By Gary Topping–
(Editor’s note: a previous version of this story appeared in the Intermountain Catholic.)
When a young man announces his intention to enter the priesthood, we are filled with admiration for his willingness to give up certain things: sexual intimacy, a family, and perhaps even wealth and fame. If he is an only child, we admire his parents for their willingness to forego grandchildren. We often forget, though, that there can be other collateral consequences. Take the case of Bill McDougall.
On the eve of World War II, William H. McDougall, Jr. was an ambitious young reporter who had developed a big reputation for his work on the Salt Lake Telegram, an evening newspaper that had been created to compete with the Deseret News. Always wanting to be in on the action, he noticed Japan’s increasing militarization and aggression and realized that the Far East was going to be an important theater in the impending conflict, so he quit his job and sailed to Japan, where he found work on the Japan Times, an English-language newspaper in Tokyo. His skills eventually came to the attention of United Press International, which hired him for their Shanghai bureau.
One of the stories McDougall covered was the launching of a new handmade sailboat, the Cynjo by a wealthy young American businessman in Shanghai, Edward Bell. Probably still in his twenties at the time, Bell proposed to sail the boat to Hawaii. It was a newsworthy event. But what caught McDougall’s eye more than the beautiful boat was the captain’s beautiful sister. He asked her for a date. She refused. He asked again. She refused again. He kept asking until it became apparent that he was not going to let up, so she accepted in order to stop his pestering. A sailboat was launched, and so was a love affair. During dinner, drinks and dancing, she perceived that “he wasn’t much to look at,” but she was transfixed by his conversation. And he was a good dancer. Eventually the two became, at least informally, engaged.
Her name was Mary Bell. The eldest child of eleven, and the only girl, her family had lived in Shanghai for two generations and had amassed a very substantial fortune running a lumber business. When her father died young, she forfeited an opportunity to go to college in order to take over the business, which she carried on very successfully. And she was a famous beauty: once, on an around the world trip, she visited a Hollywood movie set and was offered a part in the picture. She loved dressing like a movie star and posing for glamorous photographs.
When the Japanese invaded China, McDougall, the Bells and the many other foreign nationals in that great commercial city Shanghai continued their lives with little disruption. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the American declaration of war, the Americans were in dire jeopardy of capture and imprisonment, which is exactly what happened to the Bells. They were arrested in their home, allowed only two suitcases for their possessions, and interned in a prison camp at Chapei for seven months. Their captors promised to treat them well since they were civilians, and generally they kept to their promise, except that food was very scarce. In 1943 they left China on a Swedish ship, the Grimsholm, and sailed to San Francisco. They had lost their wealth, their homes, and their business, but they had their lives and they had each other.
McDougall fared much worse. Returning to America would mean that he would miss what he knew were going to be great opportunities for reporting the war. After bidding Mary farewell on Christmas night, 1941, he escaped into the unoccupied part of China, then to India. Mary Bell, who spoke a number of Chinese dialects, had been able to put him in touch with people who could facilitate his escape. From Calcutta, his reporter’s instinct led him to the foolhardy decision to journey to Indonesia to cover the Japanese invasion of Java. Although he got out of Java on a Dutch ship, it was too late: the next morning Japanese bombers caught the ship and sank it. McDougall floated on the ocean for several hours, then was miraculously rescued by a life boat. Although the boat reached Sumatra, the occupants were soon captured and spent the next three years in a succession of ever more brutal Japanese prison camps.
Anyone in such perilous circumstances would reach down to whatever spiritual resources they might have. For McDougall, it was Catholicism. He had grown up across the street from Our Lady of Lourdes parish in Salt Lake City, where his mother was a fixture in the Altar Society, but his youthful life had been better known for partying than piety. Now, though, while floating in the ocean, he promised the Mother of God that if he survived, he would “do something for Christ.” In the prison camps, he began attending daily Mass, and although he never recorded it in his diary, he apparently began considering becoming a priest.
(Part 2 will appear tomorrow.)
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
