Please join us on Wednesday, March 8, at 6:00pm for a book signing and reading with Bill Lascher Salt '02 for his book Eve of a Hundred Midnights. This event takes place in the PhotoLab, located in the Lower Level of the Porteous Building. Free and open to the public.
Eve of a Hundred Midnights
Eve of a Hundred Midnights tells the true story of two newlywed war correspondents’ island-hopping run for their lives across the Pacific after the fall of Manila. The book charts the career of Melville Jacoby, who covered China and the Philippines during World War II, and recounts how Mel’s love for China and journalism brought him into the orbit of MGM scriptwriter-turned-journalist Annalee Whitmore, who he married in Manila barely a week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Portland, Oregon-based author Bill Lascher, a relative of Jacoby’s and a 2002 graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, will discuss the book and how journalists like Mel and Annalee brought the oft-neglected conflict in China and the Philippines to U.S. audiences. Lascher will also discuss how he used archival sources from private and institutional collections to bring the Jacobys’ story to life.
Artist Biography
Bill Lascher is a Portland, Oregon-based journalist whose work appears in Atlas Obscura, The Guardian, Pacific Standard, High Country News, the Oregonian, Portland Monthly and elsewhere. A graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, and Oberlin College, Lascher studied history with a politics minor. Lascher also earned a master’s degree in 2009 in specialized journalism from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.