Read Online Eve of a Hundred Midnights by Bill Lascher - Free Book Online

precipitated the Second Sino-Japanese War but the many potential impacts of these events on readers in California.
    While he worked on his thesis, Mel rented a room at 556 Alvarado Avenue in Palo Alto. His landlord was May Smith, the widow of Everett Smith, who founded Stanford’s journalism program. Mr. Smith died before Mel arrived at Stanford, but his daughter, Shelley, attended for three years coinciding with Mel’s attendance, though she didn’t graduate.
    Shelley had moved to New York after leaving Stanford. There she ended up with a job at Life magazine as a researcher. At the magazine, Shelley met a photographer named Carl Mydans. Carl and Shelley instantly fell in love. Married in June 1938, the Mydanses came to visit Shelley’s mother later thatyear, while Mel was renting a room from her. That gave Mel a chance to learn from Carl.
    â€œHe is a photographer for LIFE mag and a swell fellow,” Mel told his parents. Carl took an interest in Mel’s thesis and even asked to look over his extensive notes and source material. “I have learned a lot from talking to him already.”
    Despite Carl’s encouragement, Mel did not take to graduate work at first. By early February, Chilton Bush, Mel’s thesis advisor and the director of Stanford’s journalism program, told Mel he was alarmed and disappointed by the quality of Mel’s work. Discouraged by Bush’s comments, Mel considered quitting his master’s studies.
    He didn’t. He knew the problems with his thesis did not stem from lack of effort; after a few weeks of even more work, the project began to seem manageable again. There was little time for outside pursuits, like the flying lessons Mel had been taking. Aside from work on the thesis, he worked some training assignments at local papers and pitched freelance articles to national publications. He also attended lectures by prominent journalists and made numerous visits to local wire service offices. Impressed by Mel’s dedication, Bush’s attitude shifted. Where he once threatened to flunk Mel, he now pushed Mel on his thesis and helped him find career contacts.
    That June, Mel briefly visited Los Angeles. While he enjoyed seeing his family, he realized that his hometown lacked the kind of opportunities he might find in San Francisco, or the place he really wanted to go: China.
    â€œPerhaps I have the wrong slant on things, but I feel I would like just as broad an outlook on life as is possible to get and I can’t have that spending all my life in Bel Air and sitting on the sand at the Beach club,” he wrote.
    That summer Mel broadened his outlook further by workingnights at a fruit packing plant in nearby Sunnyvale. His wasn’t the hardest task—he was a quality checker who ensured that each can of fruit salad or fruit cocktail had the right proportion of ingredients—but the summer job gave him his first experience with manual labor.
    â€œCannery work has done me good in several ways,” he wrote. “Not only has it settled me to the idea of hard work, but it has brought me in contact with conditions I have been reading and thinking about for the last six years.”
    Despite the cannery’s lessons about the working class, Mel was getting anxious about finishing his thesis by the end of the summer. As the deadline neared, it was Charlie Leong whom Bush threatened to flunk. Mel’s writing partner only made matters worse when he took a full-time job that left him with no time to help Mel format the paper. Most of the work was done, but Bush still hinted that the whole thesis might need to be rewritten. Mel was reminded of how discouraged he’d been earlier in the year.
    Bush’s attitude was complex: though he was satisfied with the thesis’s content, he thought the paper wasn’t sufficiently polished. This was a frustrating assessment because Mel and Charlie were scheduled, only five days after Bush