deputy in charge of crime prevention and this operation’s key architect, had softened the ground throughout the state in the weeks leading up to the deployed officers’ arrival.

French already knew why they were there, of course. Cross had talked to her when he came to Modoc County that January. Even if he hadn’t, French may have known, as she prided herself on how plugged in she was to events transpiring all across California. After all, she was one of the Native Daughters of the Golden West, a member of the Alturas Chamber of Commerce board of directors, and, like her husband, R. A. “Bard” French, a former operative in the state Republican Party. Gertrude and Bard were very encouraged, French told Bergman, that someone—Chief Davis—was finally doing something about the “penniless itinerants and criminals” plaguing the Golden State. Concerns about how out-of-town police might disrupt Modoc County were already spreading. The Plaindealer would diligently downplay these concerns on its pages, but, French told Bergman and would repeat in print the next day, the paper was “reserving our final judgment to see what happens.”

Whatever judgment ensued, numerous scenes like the one taking place at the Niles Hotel likely occurred throughout the remotest corners of California that evening. Davis had sent Bergman, the two seven-officer squads working under him, and 120 other Los Angeles police officers—each handpicked by the chief from a larger pool of volunteers—to seize control of the state’s borders. Each squad was stationed at one of sixteen entry points around the perimeter of California. Some would patrol highways and set up checkpoints to stop incoming cars, while others boarded trains to look for fare evaders and stowaways. All those entering California who appeared unable to support themselves and likely to become public charges or who the officers believed likely to be criminals would be stopped. No one was to get through without permission from the Los Angeles Police Department, even if Los Angeles itself was hundreds of miles away.

A short man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache wearing a suit looks at two other men, one at center in a police uniform and the other at far right in a suit. The third man holds a large cake shaped like the state of Texas.

Los Angeles police chief James Edgar Davis and Los Angeles County superior court judge Minor Moore present Los Angeles mayor Frank Shaw with a Texas-shaped birthday cake on the eve of Davis’s rollout of his border blockade. Courtesy of Los Angeles Times Photograph Collection, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA

Perhaps Chief Davis, originally from Texas, thought of the deployment’s launch as a birthday gift for his boss, Los Angeles Mayor Frank Shaw. That Saturday morning, Davis sat down with Shaw, not to celebrate his birthday but to discuss the blockade, just as someone wheeled a sixteen-pound birthday cake into the mayor’s office. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Minor Moore—also a transplant from the Lone Star State, and president of the Texas Society of Southern California—was the enormous dessert’s likely mastermind. Moore, who called Shaw to wish him a happy birthday just as the cake arrived, had conspired with Shaw’s Texas-born wife, Cora; his mayoral counterpart in Dallas, George Sergeant; and officials from the Texas Centennial Exposition, who actually paid for the giant confection.

As mayor and police chief, respectively, Shaw and Davis were among Los Angeles’s most prominent public figures. Before becoming mayor, Shaw, a grocery-chain executive and one of California’s wealthiest politicians, was a Los Angeles County supervisor who led the county board’s efforts to blame Los Angeles’s fiscal woes on poor, unemployed migrants. Davis, a former chief of police who’d been re-elevated to the position when Shaw was elected mayor, made arresting homeless and other visibly poor Angelenos a key plank of his policing strategy. Both men could trace their success in part to the city’s obsession with drawing tourists (and their money) while simultaneously shunning poor migrants (and their need). Like other California cities, Depression-era Los Angeles treated transients as little more than parasitic threats. Indigent relief was burden enough for these cities’ own residents, the argument went. Why should they pay for other cities’ discards?

Reliant as their public rhetoric might have been on antimigrant sentiment, neither Davis nor Shaw were truly of Los Angeles. Between fleeing his native Texas and arriving nearly broke in Los Angeles, Davis spent many of his early years as a drifter, while Shaw was born in Canada and grew up bouncing around the Midwest. Neither likely discussed those backgrounds when they met at city hall three days before Davis’s officers arrived in Alturas.

The day after their meeting, Davis put an exclamation point on declarations that outsiders—or at least, the wrong kind of outsiders—just weren’t welcome in the City of Angeles. Davis deployed his border patrol, confident in a full-throated endorsement from Shaw. The chief also knew he could count on support from the Los Angeles powerbrokers who helped elect the mayor three years earlier and who for years had decried what they believed were “hordes” of transient “ne’er do-wells” invading the city. Now well into his second stint as Los Angeles’s police chief, Davis had Shaw to thank for his job.

Whether Davis conceived the operation as a favor to Shaw or not, the fervor with which he pursued it was hardly surprising. He cared little about misgivings lawmakers expressed about earlier proposed anti-indigent and anti- migrant measures. He also had no qualms that his officers might trample a few constitutional protections in their attack on criminality and the vagrants who he believed embodied it.

And it would make sense if Davis believed he owed something to the mayor. At the outset of 1930 Shaw’s predecessor, John C. Porter, had demoted Davis from chief to deputy chief after a series of high-profile scandals involving his department. After Shaw replaced Porter in 1933, one of his first official acts had been to put Davis back in power. In return, Davis carefully crafted his police department to serve as the primary municipal tool to guard the free-market-cherishing, business-friendly forces cherished by Shaw and responsible for his election.

Amid the economic turmoil and labor unrest of the Great Depression, Davis—while also sparking the Los Angeles Police Department’s inchoate development into a paramilitary force that would serve as the national standard for militarized policing—reveled in using the department’s power to harass and intimidate union organizers, civil libertarians, and political progressives. Now, the chief turned his attention toward the wretched souls washing across California’s borders from barren Dust Bowl farms and Depression-shuttered factories. To hear it from the agenda-setting Los Angeles Times, the city’s chamber of commerce, and Davis himself, these domestic migrants, if not already criminals, were likely to become criminals given enough time loitering on the streets of Los Angeles.

Davis’s plan would neutralize that threat with a phalanx of officers at California’s borders ready to block incoming laborers while the rest of his officers scoured Los Angeles’s streets for indigent transients and “vagrants.” After months of preparation, the plan was finally ready. Beginning that Sunday, February 3—a day after Shaw’s birthday—and continuing into the following afternoon, squad after squad of officers piled into personal cars, drove past the city limits, and continued to the farthest reaches of California, where they would assume their duties as the Golden State’s first line of defense from the uncivilized masses beyond.

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Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher

Infamy in Manila

Today is the anniversary of the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines that brought the United States into World War II as a combatant. In Manila, reporters Melville Jacoby, Annalee Whitmore Jacoby, and Carl Mydans sprung into action to cover the conflict. Here's an excerpt from the book Eve of a Hundred Midnights, by Bill Lascher and published by William Morrow, describing their experience of that harrowing first day.

Newlywed reporters Melville and Annalee Jacoby at work together during the outset of World War II. Photo Courtesy Peggy S. Cole.

Newlywed reporters Melville and Annalee Jacoby at work together during the outset of World War II. Photo Courtesy Peggy S. Cole.

Communication lines with Hong Kong were silent.

Radios tuned to Bangkok broadcasts received dead air.

Wireless communications with the United States carried only static.

The streets outside the Bay View were empty.

The morning of December 8, 1941, was deceptively quiet. Then the phone rang.

It was Carl Mydans. Pearl Harbor had been bombed. A newspaper slipped under Carl’s door declared the news in bold headlines. Melville Jacoby didn’t believe his colleague, so he looked at his own paper and “saw some screwy headline that had nothing to do with Honolulu.”

Still doubtful about what Carl had told him, Mel went back to bed, but he couldn’t fall back asleep.

He called Clark Lee, who confirmed the news.

There had been ever-more-frequent Japanese flybys of the Philippines in the preceding days, but still, the news was a shock. “We’d known about the Japanese flights, all the other signs, but we didn’t quite believe it even out there,” Mel wrote.

While Mel was on the phone with Clark there was a knock at his door. He hung up and heard another knock, heavy and insistent. Mel found Carl standing outside the hotel room door, already dressed and ready to head into the city.

That World War II would be fought, and won, in the skies was clear early in the conflict. Though Japan delivered its first blows at Pearl Harbor, more than 6,000 miles across the Pacific from the Philippines, it followed its opening act with devastating raids on two airfields—Clark and Nichols Fields—in the Philippines. Two squadrons of B-17 bombers, dozens of P-40 fighters, and other planes were destroyed, eliminating much of the matériel that had been sent at General Douglas MacArthur’s request.

Despite the news of the attacks in Hawaii nine hours earlier, the planes had been left in the open while their pilots ate lunch nearby. Flyers didn’t receive warnings of the approaching Japanese planes until they were almost overhead.

“By noon the first day, pilots were waiting impatiently on Clark field for take-off orders to bomb Formosa,” Annalee Jacoby wrote, referring to the Japanese-occupied island now known as Taiwan. “Our first offensive action had to wait for word from Washington — definite declaration of war. Engines were warmed up; pilots leaned against the few planes and ate hot dogs.”

Twenty minutes later, without warning, Annalee wrote, fifty- four enemy bombers arrived, delivering a brazen, devastating raid on Clark Field that crippled an already underprepared American garrison.

These raids sparked a decades-long debate about who was responsible for the blunder, but whoever should be blamed, the United States lost fully  half of its air capacity in the Philippines in this one devastating first day of the war.

“MacArthur’s men wanted to fight—but most of all they wanted something to fight with,” Mel wrote in a flurry of cables he sent Time following the war’s commencement and the air- fields’ decimation. Unfounded rumors of convoys and flights of P-40s coming to join the fight began almost as soon as the attacks subsided. They would not cease for  months.

On that morning, Manila’s Ermita neighborhood was quiet. Mel arranged a car for the Time employees to share. Together they raced up Dewey Boulevard, to Intramuros, the walled old- town district that had been Spain’s stronghold during its 300- year occupation. When they reached the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) headquarters at 1 Calle Victoria, they found MacArthur’s driver, who had arrived early in the morn- ing, asleep in his car.

“Headquarters was alive and asleep at the same time,” Mel wrote. MacArthur’s staff was weary-eyed but busy as they girded for war. Within hours, helmeted officers carrying gas masks on their hips raced back and forth across the stone- walled headquarters, stopping only briefly to gulp down coffee and sandwiches. The general himself was his usual bounding self, striding through the headquarters as staff and other wit- nesses confirmed reports of attacks throughout the Philippines. Mel and Carl were concerned about their jobs. Would wartime censorship clamp down on their reporting?

“The whole picture seemed about as unreal to USAFFE men as it did to us,” Mel later wrote. “We couldn’t believe it, and MacArthur’s staff had hoped the Japanese would hold off at least another month or so, giving us time to get another convoy or two in with the rest of the stuff on order.”

This hesitation, of course, was partly to blame for the devastation that occurred that day and the unsettled footing with which American forces fought during the brutal months to come.

Meanwhile, deep-seated racial prejudices kept many Americans from believing that Japan was capable of carrying out the attacks.

“Those days were eye-openers to many an American who had read Japanese threats in the newspapers with too many grains of salt tossed in,” Mel wrote. “They still couldn’t believe the yellow man could be that good. It must be Germans; that was all everyone kept saying. We were just beginning to pay for years of unpreparedness. The shout ‘It’s Chinese propaganda’ had suddenly lost all traces of plausibility.”

Regardless of who was to blame, U.S. forces reeled.

Manila was quiet even as chaos engulfed the headquarters, where a scrum of reporters waited for updates. Rumors flew beneath the shady trees of Dewey Boulevard, rippled up the Pasig River, and raced past the storefronts along the Escolta.

“The whole thing has busted here like one bombshell, though, as previous cables showed, the military has been alert over the week,” Mel would soon write.

As the realization of what had begun set in, Manila residents rushed through the city, withdrew cash from banks, stocked up on food, and bought as much fuel as they could before rationing was ordered. Businesses quickly transformed basements into bomb shelters. Sandbags became scarce. As would happen all over the United States, local military rounded up anyone of Japanese descent, whether they were Japanese nationals or not. The Philippines waited for war.

From Eve of a Hundred Midnights, by Bill Lascher and published by William Morrow (2016). For the story of the Jacobys' last-minute escape from the Philippines and to learn about their work as war correspondents in China and the Philippines, find Eve of a Hundred Midnights at your favorite bookseller, or order it from Indiebound, Powell's, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.

 

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Appreciation

Last night, April 24th, 2017, the Oregon Book Awards took place in Portland. Eve of a Hundred Midnights was nominated for the Frances Fuller Victor award for general nonfiction. While the book didn't win, it was such an honor to be chosen a finalist. Moreover, being asked to write some remarks in case I did win proved to be a wonderful opportunity to reflect on all of the people I appreciated for making this book possible. Here's what I would have said, because it's all still true.

Last night, April 24th, 2017, the Oregon Book Awards took place in Portland. Eve of a Hundred Midnights was nominated for the Frances Fuller Victor award for general nonfiction. While the book didn't win, it was such an honor to be chosen a finalist. Moreover, being asked to write some remarks in case I did win proved to be a wonderful opportunity to reflect on all of the people I appreciated for making this book possible. Here's what I would have said, because it's all still true:

Today marks the 75th anniversary of what could have been the last time my grandmother, her parents, and the rest of her family heard the voice of Melville Jacoby, my grandma's beloved oldest cousin and the subject of my book. That night three quarters of a century ago, everyone gathered around their radio listening to the March of Time, hoping to hear from Mel, a reporter who, with his wife, the journalist and former MGM screenwriter Annalee Whitmore Jacoby, had just survived a month-long escape from the Philippines, and six weeks of reporting from the front lines of Bataan and Corregidor.

Mel's broadcast failed and his family didn't get to hear his voice again. However, three quarters of a century later, thanks to my grandmother, Peggy, and her sister, Jackee, I've been able to give voice to his story. This award honors not just them, or Mel, but the people whose voices were only heard because Mel sacrificed so much as a foreign correspondent.

It's an honor to be nominated among this wonderful group of fellow writers, in part because many of them have produced work that amplifies the voices and subjects too often overlooked, marginalized or forgotten.

I would not have been able to tell this story were it not for others in my family as well, especially my mother, Wendy — my first and often shrewdest editor — her siblings, and my own siblings. Likewise, my partner, Andrea, has helped me survive every stage of this book's production and championed me even when I second-guess myself

Over the course of seven and a half years, more than half of which I spent on this book, Oregon has become my home. While today, too many ominous signs remind me of the dark world in which Mel and Annalee worked as reporters, the community I've found here in Oregon and what I like to call its "pot luck" culture are key reasons why I'm hopeful we'll all be able to survive whatever comes next. Many of those I've met here, whether writers or not, have contributed something that helped me make this book possible, and in turn, ensured that I have been able to get Mel's voice heard once again.

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Into the Blackness Beyond

"We are remembering MacArthur’s men, how hard it was to finally leave, how lucky the three of us are."

On February 23, 1942, Seventy-five years ago as I write, Melville and Annalee Jacoby crossed the two-mile-wide channel between the fortress island of Corregidor and the besieged Bataan Peninsula for the last time. There, there would wait until sundown when a small inter-island freighter, the Princesa de Cebu, arrived in the channel, ready to sneak through the Japanese blockade surrounding the Philippines' largest island, Luzon. Their hope: escape to unoccupied portions of the Philippines and then, if they were lucky, find another ship through Japanese waters to allied territory. Here is the story of that night as told in the bestselling book, Eve of a Hundred Midnights:

“We sit by the side of a Bataan roadway waiting,” Mel wrote as he and Annalee absorbed their last moments on the peninsula amid a thick knot of banyan trees near the shore. “Our visions of past months of war are vivid, clouded only momentarily during this waiting by thick sheets of Bataan dust rolling off the road every time a car or truck races by. We wonder for a moment when we will return—and how.”

Finally, escape was in sight. At dusk, a launch would arrive to take the Jacobys to the Princesa de Cebu. That ship, they hoped, would then slip past enemy patrols at the mouth of Manila Bay and carry the reporters through the Philippines—possibly even farther across treacherous, Japanese-controlled sea-lanes and on to refuge in Australia, thousands of miles to the south.

Through a pair of binoculars borrowed from a soldier on the Bataan coast, Mel peered south toward Manila. He thought he could see the rising sun of the Japanese flag fluttering over the Manila Hotel, the same place where he’d had his last Christmas dinner, where Annalee had danced with Russell Brines and Clark Lee had urged Mel to flee the Philippines. He knew that Carl and Shelley were somewhere beneath that fluttering crimson-and-white banner. A reliable confidential source had told Mel that the Mydanses were among the thousands in captivity at Manila’s Santo Tomas University, which the Japanese had turned into an internment camp. However, it had been a month since that report.

Bunker

That day Mel and Annalee felt as “impregnable as the mountain,” almost invincible “for the first time in this war.” Finally, they were leaving, Mel wrote, recalling people and moments from his six weeks on Corregidor and Bataan. Leaving everything. Leaving General Douglas MacArthur. Leaving the general’s trusted lieutenants, who had become their friends. Leaving the scores of men they’d met at the front whose stories had yet to be told. They were leaving all of them behind, “most of all the scared Pennsylvania soldier who ran the first time he heard [Japanese] fire but who braved machine gun fire the second time to carry his officer off the field.”

As the Jacobys walked along the tree trail, a Jeep carrying two officers skidded into the dirt. The noise and dust shook Annalee and Mel back into the moment. They stood up and greeted the officers. It was the first time Mel really registered the weariness on the faces of those fighting in Bataan. Despite the fatigue in their eyes, neither officer mentioned their exhaustion. Instead, they chatted casually, sharing rumors and battlefield legends until the soldiers finally drove off a few minutes later. Mel and Annalee again turned to thoughts more hopeful than the soldiers’ exhaustion. Like thoughts of ice cream sodas. Could they ever taste as good as they imagined?

Finally, the sun began to set. It was time.

The couple ran back toward the shore along the tree trails. One path led to the last American planes remaining in the Philippines, the rickety trainers, a couple of obsolete fighters, the P-40 so “full of holes.” The planes were hidden next to an airstrip that resembled a hiking trail more than a runway.

Mel and Annalee were barraged by memories at each turn. They passed anti-aircraft batteries, a motor pool, a machine shop, even a bakery (though one that had never had bread to bake) and a makeshift abattoir where first caribou, then mules, then even monkeys were slaughtered for the soldiers’ meals.

Tired Soldiers

Across the narrow channel from Bataan, Clark Lee had finished wrapping up his own affairs on Corregidor, and now he was waiting for the Jacobys at the same dock on the island’s north side where the trio had come ashore on New Year’s Day. He did bring a typewriter, as well as a razor, a toothbrush, and a change of clothes.

The Princesa approached at dusk, slowly steaming westward. They boarded and were greeted by four British and two American civilians who had received field commissions after fleeing from Manila to Bataan. They had boarded the Princesa from a separate launch earlier. Among them was Lew Carson, a Shanghai-based executive for Reliance Motors hired by the army to help manage its motor pool, and Charles Van Landing-ham, a former banker who escaped to Bataan on a tiny sailboat on New Year’s Eve. Also a contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, Van Landingham was struck by how deceptively peaceful the green jungles of Bataan looked as he left.

“It was hard to realize that under that leafy canopy thousands of hollow-eyed, half-sick men stood by their guns, fighting on grimly in the hope that help would come before it was too late,” Van Landingham wrote.

Its lights dark, the Princesa slowly made its way into mine-laden Manila Bay. Huge searchlights on Fortuna Island scanned the sky above the island as its “ack-ack” guns—anti-aircraft artillery—fired at Japanese bombers. The darkness gave way momentarily to the glow of the guns’ tracers, which lit the passengers’ faces. Then night returned across the ship’s deck.

From Corregidor, a searchlight swept the coast in front of the Princesa. A small, fast torpedo boat appeared and led the ship through the mines, barely visible but for the path carved by its wake. The craft was skillfully piloted by Lieutenant John D. Bulkeley, who provided a few minutes of covering fire while guiding the Princesa toward the mouth of Manila Bay. Then, in a final farewell gesture, Bulkeley flashed the torpedo boat’s starboard light and roared back to Bataan, leaving nothing but darkness in his wake.

Night on the Pacific washed across the Princesa. Only the distant flash of Japanese artillery punctuated the dark. The ship’s two masts bobbed beneath what Mel’s eyes found to be a “too bright moon.” This was the same moon the soldiers on Bataan prayed would descend quickly, lest even a quick glint of its light across a shining service rifle’s barrel draw a sniper’s bullet. Now the moon cursed the Princesa. The nearby shore was dark, but everyone aboard the Princesa knew it crawled with enemy forces. They silently watched the passing islands. Each lurch of the ship tied the passengers’ stomachs in a “tight feeling.”

A crew member snapped a chicken’s neck. The reporters jumped at the bird’s sudden, loud squawk.

It was just dinner, but everyone crossed their fingers.

“Sure, we’ll make it,” someone said. “Easy.”

All three reporters rapped their fists on the wooden deck.

Nobody slept. Everyone kept watch, fearful of missing even the briefest moment of movement. Finally out of Manila Harbor, the ship maneuvered toward the southeast and crept through the darkness along Batangas, on the Luzon coast south of Manila.

Thousands of miles, countless inlets and islands, circling recon planes, even submarines and destroyers dispatched by the Philippines’ new conquerors lay between the reporters and safety in Australia. They spoke little. Instead, they reflected privately on the soldiers they had met on Corregidor and Bataan, the onslaught both places had endured, and their own good fortune so far.

“We talk very little sitting on deck now. We are remembering MacArthur’s men, how hard it was to finally leave, how lucky the three of us are. We’d gotten through the [Japanese] before,” Mel wrote. “Everything we’ve known the past two months is swallowed in blackness beyond.”

 

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On Protest and Reporting

Today, Poynter ran a piece titled "Should journalists protest in Trump's America?" It was mostly focused on newsroom journalists. In reply, I wrote up my thoughts about how it applies to me as a freelancer.

 

Today, Poynter ran a piece titled "Should journalists protest in Trump's America?" This is a question I've been wrestling with as a freelancer. It was mostly focused on newsroom journalists. I posted to Facebook and tweeted, wondering how it applies to freelancers like myself. The piece's author, Katie Hawkins-Gaar, asked me to elaborate. At first I responded in tweets, but then realized I had more to say. Here's what I ended up writing.

Why is it important that I be on top of current affairs? Partially, so as I reach out to editors I can be prepared to jump into my reporting and do it well. I need to have a clear idea of what current issues are to make an effective contribution. On a more selfish level, I need to have a clearer idea of what kind of stories will more easily get an editor’s attention, not to mention that of the public.

In the meantime, I also need to report potential stories, pitch them, and wait on editors understandably harried by current circumstances to reply. How do I survive doing so with such uncertainty? How do I make a living doing that? And how do I do that if the world is changing very rapidly. If a crisis emerges, how does my more evergreen work matter?

That’s reporting. What about protest and politics? Do I let the world go by when people I care about are affected, concerned, scared, etc.? What about when I am affected? Am I affected? Probably not as much, because I’m white, straight, cis-male, college- and graduate school- educated and born in the United States. I am Jewish, but not practicing, and that’s still not (yet) as much a target. My best strength is my dedication to the craft, my skepticism, and my courage to tell stories even if people don’t want to hear them. But, again, I have to be able to survive telling them. It, sadly, often comes to economics, which are often made shakier by political uncertainty. So do I then work on more anodyne material while watching the world go by? Isn’t that just shutting my ears? Wouldn’t that just be isolationism in a different form?

After all, my first book is all about reporters who risked their lives and livelihoods in a troubled time to bring stories to the public that were being inadequately covered. My central subject — Melville Jacoby — was writing about devastating, daily air raids in China that were killing thousands. He was writing about brutal conditions in Shanghai and about the march toward war in what was then French Indochina. His master’s thesis was all about how the U.S. public wasn’t paying attention the war between China and Japan and what that portended for them. He knew what happened there mattered here, and vice versa, so he was driven to tell such stories. Then he reported on the totally under-resourced defense of the Philippines, and sent home the first photos the U.S. saw of the absolutely savage conditions U.S. and Filipino troops endured in Bataan.

I mention all this not because I want to raise heads about my book. I mention it because journalists are still doing this kind of work, still not being listened to, and still often dying because of their work. Seventy-five years later, journalists are telling us about civilians dying in military strikes, about coming conflicts and uncertainty, about corruption, about tone-deaf foreign policy. As a journalist, my form of protest, if I have one, is, in part, amplifying these reporters, and in part, joining them. Not letting the line go quiet.

And I do wonder, in this time, how do I do justice to the subject I spent so much time with? Mel, Annalee, and their friends and colleagues were people who had marks on their heads for their reporting, who fled besieged islands in the dead of night to get the story out. Me? I’m at home reading Twitter, trying to figure out where and how to jump in and contribute when my portfolio is, well, not stale, but, about such specific subjects it seems disconnected from what’s happening. What editor wants to take the risk on that at a time when they need to be very careful about the professionalism of their contributors, to know that they can trust the credibility of their reporting? 

I guess this doesn’t answer the question of what and how I protest as a freelancer, but the thing is, I can’t afford to not think them. I don’t know any other way to operate. How do I contribute now? Lately I’ve thought the ideal is joining a news organization, becoming a stringer for a few publications, or becoming a regular contributor to a few outlets, but with freelancing, even in a time of protest, it still comes back to how do I survive while doing so? I always think I can best help society by reporting well, but where do I turn to be able to do that? Normally, I’d say my community, but if some of my community — those who aren’t reporters — are out in the streets protesting or at home making calls to representatives, and the rest — those who are reporters — are pushed to the max doing their own reporting, what’s left as a backstop or a network for me?

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Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher

75 Years Ago, When War Seemed a Million Miles Away

75 years ago, today, Pearl Harbor was on the horizon, but for one couple in Manila, war briefly felt a million miles away.

Seventy-five years ago, today, with the United States and Japan on the brink of war, Time Magazine correspondent Melville Jacoby married the former Annalee Whitmore, a former MGM scriptwriter who had been managing publicity for an aid organization known as United China Relief. The following excerpt from Eve of a Hundred Midnights (William Morrow, 2016) describes the moment Annalee arrived in Manila from Chungking, the wartime capital of China, and Mel whisked her off to their wedding. Pick up the book from your favorite retailer to find out how Mel and Annalee's paths crossed, and what happened when war broke out just two weeks after their wedding.

From the edge of Pan-Am’s facilities along the southern arc of Manila Bay near the Cavite shipyard, Mel watched a Boeing 314 cross the sky. It was Monday, November 24, 1941, just three days before Thanksgiving.

Annalee was on the plane. As it landed she spotted Mel at the water’s edge, clad in a gleaming white suit, white shirt, and yellow tie.

“I could see him when the plane landed in the water, and it seemed like hours until they pulled it up onto the beach,” Annalee later wrote to Mel’s parents.

Finally, the Clipper’s pilot cut the aircraft’s engines. The plane coasted the last few feet to the dock, where its passengers disembarked. Annalee barely had time to say anything to her fiancé. After they embraced, Mel ushered her to a waiting car, which drove the ten miles from Cavite to Manila, turned right off Dewey Boulevard onto Padre Faura, then stopped at the Union Church chapel a couple of blocks away. Mel strode confidently up to the church, while Annalee, wearing a white nylon dress printed with palm trees, ukuleles, pineapples, and leis in green, yellow, and red, linked her arm in his, smiling widely, a broad-brimmed yellow hat tucked under her other arm. For a couple who never expected romance, it was as dreamlike as any fairy tale.

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

Melville and Annalee Jacoby walking along the streets of Manila on their wedding day, November 24, 1941. (Photo Courtesy Peggy Stern Darling)

Melville and Annalee Jacoby walking along the streets of Manila on their wedding day, November 24, 1941. (Photo Courtesy Peggy Stern Darling)

Carl and Shelley Mydans were there, as well as Allan Michie (a Time reporter about to transfer to England, Michie was also the author of Their Finest Hour) and the Reverend Walter Brooks Foley. As soon as the couple arrived, the small pro- cession gathered in an intimate reception room off the chapel decorated with white flowers and green drapes. Carl served as Mel’s best man; Shelley was Annalee’s matron of honor.

Reverend Foley performed the modest ceremony. Mel had always dreaded large, formal weddings. He had looked for a justice of the peace to officiate, but most of the ones he found spoke little English and held ceremonies in nipa huts—small stilt houses with bamboo walls and thatched roofs made from local leaves.

Melville and Annalee Jacoby exchange vows in front of the Reverend Walter Brooks Foley at the Union Church of Manila on November 24, 1941. (Photo Courtesy Peggy Stern Darling)

Melville and Annalee Jacoby exchange vows in front of the Reverend Walter Brooks Foley at the Union Church of Manila on November 24, 1941. (Photo Courtesy Peggy Stern Darling)

“The morning I came he found Reverend Foley, who was   a short blond near-sighted angel, full of extravagant plans for choir chorales and processionals and borrowed bride giver-awayers,” Annalee wrote.

Annalee may not have wanted a big to-do or an ostentatious ring, but she clearly couldn’t restrain her delight at the occasion itself. Her smile did not subside throughout the ceremony. Her hands gently clasped Mel’s as they exchanged vows, and she looked intently at her husband, her eyes grinning and warm. For his part, Mel couldn’t mask the pride on his face, nor his joy.

Within an hour of Annalee’s landing, she and Mel were married. After their wedding, they wrote letters to their families. In one, Annalee insisted to Mel’s parents that she didn’t go to China to marry Mel, but she “couldn’t think of a better reason” to have gone.

Mel and Annalee Jacoby on their wedding day, November 24, 1941. (Photo Courtesy Peggy Stern Darling)

Mel and Annalee Jacoby on their wedding day, November 24, 1941. (Photo Courtesy Peggy Stern Darling)

The celebration continued at the Bay View Hotel, just a few blocks away. Gathered in the lobby were many of the couple’s friends who had also transferred to Manila from Chungking, as well as others Mel had met since arriving. Those who couldn’t be there sent their congratulations. Everyone, from Annalee’s colleagues at MGM to Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, to all the Press Hostel residents, to the entire staff of XGOY (which also aired a brief item about the marriage), sent their good wishes.

 “General MacArthur about knocked me over the other p.m. congratulating me,” Mel wrote. “Admiral [Thomas] Hart’s staff nearly shook my hand off.”

There was a portable phonograph setting the tune with jazz standards and popular big band recordings. In between songs, the newlyweds ducked into a corner of the lobby where they took turns placing long-distance phone calls to their parents in Los Angeles and Maryland. And then they danced into the night. War was on the horizon and could arrive any day, but that evening it could have been a million miles away.

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Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher

To Tell this World's Stories

Today I drive to one of Oregon's many red counties to read a story about a man who sacrificed everything to report on a besieged world.


Today I drive to one of Oregon's many red counties to read a story about a man who sacrificed everything to report on a besieged world.

I will think deeply about how he willingly and repeatedly went toward danger and discomfort when others stayed where it was safe, because he could, and he knew it was his responsibility to bring a story of how the world really was to a public that didn't seem to care, to a public that only seemed to want to hear what they thought mattered to them, even though he knew all this mattered to them. Even when given the chance to work in a safe job back home at a remove with better pay, chose a war zone. He, like many journalists today who we should value so much more, sacrificed his livelihood, and his life so that we could know the world.

To be clear, what I am doing is not the discomfort or sacrifice I reference, but what we must do as reporters will be on my mind as I read.

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