TREASURE HUNTING IN THE PI Beach vendors in the Philippines sell fridge magnets, shells, coral necklaces, fake Marlboros and anything they can to tourists. At Subic Bay I was offered American ‘silver’ dollars stamped 1797. The coins were said to be from a ship wreck hoard recovered off Mindanao the second largest island in the Philippines. Both of us wanted them to be real but knew they were...
AMAZING LUBANG OCCIDENTAL MINDORO, PHILIPPINES The week before Malaysia’s first Covid lockdown I bought Hiroo Onoda’s: ‘No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War’ from a second-hand bookshop in Penang. Onoda was a Lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army who refused to surrender at the end of World War II hiding out on Lubang Island in the Philippines for 29 years. Tucked inside the flyleaf was a...
Hemingway enjoying his Asian tour. In November 1940, two months after publication of his Spanish Civil War novel: ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, American author Ernest Hemingway married his third wife war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Paramount Studios paid him $100,000 for the movie rights and announced that film star Gary Cooper would play the leading role. At the height of his fame Hemingway...
In August 1936 the Warner Brothers film ‘China Clipper’ was released starring Pat O’Brien and Humphrey Bogart. It was inspired by the life of American aviation pioneer Juan Trippe founder of Pan American World Airways and capitalized on public excitement generated by the first commercial transpacific airmail flight the year before. The China Clipper was a four-engine flying boat that took off...
Missed too many boats: Americans in the Philippines Long Read In December 1945 MGM released the war film ‘They Were Expendable’ starring Robert Montgomery, John Wayne and Donna Reed based on the best-selling book by William Lindsay White. Directed by John Ford then a Captain in the United States Naval Reserve it told the story of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3 defending the Philippine Islands...
In March 2020, after 28 years in Hong Kong, I moved to Penang as a base to travel in the region. The Covid 19 pandemic ended that plan and I spent much of the time re-reading books I had collected over the years. The only new book I bought was ...