I went places and said things

International travel, Hong Kong talks, NPR appearances, book sales, snark from 1940s editors, the best chicken in Montreal, and the delightful Dory Fantasmagory

Portland, Ore., United States, and Hong Kong, May, 2025 — I began this edition of The Scenic Route in March, but no matter how much I wrote, everything got in the way of finishing it.

Given how often I seem to write about delays for The Scenic Route as well as that voice in my head shouting about how frequently I should be writing, how much I could have accomplished, and how many other writers do just fine writing and sending newsletters consistently I know this sounds like excuse-making yet again, but I am also fully aware that I am not other writers. I am this one. So screw that voice, especially because it doesn’t pay me enough to put up with its abuse.

I digress (“something something The Scenic Route takes its time.”). Happily, a couple things happened this spring that at least temporarily quieted all that self-criticism. The first was the exhibit of Melville Jacoby’s photographs that I curated alongside photographer Carsten Schael for the Foreign Correspondents Club, Hong Kong. The exhibit was up in the club’s main bar throughout April, and the month began with talks at the FCC and the Royal Geographical Society - Hong Kong.

If you couldn’t attend these talks, you can still watch my April 2 discussion with then-FCC President Lee Williamson about Mel Jacoby, his photographs, and my books about him and his work, last year’s A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (Blacksmith Books) and 2016’s Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two WWII Journalists and Their Epic Escape Across the Pacific (William Morrow).

Here’s the video of my talk with Lee:

The exhibit at the FCC would never have happened without Schael’s dedication and help. The Hong Kong-based photographer understood the significance of Mel’s work and recognized the unique opportunity it offered to explore the FCCHK’s roots in wartime Chungking’s (Chongqing’s) as well as China’s and Southeast Asia’s experiences of the conflict. Schael also put in the hard work of advocating for the show to club decisionmakers, curating the images we used, preparing and mounting them for the exhibition, and otherwise implementing the show.

I also have Blacksmith Books publisher Pete Spurrier to thank for reinvigorating interest in Mel Jacoby by taking a chance and publishing A Danger Shared last year (with an assist from the ever-encouraging Paul French for putting me in touch with Pete and countless other contacts). Thanks to Schael, Spurrier, and French, as well as many other people I met through them and these events, my trip to Hong Kong was fulfilling, inspiring, and rewarding (though about the furthest one could get from renumerative, so please do consider that “subscribe” button ).

The exhibit at the FCC opened with a reception at the club and continued with my lunch talk the next day. I also introduced Mel Jacoby, his work, and his travels through Asia to members and guests of the RGS-HK. The warmth of their welcome felt particularly fulfilling given how jet-lagged and bumbling I’d felt during it. Fortunately, the audience’s grace despite my missteps helped me improve upon my later events at the FCC, in which I felt much more confident.

Warm welcomes and the chance for travel halfway across the world weren’t what made these events meaningful, however. What mattered was the chance to deliver these presentations in a place and at an institution intimately entwined with Mel and his career as a foreign correspondent. Though the organization that became the FCCHK formed in 1943 — a year after Mel’s death — its antecedents can be traced to the summer of 1941. Mel had just returned to Chungking then after initially leaving for reporting work in French Indochina (present-day Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) then briefly traveling home to the United States. By the time he was back, Chungking’s conditions had worsened, as had the working environment for the community of foreign journalists reporting amid the city’s air raids and deprivations.

Frustrated by restrictions impeding their ability to effectively cover the conflict, these reporters — Mel among them — circulated and signed a memo complaining to Chinese officials about censorship, impinged access to officials, and other obstruction by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek’s then-ruling Nationalist government. Those discussions, that memo, and subsequent efforts by Chungking’s foreign press corps eventually led surviving signatories to establish the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which eventually moved from Chungking to Shanghai and finally to Hong Kong.

The anxieties of travel

I was incredibly moved by the opportunity to present Mel’s story, his writing, and his photography in the part of the world where he worked, a city he visited frequently, and at an institution whose history was connected to him, but before I left for Hong Kong, I’d also been quite anxious.

I fretted about how well attended the events I had scheduled might be, whether I’d be able to deliver my talks effectively, and if anyone would understand why I was there talking about this distant relative in such a distant place. I thought people might think the subject was stale since it had been a year since A Danger Shared published and nearly a decade since Eve of a Hundred Midnights hit shelves. It was also my first extended trip away from my family since my son was born more than five years ago. I felt uneasy about leaving my wife to take on solo parenting duties for something so uncertain. I was facing all this uncertainty and also taking a risk financially; no one was paying me for any of my talks, and I had to finance both my flight and my lodging. Despite a great deal of uncertainty and the stress of adding to my debt, as soon as I resolved to just reserve my tickets and room and figure out how to recoup the trip’s cost later I couldn’t imagine having made a different choice.

It’s been a strange few years. I’ve accomplished many things, but juggling my work with becoming a parent and living through a global pandemic has muddled my sense of what progress I’ve made. This was different. It felt like a concrete step, despite the lack of apparent renumeration.

I was lucky to get a chance to celebrate Mel Jacoby among some of the people whose work Mel and his colleagues helped make possible, or at least, more feasible. Beyond each of my events, a number of people invited me to lunches, drinks, and breakfast chats that became just as memorable and energizing. Meanwhile, the FCC’s staff showed why the institution remains so well-loved, even by non-journalists. I only wish I could have stayed longer and done even more.

Others more familiar with Hong Kong can more competently address its many changes in recent decades but anything they might bring up, I found an inspiring, engaging energy in the city. The trip re-energized me at a moment when I felt professionally and personally sapped. That fact might have less to do with Hong Kong itself than with the experience of traveling internationally at a distressing moment when the U.S. seems to be withdrawing from the world. The journey reminded me just how vital travel, international engagement, and cross-cultural communication are to global peace and security, let alone personal fulfillment.

Radio, Radio

I was even able to maintain the energy of my trip after I was home from Hong Kong. On April 10, RTHK3 radio presenter Phil Whalen interviewed me for his Morning Brew radio show. Phil’s show afforded me a welcome opportunity to delve deeper into my work. Though our talk originally aired in Hong Kong, it is approachable for anyone. Please listen not just because I want to promote myself and my writing but because I’m confident it’s one of the best opportunities to hear what I care about, how I work, and why I work on what I do. I thoroughly enjoyed doign the talk and I sound as clear and enthusiastic about my writing as I think I ever have. Listen here:

Meanwhile, on NPR

Did I say Radio, Radio? Indeed, and not just because I like Elvis Costello. After discussing my first and third books in April, I returned to my second, The Golden Fortress: California’s Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees last month when I was a featured guest on the May 8 episode of NPR’s award-winning history podcast and radio show, Throughline.

Producer Anya Steinberg went deep on erstwhile Los Angeles Police Department Chief James “Two-Gun” Davis his Depression-era police blockade of California’s state lines, both of which are the subjects of The Golden Fortress. I was one of Steinberg’s three guests and I had a lot to say given how closely the episode’s focus tracks closely with The Golden Fortress’s content.

New book-buying opportunities

If you haven’t read any of my books, hopefully some of these appearances will spark your interest enough to buy one. If you’d like a copy (signed or not), I still have some available to ship anywhere in the U.S. via my web site (I can probably ship internationally too, but I need to reassess the cost of shipping overseas).

If you’re in Portland or visiting you can also now buy signed books from Second Shapes Books on N. Denver Ave. in Kenton. This newly-opened shop has quickly become a hit for local authors while bringing more cultural energy to a neighborhood that needs it. If you head over in search of my books don’t forget to ask about Joe Streckert’s work and other local authors, whose work I understand keep flying off Second Shapes’s shelves.

This Week’s Souvenir: Priorities and The Lost Art of Editorial Sarcasm

Contempory residents of Portland are widely recognized for their prowess at taking offense on behalf of others. Sometimes we express our indignation before checking how accurate our complaints might be. As I prepared for my Hong Kong talks and perused issues of LIFE magazine where Mel Jacoby’s work appeared I discovered the following letter from LIFE’s January 12, 1942, which suggests Portland’s been working on its pearl-clutching for at least eighty years.

Then-Oregon State Legislator and former Portland City Commissioner Stanhope S. Pier was so troubled by LIFE’s editorial decision-making after Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941 attacks on U.S. naval forces in Pearl Harbor that he — *checks notes* — chided the magazine for supposedly mis-attributing a propaganda slogan inspired by the attacks.

“Remember Pearl Harbor!” urged the slogan. It evoked the cry a generation earlier, during the Spanish-American War, to “Remember the Maine!” As LIFE reported, the federal Office of Production Management, or OPM, devised the slogan on December 10. But an aghast Pier countered that it was the Oregonian who first used the slogan.

The destruction and loss of life on Pearl Harbor turned December 7, 1941, into what President Franklin Roosrvelt termed a “date which will live in infamy,” but the matter that so incensed Pier to complain to LIFE’s editors — whose publication was then one of the nation’s most read — was that they’d overlooked his hometown paper’s use of an already derivative propaganda slogan.

LIFE’s response to Pier was a masterstroke in dry wit, beginning with its deadpan headline for the letter:

“Priority.”

Whoever edited the letters section that week understood the art of succinct but cutting snark. They maintained plausible deniability with a response that could be read — at least by anyone not paying attention — as completely polite, though they all but rolled their eyes in print. The reply’s closing line, which read “For the benefit of future authors of monographs on this point, the Oregonian’s claim to priority is herewith registered,” subtly but effectively underscores their sarcasm.

To be clear, I believe strongly in proper attribution. Sufficiently crediting sources both reinforces the credibility of information and ensures that those sources who contribute authentic, new ideas to public discourse continue to do so. That’s not what happened here.

Pier was a politician who perhaps should have focused his emotions elsewhere. His nation had just plunged into war but he was acting little better than a gadfly. It was fair play for LIFE to imply as much, however subtly or acerbically. Simply complaining loudly shouldn’t earn gadflies the attention they crave. They waste everyone’s time and mental bandwidth by drowning out quieter, more rational voices. Pier should have understood this given his experience in municipal and state government.

I can’t speak to whether the Oregonian sought Pier’s defense, nor whether he had company in his support of the paper, but I’m willing to gamble that few people anywhere took that slogan as seriously as Pier’s pedantry suggests he had. There’s much to critique about what appeared on the pages of LIFE during the war and other periods, but at least in this case it’s nice to see such a powerful news outlet unafraid to issue a pithy dismissal of a politician’s BS.

Receipts

By the way, it just so happens that Pier’s criticism wasn’t even valid. Of course, I can prove this thanks to technology that he couldn’t have imagined. Nonetheless, I ran a quick query of the phrase “Remember Pearl Harbor” on Newspapers.com and immediately found numerous instances of the phrase in print earlier than the Oregonian’s Dec. 9 printing Pier cited. For example, on December 8, 1941, many papers in the Midwest printed a wire report about crowds of University of Illinois students marching through campus hours after the attacks broke and chanting the slogan.

“Remember Pearl Harbor” also appeared in multiple articles, editorial cartoons, and other pieces published throughout the United States on Dec. 9, the same day the Oregonian first printed it. It’s conceivable that some newspaper staff devised the slogan on their own, but it’s just as likely that OPM propaganda messaging hit its mark and inspired many publications to use the phrase.

Obviously this isn’t game changing history, but today’s newsrooms could stand to learn something from 1940s LIFE: It’s okay to stand up for yourself when criticized unfairly, and it’s okay to point out when ridiculous people are being ridiculous. If you can’t be bothered to call people on their trivial bullshit, how can you be expected to stand up to meaningful deception?

Still, let’s not get too worked up. This is as apt a time as ever to pause, take a breath, and check what outrages you prioritize. There’s so much to be outraged about right now but you’re only adding to the noise and fatigue if you weight mole hills as heavily as mountains.

Pace yourself.

This Week’s Scenery

A rooster design embedded in the terrazo floor of Montreal’s Chalet Bar-B-Cue restaurant. (Photo 2016 by Bill Lascher)

This Week’s Detours

Delve Deeper on the Dust Bowl Dustup: As I responded to fact-checking requests related to my appearance on NPR’s Throughline I came across this excellent 2024 post about the California border blockade from Lou Schacter’s True Crime Road Trip blog. Schacter’s post is one of the few pieces of media in recent years — besides The Golden Fortress — to add new, interesting, and, most importantly, accurate, information about the blockade and the people involved with it. I was especially interested in Schacter’s discussion of John Langan’s bitter divorce and custody proceedings after his arrest during the blockade and subsequent harassment by the LAPD’s Earl Kynette. I’m looking forward to reading more of True Crime Road Trip as I’m able.

Dory Fantasmagory: If you have kids I hope you’ve had the delight of reading Abby Hanlon’s wonderful book series, Dory Fantasmagory. Indeed, you don’t even need kids to enjoy the wit, imagination, anxieties, and joy of childhood that Hanlon captures in the Dory series. In late 2023 Genevieve Smith profiled Hanlon for New York magazine’s Vulture blog, describing the series as “a unicorn of children’s literature: chapter books geared toward new readers that are a pleasure even on the hundredth read, largely because they’re funny — the kind of funny that comes from being wholly recognizable.” Few books that captivate my kid’s attention also regularly make me (and his mom) laugh out loud regularly the way each Dory book does (so do Suzy Jackson’s delightful audiobook narrations). All three of us look forward to September’s release of the next Dory book.

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