Tag: History

25 Thoughts to Conclude a Strange Year

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 1 Comment

Hi folks,

I was undecided until, well, this afternoon on what kind of post to make for New Year’s Eve. Should I do a retrospective for 2025? Should I predict weird stuff for 2026? Should I just shamelessly promote myself, or talk about my dog dying, or brag about us going to Iceland?

Hmmm . . . why not all of the above?

Here are 25 thoughts, in no particular order, about the past year as well as the year to come. I wrote this in a rush, so . . . hopefully it all makes sense!

(#1) 2025 was . . . sad. This year we lost JoAnna’s Great Aunt Margaret (who for me had become a surrogate West Coast aunt) and our miniature poodle, Eddie. We had Eddie for over 13 years, which is close to a third of my life, so to say we miss him is an understatement. However, sometimes I will feel him in the room with us, hanging out and watching our front yard for predators and mail carriers, only this time he can fly so watch out.

(#2) 2025 was . . . adventurous. This past summer we spent two weeks touring Iceland, another week in Newfoundland, and several days in Denmark. We also took a Spring Break trip to London and Paris using some of our accumulated AmEx points, and in May we visited Denali National Park in Alaska. In terms of solo travel, I went to E11 in Utah for the second time. Although a severe dust storm forced us to flee leave earlier than we wanted, the experience solidified my desire to make it an annual tradition. By the end of the summer we were a bit traveled out, though, so for the last few months we’ve been enjoying some extended time at home.

(#3) 2025 was . . . professionally discouraging. This past year sounded the death knoll for the HUX MA Program. Although I have high hopes for reinventing it at a different institution, it’s been difficult to reconcile myself to its impending closure, especially after all of the work I put into starting it.

(#4) 2025 was about . . . improving myself. On a perhaps related note, I was diagnosed with depression earlier this year. My counseling training has given me the ability to see depression in other people, but I had a hard time realizing that I was suffering from it myself. Medication, exercise, and a series of projects have made things significantly better, but I am going into 2026 with the recognition that neither physical nor mental wellness can be taken for granted.

(#5) 2025 was about . . . improving my surroundings. My depression diagnosis was a surprise, but my ADHD diagnosis last year was not. Still, though, this past year has forced me to revisit those things that help me—as well as those things that do not help me—cope with it. One of the nice things about this process was realizing that a lot of my academic shortcomings during my childhood were a direct result of my ADHD, as well as understanding the role that hyperfocus plays in my day to day life. But there are many things that I can still improve upon, and so this last year has been an exercise in searching for and implementing new tools to help me better organize (and live) my life. This is a work in progress, obviously, but when I look back on this year I see a lot of progress in my work.

(#6) 2025 was about . . . my daughter. As it turns out, Clementine has ADHD, too. So in addition to figuring out how to better navigate my own path, I am also relearning how to help my kid navigate hers. While this has not been the easiest journey for our family, I do not doubt its outcome. Our love will see us through.

(#7) 2025 was about . . . longevity. JoAnna and I celebrated our ten year anniversary last March. Time flies when you’re having fun!

(#8) 2026 will be . . . a change year. Stay tuned . . . hopefully the changes will be (mostly) good.

If you don’t know much about ADHD, here is your chance to change that!

(#9) Things I am looking forward to in 2026: Finishing and traveling around in the pop-up camper. Going on a Nile River cruise with my mom in March. Visiting my 50th state (North Dakota) in April. Watching Season 5 of For All Mankind. Taking a long summer road trip (possibly cross-country) and spending a week or two in Saint Louis. Starting work on our upstairs renovation. Going on the job market.

All sorts of things.

(#10) Things I am NOT looking forward to in 2026: Relentless political ads and an endless barrage of text messages asking for money. Economic and political uncertainty. Forcing my kid to learn her multiplication tables. A hotter and longer summer. Having to wait until at least 2027 for Season 2 of Pluribus. Going on the job market.

Stuff like that.

(#11) My “Capital R” New Year’s Resolution for 2026: To read one fun book each week. I’m sure I am not alone in saying that Academia has mostly killed my desire to read for fun. After all, when reading is work, and when work is reading, then reading for pleasure tends to take a backseat to less intellectually stimulating activities. However, as I begin writing again, I also want to begin embracing writing as a craft again, as opposed to something that checks off a professional box. But writing from a place of enjoyment requires being able to also read from a place of enjoyment. So, throughout the coming year, I want to read 52 “fun” books that have absolutely nothing to do with work. I don’t think I have ever challenged myself to do something like this before, at least since Summer Reading when I was a kid.

While I already have a sizeable backlog of books that I’m planning on reading, if there is a book that you think absolutely needs to be on my list, then please let me know. BUT: you can only recommend ONE book, so be sure that you can vouch 100% for whatever you decide to suggest . . . 🙂

(#12) My “I need to have at least one good health habit resolution” resolution: To start going to the gym at least three times a week AND/OR get back into jogging. I have already had both of these habits at one point or another, but over the past few years I have let professional concerns (and, well, some lethargic depression) disrupt them. The easiest way to do the former is to hit the gym after I drop Clementine off at school, so I plan to resume this habit next week when she returns. However, our neighborhood park has a new concrete walkway that weaves around its outer perimeter, and I am excited to find out how many laps I would need to do on it to train for a 5k.

(#13) Random thoughts about the past (and the future): I miss the old AM Coast to Coast show with Art Bell. When I was a teenager, I would stay up several hours past midnight on New Years in order to listen to people calling up the show with strange predictions about the future. Does anyone out there still do this? There’s a strange, perhaps even harrowing, intimacy to listening to cranks, truckers, and insomniacs call late-night talk shows with their own pet theories about life, the universe, and everything else.

(#14) My favorite movie from 2025: Sinners. It’s phenomenal on so many levels . . . definitely worth watching.

(#15) My favorite movie from 2025 (runner-up): Rental Family

(#16) My favorite movie that I won’t admit to most people is my favorite movie of 2025, but it may very well actually be my favorite movie of the year: The Naked Gun.

Rental Family is one of my favorite movies of 2025 . . . Fraser is a tour de force.

(#17) A Brief Story about the Most Inaccurate History Book of all Time: When I was a teenager, my mom worked at the Booksource in Saint Louis. As a book wholesaler, she had access to thousands of unsold books whose front covers were stripped in order to facilitate their return to the publisher. I got all sorts of “free” books this way.

One of those stripped books was Prophecies for the End of Time, by Shawn Robbins. When I was a kid I was really into books about Nostradamus and other weird stuff (like listening to Art Bell at 2 in the morning on New Year’s), so my mom correctly assumed that I would be interested in it. I remember reading this book, which the author alleged at one point would be the “Bible of the Future,” with rapt attention. For instance, Robbins claimed in 2001 that Puerto Rico would become a state and that surgeons would use pig hearts for the first time to save human lives.

That’s it. Nothing else. She made no other predictions for 2001.

Anyway, at that time I thought it was pretty cool, but in 1999 I went off to college and subsequently forgot about it while I was immersed in reading actual history at Southeast Missouri State University.

Well, I’ve nevertheless wondered about the book a few times in the intervening years, and earlier this year I decided that I would try to find it. And my friends, once I did . . . it did not disappoint.

Here’s a scanned image of the author’s predictions for 2024 and 2025. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether you should take its predictions for 2028 and 2030 on the following page seriously:

Here's the text for the predictions for 2024 and 2025 from Prophecies for the End of the World, by Shawn Robbins: "shut down all nuclear power facilities due to massive protests. 2024 In Nogales, Mexico, across the border from Nogales, Arizona, a group of angry union members walk off the job in a wildcat strike. Gunfire erupts and quickly involves troops of both nations fighting each other. Meanwhile, Americans and sympathetic Mexicans who are making good money from Americans and American tourists in San Jose de Cabo, at the tip of Baja California, and others in Tijuana, Mexicali, and Ensenada take over the local broadcast systems, declare the independence of Baja California from Mexico, and immediately request annexation by the United States. Complications increase as tourist-conscious Yucatan declares that its citizens---mostly descendants of Mayan Indians-also want to be free of the corrupt and inef­fectual government of Mexico City. The request for US military protection is approved by the US, which sends thousands of troops across the Yucatan Straits from Cuba. 2025 Kurdish terrorists explode an atomic bomb in down­town Ankara, the capital of Turkey, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Just about every borne in America is now wired and is online with the telecommunications superhighway­and industry and business pay for the hookups as well as reward homeowners for using the system.
A scanned page from Prophecies for the End of the World, by Shawn Robbins. Surprisingly, she was way off base.

One other thing I’ll add: the original book apparently contained a yellow envelope so that readers could send $20 to the author for a personal astrology reading. The copy I bought on eBay did not include it, so hopefully the original buyer threw it in the trash.

(#18) A Brief Lesson Learned (and One that I Clearly Ignored) from the Most Inaccurate History Book of all Time: I received my reader reports for Grandpa’s Letters last year, but I could . . . not . . . muster . . . the wherewithal . . . to finish the necessary edits.

One of my more typical ADHD proclivities is to try to avoid work that I believe will be less than perfect in execution. Books are solidly in that category, and I would not have submitted Never Caught Twice to my editor had it not been at my dissertation advisor’s urging. This time, though, the credit belongs to my wife—and to a certain book of prophecies from the 90s. After all, mistakes and inaccuracies are inevitable in any history book . . . it’s par for the course. When you’re dealing with thousands of facts and documents, it’s virtually impossible to error check them all. That being said, though, there is no way that Grandpa’s Letters will be even remotely as inaccurate as this book of prophecies, which still somehow saw the light of day from the inside of a bookstore. It’s a small comfort, but it was enough for me to hit “Send” on my email to my editor with my revisions attached.

Anyway . . . without further ado, here are my own predictions for 2026. Hopefully I won’t look quite as stupid a year from now.

(#19) Prediction #1: The Democrats will win the House and the Senate in November. Most pundits are predicting this. Historical midterm data suggests that a “Blue Wave” is all but preordained. However, the margin of victory is less certain, and to that end I think the Dems will win closer to 30 than 3 seats.

That being said, surprises do happen, so it’s more important than ever that we all show up and vote this coming November.

(#20) Prediction #2: At least one California State University (CSU) campus will announce plans for closure. It makes me sad to write this, but the CSU system is not in good shape right now. As some of my colleagues have told me privately, “It is going to get worse before it gets better.”

(#21) Prediction #3: Scientists will find a cure for Alzheimer’s. Perhaps this one is more wishful thinking (and speedy FDA approvals) than anything, but recent studies seem to suggest that a cure might be on the horizon for one of humanity’s most confounding, and bleak, diseases.

(#22) Prediction #4: The Cleveland Browns will make the NFL playoffs this year. Just a gut feeling . . . I really like Shadeur Sanders and his progression over the past few weeks. Giving Sanders an offseason training regimen with first team reps plus a draft-augmented Offensive Line will do wonders for this team. But then again, these are the Browns . . . no one will be less surprised about me being wrong than I.

(#23) Big things are coming in 2026! (Self-Promotion #1): I’ll conclude this list of 25 “2025 thoughts” (and hurry up with writing this so that I can join my family for the midnight countdown) with a reminder to stay tuned for updates about Grandpa’s Letters! It’s probably a little late to get it released in 2026, but I hope it will land on bookshelves sometime during the first half of 2027. Fingers crossed!

(#24) Big things are coming in 2026! (Self-Promotion #2): I finally have a project in mind for my Grandmother’s Letters . . they will be coming soon to a brand-new Substack account! I hope to launch it this spring. Stay tuned . . .

(#25) Big things are coming in 2026! (Self-Promotion #3): Last but not least, my writing goals for 2025 include sitting down and finally churning out a script for Earthshaking, which is the story of Iben Browning’s infamous 1990 earthquake prediction in Missouri. But don’t be surprised if it ends up being a podcast instead of a documentary . . . time will tell.

OK . . . finishing just under the wire here . . . thanks as always for reading, and of course, have a Happy Ney New Year!

Happy Birthday, plus some updates

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

Hi folks,

Apologies again for yet another long absence from this space. Work, family, and travel are all keeping me busy, and as the to-do lists grow the need to update the blog falls further and further down the priority queue. Nonetheless, it is my Grandpa Luckett’s birthday today (he would be 104 years old), so it would be a shame to pass up the opportunity to wish him a happy heavenly birthday!

In any case, as long as I am here, I might as well update you on some of the things happening in my personal and professional life, and hopefully soon I can get my act together and begin elaborating on some of these things:

Grandpa’s Letters update: Good news . . . we have a publisher lined up for Grandpa’s Letters! Last fall I received peer reviews for the manuscript, and my goal is to get my edits done by Memorial Day. I don’t know if it will come out next year at this point, but if the edits are accepted and the contract is finalized then it will probably be approximately a year or so before the book becomes available. More information when it’s ready, but I am looking forward to sharing the final product with the world!

Other writing and research projects: I have not been consistently updating my blog, but that doesn’t mean I am not writing. I have been working on some other things as well, including two journal articles and a book chapter for an upcoming prison education collection. I have already submitted drafts for two of those items, and the third should be finished this summer.

I am also collecting research materials and reading foundational literature for my next scholarly book project, which will explore the cultural history of punishment in Hawaii. As with my approach to horse stealing in Never Caught Twice, I like to tell chronologically sweeping stories: this book will cover the history of punishment on the islands from Polynesian settlement up through the recent reboot of Hawaii 5-0. I’ve been working on this since last summer, when I presented a paper on Queen Liliuokalani’s famous Iolani Palace quilt and its place within the praxis of carceral education at the Pacific Coast Branch meeting of the American Historical Association in Honolulu. I don’t have a timeline for completing it, but I am excited to continue working on it.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that part of the reason why I wanted to focus on Hawaii for my next book is that my family and I enjoy spending time there, but overall it is an appropriate area to combine some of my passions: prison education, cultural and legal history, my family’s attachment to Pearl Harbor and the community we share with other survivor families, and getting a sense of place when I write about something. I felt like I successfully accomplished the latter when I wrote about Nebraska, and I want to replicate that experience with Hawaii.

HUX Program: This probably warrants a separate post, but I have some good news/bad news about the HUX Program.

Let’s start with the bad: due to our university’s budget struggles and my program’s higher-than-average staffing requirements, we have decided to close the program after teaching out our remaining students. This was an incredibly difficult decision for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that as the inheritor of a program that’s over five decades old I am in the strange and sad position of closing it down a second (and most assuredly final) time. This fantastic program, which has functionally been a stand-alone department since its inception in 1974, has graduated over 5,700 students over the years. Moreover, the newest iteration of HUX—the prison education program—will graduate as many as 18 students by this summer. It has a deep, rich legacy that long predates my tenure as program director, and I wish that there was a scenario in which we could realistically keep it at CSUDH.

Well, that was pretty bleak . . . but there is light at the end of the tunnel. The good news is that the administration and I are working together to try to find a new institutional partner for some version of HUX, which I hope will not only continue to operate as a Humanities MA degree, but will help it grow and evolve in other ways that make humanities graduate education more vibrant, desirable, necessary, and urgent. In my mind, 2025 is nothing if not an indictment of the myopic mind . . . K-12 students and adult learners alike need to learn critical thinking, information literacy, civics, and a host of other soft skills that the humanities have historically excelled in teaching. Although I am passionate about prison education for its own sake, my ulterior motive is to help make my carceral classrooms a proving ground for what intelligent, capable, efficacious, and empowered students can accomplish under even the most stark of circumstances. Once these students show the world what they can do, I hope that the world will take notice of what they learned to get to that point.

Besides relocating the program, I am also hard at work doing something that I probably should have been doing a better job of all along: fundraising and finding scholarship opportunities for my students. When we relaunch the HUX program (or when someone else comes along to offer their own MA), I intend for every student to have access to a larger funding ecosystem that does not rely on one basket of money or another. I’ve already laid some of the groundwork, and there will definitely be opportunities for readers to contribute to this effort! More information will be posted here when it becomes available. But for now, please keep it in the back of your mind, and remember that 100,000 people donating ten dollars apiece raises the exact same amount of money as one person writing a check for a million bucks.

The MFT Program: I am almost done with my counseling degree! It has taken me twice as long as everyone else in my original cohort, but pursuing one graduate degree while running a graduate program elsewhere is no easy task. In terms of how I am going to use it, well . . . I already am! Counseling has given me much deeper insight into some of the problems my students face, both before and since their incarceration, and it provides perspective and training on how trauma-informed education can transform outcomes for our students. Some of my recent (yet to be published) scholarly work on prison education pedagogy reflects this new positioning.

Although I am not considering a path towards licensure as a therapist at this particular time, I have recently begun training for and learning about the world of professional mediation. In many ways, this path echoes and builds on the work I have already been doing for years as both a historian and as a prison education program director. However, the addition of my counseling background combines my penchant for systems thinking and creative problem solving with a therapist’s ability (as one of my professors at CSU East Bay would say) to “enter [the] client’s world.” To that end, I recently completed my training to become an officially licensed mediator in California, and this fall I will be teaching a course for the Negotiation, Conflict Resolution, and Peacekeeping (NCRP) program at CSUDH. Even though we academics are living in increasingly uncertain times, I hope that between my writing, my prison education work, and my growing experience in conflict resolution and mediation, I will be able to evolve and adapt as needed.

Travel updates: It has been a very busy travel year so far for the Luckett-Wall Clan! In April we visited London and Paris for spring break, and this week we just got back from a brief trip to Fairbanks, Alaska and Denali National Park (my forty-ninth state . . . look out, North Dakota, I’m saving the best for last!). We booked both trips using airline miles (I use The Points Guy and The Thrifty Traveler to get updates on credit card offers, conversion opportunities, etc. . . . pro-tip: if you have to pay for your own tuition for grad school, you can open a new card, charge your tuition to it, collect the bonus points, pay off the card, and then fly your family of three roundtrip to Alaska during the offseason for next to nothing 😁). Later this summer, we will be traveling to Newfoundland for a wedding, and in July we will be driving the Golden Circle around Iceland with the grandparents!

Anyway, they say the best part about traveling is going home, and that definitely rings true for us. We are very privileged and fortunate to be able to have so many adventures, but it is always lovely to come back home and see how excited our dogs are to see us. 🥰

Thanks for indulging me on this long, overdue post . . . and Happy Birthday, Grandpa! I will have some cookies in your honor.

A picture of our two dogs snuggling. Scruffy, on the left, is a shih tzu, while Eddie (on the right) is a dark gray miniature poodle.

Scruffy and Eddie, snuggling after a long day of doing nothing.

Never Caught Twice . . . in Color!

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

I clearly enjoy writing a lot, but I love doing photography. Although I still have much to learn about the technical side of taking a good photograph, I think I have some of the fundamentals down: proper framing and staging, the rule of thirds, optimizing light and other conditions, and most important knowing that sometimes the most mundane scenes can lead to the most incredible photographs. One of my favorite side projects while doing book research is taking photographs along the way—not just of archival documents and historical sites, but of everything else I see during my travels.

Unfortunately, of the half dozen or so photographs I submitted to be included in the book, none of them appear in color. I was told that the production price of printing them in glossy color would be too exorbitant, and frankly I am OK with that . . . cost pressures dictate a lot of decisions made in publishing, and I am not here to complain about the give-and-take of the publication process. However, it would be nice to send these photographs out there in their natural, colorful state, and perhaps include some other pictures I took while researching Never Caught Twice. Western Nebraska is a visually arresting place, and its landscape is full of contradictions.

In honor of Never Caught Twice’s paperback release on December 1st this year, I am going to post a series of photo essays each week on my blog in order to promote the book and show readers what the pictures in the book look like when displayed in full color. I will talk a little bit about the places I shot, how the photographs fit into the story, and what happened on some of those adventures through the Nebraska Panhandle.

Look out a week from today for the first essay. In the meantime, if you have not already purchased a copy of Never Caught Twice, you can now pre-order a paperback copy by visiting the University of Nebraska Press website: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496205148/

Manila, Part II: Searching for the 400 Club

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 1 Comment

When explaining this strange, too-brief-to-be-pleasure and too-long-to-be-business trip across the world to the Philippines, I tend to use the word “research” a lot. It’s probably the most applicable term, both in light of the goals I described in Part I and in view of my ongoing historical information-seeking for the book. But my own “research” trips in the past and for other projects have had a more explicit research-based component in that I am usually visiting an archive someplace. Indeed, I have a conventional “research trip” later this month when I visit College Park, Maryland to conclude my work (started before COVID) at the National Archives.

My trip to Manila, however, is a bit different. I am not bound by the opening and closing hours of a library. I do not need to fill out any call slips. I am not checking archival items off a list (while trying to avoid the temptation to add new ones). And since this does not feel like a conventional research trip, I’m not sure what I should do. I’m visiting museums, not libraries. I’m taking photographs of the city, not of arcane documents. Instead, I am trying to retrace my grandfather’s steps, and in that process I am feeling my way around a whole new dimension of place-based research.

One of my few discrete “research” goals going into this trip was to find a place called the 400 Club. Although his future brother-in-law Dan did not accompany Elmer to the popular dance hall (perhaps for obvious reasons), the name stood out to me as I was reading Grandpa’s letters. He mentions it in one of his final letters home before he was discharged:

I had liberty in Manila yesterday . . . Several other fellows [and I] took some beer with us from the ship. The place we went to is called the ‘400 Club.’ It was a pretty nice place. Small band for dance music and several girls around to dance with. I told Rosie I went dancing out here. We all had a nice time and it was good to dance again.

Elmer Luckett to his Parents, 16 September 1945

Most of his discussion about Manila is vague in terms of location, and the places with Dan and his friends are left up to the imagination. But “the 400 Club,” a “pretty nice place,” seemed enticingly specific. I wanted someplace concrete in Manila that I could use to connect with my Grandfather’s experience in the city. I did not realistically expect the club to still be operational, but I hoped that at least the building would still be there. Either way, it was worth checking out.

Destruction at the Walled City (Intramuros district) of old Manila in May 1945 — after the Battle of Manila
Destruction at the Walled City (Intramuros district) of old Manila in May 1945 — after the Battle of Manila. From WikiCommons. Original source: Illustration 341 in Medical Dept., U.S. Army: Surgery in World War II: Activities of Surgical Consultants, Vol. II, Office of the Surgeon general, Dept. of the Army, Washington, D.C., 1964.

Unfortunately, the 400 Club existed during an inconvenient period for historians researching local businesses. It is hard to know what predated and survived the relentless Battle for Manila, and what immediately followed. Like a punch-drunk boxer staggering after a near-knock out blow, Manila was putting the pieces back together—quite literally—after its liberation, and many things were changing at once. The 400 Club might have been brand-new to the stricken city, a mere room in a structurally sound building with a crate of booze, a few musicians, and a rag to wipe the soot and ash off the bar. Or it might have slinked its way through the past three years, hosting Japanese Imperial officers one day and grizzled guerillas the next, sort of like a Filipino version of Rick’s Café Américain. The more I thought about it, the more I built up the mystery in my mind.

This may be by design. The 400 Club was both a place and a concept, and the concept itself was hardly original. In 1892, the New York Times published a list of “the Four Hundred,” which was a roll-call of New York’s most beloved (or at least sought-after) socialites. The term soon became synonymous with elite social standing. Eventually someone applied the significance of the number to the need to sell drinks, and it was not long before it became a kind of brand for exclusive bars, nightclubs, and restaurants. The most famous “400 Club” belongs to London, which opened in Leister Square sometime before World War II. Although it would eventually become an exclusive supper club, during the war it catered largely to military personnel. Perhaps not coincidentally, the 400 Club was eventually exported to other places in the British Commonwealth, including Sydney, and it later made its way up the Pacific Rim. Yokohama, Japan had a 400 Club during the American occupation after the war, where it eventually became associated with the growing popularity of jazz in that city. (1)

Fortunately, Manila’s 400 Club had a more detailed chronicler (at least in this respect) than my grandfather: Sy M. Kahn, an enlisted man who served in the Army Transportation Corps. In his diary, which he later edited and published, Kahn gives a fantastic and detailed description of the venue:

We went to a place named the 400 Club, a nightclub way up on the other end of Royal Ave [Real Street]. We bought several bottles of whiskey and then proceeded to look for the place. It took us an hour-and-a-half to find it, and the driving rain and dark streets of Royal Ave did not help . . . The club had a good band, an indoor and outdoor dance floor, and a small patio. There are numerous women, mostly Filipino, some Spanish. In a few moments we had women at our table. I got the company I wanted in a Spanish girl named Virginia who spoke English well, is tallish, a good dancer, and 25. It felt strange to have a good-looking girl dance close and be mildly affectionate. We all had a roaring time. The prices were terrific, but we were having such a good time that the money didn’t mean anything.

Sy M. Kahn

Kahn’s vivid and detailed description of the 400 Club leaves little to be desired, apart from its exact location and its broader historical context (2). Kahn’s recollections, like Elmer’s, provide a snapshot of the place, but little in the way of biography. So the search continued, and I knew it would take me much longer than an hour and a half to locate it.

Picture of street in Intramuros. Several motorcycles can be seen. Picture is mostly decorative.
Intramuros in 2022. Photo by Author.

Last Saturday I was able to visit Real Street for myself. I imagine it looked very different after the battle in 1945, but in 2022 it is the living, breathing heart of Intramuros. Stalls, scooters, and sleeping dogs line the narrow sidewalks, while residents make their own daily history. The war is not quite ancient, since some folks still remember the long, difficult years that followed. However, aside from a prominent memorial to the lives lost during the Battle of Manila, the conflict feels remote. As I walked down the street, I imagined throngs of American servicemen roaming down the street in giant herds, spilling out of their ships like marbles from a sack, seeking out amusement and refreshment in the battered, broken city. I could almost see my grandfather surveying the destruction, passing wrecked buildings and crumbled brick, twisted metal and blackened timber, and then marveling at the intact San Agustin Church as it gazed back at the sin-seeking sailors shuffling past. Less charitably, I could also picture him grimacing at the high price of food and the near-total absence of beer.

Once I approached the end of Real Street, I looked around for a bar or a club. There were no obvious signs of either, and the only establishment that I or Google were aware of was a small distillery museum nearby with a tasting room. Instead, Real Street ends in a crowd of apartment buildings, with the rebuilt wall looming silently ahead. I’d like to think that Grandpa had a similar moment, standing in the exact same spot, of looking around and wondering where the club was. I probably had more success in quickly deciding that it was gone than they had in quickly locating it. As Kahn noted in his diary, the east end of Real Street in 1945 was a dark, quiet place to visit at night. As for me, it was a sunny, soupy afternoon in Manila. My clothes were glued to my skin. I needed a shower, not a dance, so I headed back to my hotel.

Picture of the front of San Agustin Church. Photo mostly for decorative purposes.
San Agustin Church was one of the few structures in Intramuros to survive the battle. It was built in 1607. Photo by author.

After a couple of days spent exploring the city, I decided to perform my due diligence on my last day in town and take another crack at the mystery. So I stopped by the National Library of the Philippines to see if they had any city directories for Manila. I was not sure that they even existed, given the Library’s destruction during the Japanese occupation and the burning or theft of most of its holdings, but I figured it was worth a shot. After looking at a business directory from 1988 (which had no trace of the club), I asked the reference librarian if they had older copies. As it turns out, they are all online (remember: when in doubt, always ask a reference librarian). Unfortunately, I found no trace of any later directories from the period immediately following the war, but it was fun to check out another country’s national library.

The day was getting late, and I had other things to do before I left. My quest, such as it was, came to an end. I may be able to learn more about the club eventually (and perhaps one of my readers has some information that I have missed . . .), but when I do I will be thousands of miles away, unable to visit. I decided to settle for a consolation prize: dinner and beer at the Army Navy Club (better known today as the Rizal Park Hotel). I sat down at my table on the rooftop veranda just as the sun was setting, and even though many things have changed in the 111 years since it was first built, I watched the same pink, orange, and golden hues swirl into one another over the bay that surely entranced Douglas MacArthur, Jose Rizal, and so many others. And at that moment I felt like I was truly sharing something with my Grandpa and my Uncle Dan, as if we were connecting across time.

View from the Rizal Park hotel after sunset. Image mostly decorative.
View from the Rizal Park Hotel after sunset. Photo by author.

I’m not sure if looking for an eighty-year old nightclub and then giving up because it was too hot outside qualifies as research. But retracing my grandfather’s footsteps nearly a century later and seeing the old church, feeling the breeze off the bay and the cobblestones beneath my feet, and experiencing the scrum of crowded humanity in narrow streets helps me visualize his experience a little better. The experiences I’ve gained and the empathy I’d developed will help the book, and to be frank they help me as a person, too.

This journey was also a pilgrimage of sorts. It has become a family tradition for Elmer Luckett’s descendants to fly to Hawaii, don a lei, and drive out to the USS Arizona Memorial and Museum at Pearl Harbor. It is a powerful, instructive, and emotional moment for the people who loved him. But for me, anyway, I feel like this trek is a tribute to to the other end of grandpa’s journey. It does not represent the start of a frightening quest, but the end of a momentous adventure. It also helps me connect my grandfather’s journey to my Uncle Dan’s. I never knew him (or my grandmother), but there is a kind of poetry in reflecting on how his and grandpa’s journeys intersected in this place halfway around the world, just as grandpa and grandma’s fates began twisting themselves around one another during the past two years. On a more global level, it reminds me not of how America was violently awaken from its pre-war apathy, but of that very same war’s destructive effect. It shows that Americans should continue to care about both the horrors of war and the possibilities of peacetime.

Well, anyway, that’s all a bit tedious to summarize, so perhaps I will keep calling it a research trip. The term may appear somewhat disingenuous in hindsight. However, if the hallmark of a good research trip is to not only learn the things to came to learn, but to better appreciate the vast universe of things you never had any idea you needed to learn, then this journey has been an unqualified success.

Notes

(1) See William Thomas Generous Jr., Sweet Pea at War: A History of USS Portland (Lexington, Ky: University of Kentucky Press, 2003), 21; and E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 179, 206.

(2) Sy M. Kahn, Between Tedium and Terror: A Soldier’s World War II Diary, 1943-45 (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press), 285. Note Kahn’s use of “Royal,” not “Real,” which may either be soldier slang for the infamous neighborhood’s main thoroughfare or an automatic translation on Kahn’s part. But there is no “Royal” Avenue in Manila, either before or following the war, and even Anglicized maps of the region during the American occupation use “Real.”

Manila, Part I: Getting A Sense of Place

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 5 Comments

At SFO last Wednesday, the ticketing line for Philippine Airlines stretched away from the counter, around the corner, and past the entrance doors. I rolled my luggage to the end of the queue, and silently thanked my wife for buying me a new suitcase for my birthday. The line was not moving fast, but at least it was moving, and my flight to Manila wasn’t supposed to leave for another three hours. I stood and started to wait.

A white man in front of me with even more luggage turned around. “So, I’m assuming that you’re going to go see your girlfriend?” He saw the ring on my left hand. “Your wife?” “Neither,” I replied. “My wife drove me down here.” “Oh,” he sighed. I never realized how many American men traveled to the Philippines to see wives and girlfriends until he asked. Then I realized something else: not a lot of white Americans traveled there at all, let alone to simply satisfy their curiosity. Give our nation’s shared if complicated history, this struck me as interesting, and perhaps a little odd. Anyway, we struck up a conversation about the nation to which we were both traveling. He had been several times over the past several years, and on his last trip he and his wife had purchased a house in Cebu City.

I guess you could say I was going to the Philippines for family-related reasons as well. Manila was the end of the road for my grandpa’s World War II career, and before that he had spent several months in his ship either anchored or steaming off the coasts of Leyte, Samar, and northern Luzon. His oiler, the Mink, was only two days behind MacArthur when he waded back into history after fleeing the Philippines a few years before. Later, the Mink was a part of the initial convoy charged with supporting the landings at Linguyen Gulf. Grandpa’s Liberty ship earned more battle stars during this period than the Chew (his destroyer at Pearl Harbor) did during its entire career. At one point off the coast of Luzon, only fifty miles or so west of Manila, a kamikaze pilot destroyed the ship next to his in the convoy line. For Grandpa, Manila represented the end of the longest, hardest, and arguably most harrowing period of his war service. As devastating as Pearl Harbor was to grandpa and to everyone else on Oahu, at least it ended. In the Philippines, however, the dive bombers kept coming for weeks and months on end.

Manila Bay
Ships and boats floating in Manila Bay. Elmer’s ship the Mink was here in 1945, along with hundreds of other American vessels that crowded the harbor in the days following its liberation.

Manila was remarkable for other reasons as well. Grandpa writes a lot about it in his letters, commenting on how so much of the city was in ruins and yet its nightlife seemed more boisterous than ever after three years of Japanese occupation. He also met my great-great-uncle Danny in Manila. A nineteen-year old soldier from St. Louis, and his girlfriend Rose’s baby brother, Danny was not old enough to have seen much fighting but he was smart enough to be posted in Army headquarters. Elmer and Danny met several times in the devastated city, believing each time to be their last encounter for a while. Elmer knew he was heading home, while Danny was told he was going to Japan.

I do not have the time or the money to check out all the places my Grandpa visited. Wars have a nasty habit of shaking up the globe and scattering people like snow into seemingly random places. Elmer’s ship made stops in New Orleans, Houston, Panama, Papua New Guinea, the Admiralty Islands, Indonesia, and several spots throughout the Philippine archipelago. It would be cost and time-prohibitive for me to visit them all, so I decided to choose one and get to know it a little.

Manila seemed like a good choice for a variety of reasons. As noted above, Manila is an important setting in grandpa’s narrative, and I wanted to connect his experience with that of my Uncle Danny’s. It was also host to one of the most savage and devastating battles in World War II, so much so that by the time my grandpa arrived most of the city was in rubble. Flying to Manila is also lot less involved than getting to the northern coast of New Guinea, or Manus Island, or Morotai in Indonesia. It would take twice as much money and thrice the time to visit any of these places, and if the lengthy flight to Manila was any indication then I am glad I didn’t put together a more frenetic island-hopping travel plan.

Manila Sky Line
Manila’s skyline. The city has come a long way since 1945, when the battle between Japanese and American forces reduced most of the city to rubble.

The man in front of me in line had a lot of good advice for traveling in the Philippines, and he suggested that I ride a Jeepney at some point. He also spent about five minutes talking about his new home’s air conditioning. Having recently installed a mini-split in our attic office space, I asked him about his new system. He did not know the details, he responded, but air conditioning is vitally important in the Philippines. He described the heat there, which is a hard thing to imagine while standing indoors on a cool, windy morning near San Francisco Bay.

This is another reason for me wanting to travel to Manila, or to any of grandpa’s ports of call in the Southern Pacific, and it ties in to one of my goals in writing this book. One of my general complaints about academic history, and a lot of decidedly non-academic history, is that it is too often non-descriptive. Places are “hot,” not “sweltering.” Mountains are “tall,” not “towering.” Fact-finding and narrative-establishing overshadow the need to set the scene in writing about the past. To be fair, there is often not a lot of grist to that mill. The past is a foreign country, after all, and we cannot Google Street View a scene in Renaissance Italy or the San Agustin church in Manila after the Japanese set fire to everything else around it. But my grandpa’s letters take me halfway there, as he was no idle observer himself. One of the strengths of my first book, I believe, was my success in describing western Nebraska for readers who have either never visited it or have only seen it in passing while driving Interstate 80 or flying on a plane. When I traveled to Lincoln to accept my Nebraska Book Award last year a couple of people asked me where in Nebraska I was from. Considering that I live in California and was raised in Missouri, I could not help but be flattered.

The main point here is that description matters. Being able to help one’s readers see, smell, hear, taste, and feel a place they’ve likely never visited matters. And if my years of teaching early American history to Californians has taught me anything, it is that the east coast might as well be Europe if you cannot make that place real for them.

But the best way to get a sense of that place is to actually be there. So, for me, that place is going to be Manila.

Selfie at the Jollibee
Greetings from Manila! Here I am hanging out with Jollibee the Bee (basically the Filipino equivalent of Ronald McDonald) near the Mall of Asia.

After an interminably long flight bookended by an hour at the gate on each end of the journey, we finally emerged from the plane and into Ninoy Aquino’s cool and pleasantly air-conditioned arrivals hall. My friend from San Francisco was just a few travelers behind me, and we passed each other in the immigration line. “We made it!” he sighed. The man sounded weary, but his traveling was not over. He had another flight to catch. I, on the other hand, took the easy way out of the airport: my hotel sent a driver to pick me up outside the terminal. “Yup,” I replied. “Here we are.”

We each looked ahead in opposite directions as yet another line snaked its way through the gauntlet of international travel. But we were almost through it. And at the end, travelers were rewarded with a blast of humid heat immediately upon exiting customs. Manila and San Francisco are both known for their large bays, but they could not feel any more different outside their respective airport terminal doors.