Eve of a Hundred Midnights Read Free Page B

frequently acquired through the sport.
    Two more friends of Mel’s came with him to Stanford from Beverly Hills: J. Franklin “Frank” Mynderse and Winton “Whimp” Ralph Close. The trio were inseparable, and thefriendships garnered Mel a nickname from Whimp that would fit his entire life: Tony Tramp, “because he always wanted to go someplace.”
    In one citizenship class during his second semester at Stanford, Mel wrote a paper he titled “My Private Utopia.” This “harmony”-themed society seemed to draw from the same idealism that helped shape Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Mel’s utopian vision featured a heavily managed economy, treasured scientific and industrial innovation, and insisted that beauty be “embodied in factories as well as homes.” (In what must have been a nod to his stepfather’s seed business and his mother’s prizewinning yards, it even called for a home with a garden for everyone.)
    This vision prioritized travel as a societal value and inextricably linked the economy to environmental preservation. Mel, who had taken several childhood trips through the country’s young national park system, envisioned protecting nature as society’s paramount cultural goal. Film, dance, and fashion were necessary for happiness, Mel wrote, but “they would [lose] their appeal if natural beauty should suddenly vanish.”
    Toward the conclusion of the paper, Mel seemed to return from some kind of mental vacation as he acknowledged that “ambitions, greed, fear, and drudgery” were realities that had to be addressed. Still, he had presented a beautiful dream.
    Wrote his professor upon returning the assignment: “Don’t you ever come clear down, will you?”
    Though Mel easily made new friends at Stanford, he complained about the difficulty of fitting in with Stanford’s fraternities and “eating clubs.”
    â€œWell, I’ve started being left out,” he reported a month into his studies. “Mr. Wadsworth, bev. high, sent recommendationsto his fraternity here for all Beverly kids except Mel. I guess he didn’t mention me because I don’t hold my nose right. I am going to try out for the Stanford Daily staff tomorrow.”
    It was the next day that Mel began to find a place for himself. He joined fifty other “tryouts” vying for work at the Stanford Daily and made the cut as a reporter (though it was demanding and time-consuming work, especially alongside his water polo commitments). Around the time Mel tried out for the paper, a sophomore named Annalee Whitmore was a copy editor; she was a class ahead of Mel, and the pair rarely interacted.
    In 1936, when Melville Jacoby entered his twenties, his life permanently pivoted, beginning with a family crisis.
    At the beginning of the year, Elza and Manfred Meyberg were expecting their first child. But on the morning of January 20, Elza felt that something was wrong. Manfred rushed her across Los Angeles to Good Samaritan Hospital. Elza went into labor and gave birth to a daughter, Marilyn. But Marilyn never had a chance, and twelve hours after birth, she died. It was ten days before Elza’s birthday. She and Manfred never had another child.
    Elza, Manfred, and Mel were understandably devastated, but as summer approached Mel had exciting news: he had won a scholarship to study abroad, through a new student exchange program between the United States and China. Instead of returning to Stanford the next school year (when he would have been appointed an Army second lieutenant through his ROTC work), Mel would continue his studies at Lingnan University, a missionary school in Canton (Guangzhou), a southern port city on the Pearl River (Xi Jiang) Delta.
    This student exchange program was part of the Pacific AreaExchange, which a Hawaiian-born student named Frank Wilson began after independently enrolling in Lingnan three years earlier.