Marine archivist tracks down origin of unusual garment
\nTrading Markets (press release),\u00c2\u00a0CA
\nBY JEFF BRANSCOME<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Date published: 3\/26\/2014
\nBY JEFF BRANSCOME<\/p>\n
The mystery behind a 69-year-old black smoking jacket, embroidered with colorful dragons, a man’s initials and “4th Marines,” was solved at the Quantico Marine Corps Base.<\/p>\n
Mike Miller, Quantico’s director of Marine Corps archives, spent a couple weeks in February reviewing muster rolls and more than 1,000 pages of old Marine magazines to uncover the man behind the jacket.<\/p>\n
The cast and crew of the “History Detectives” TV show on PBS visited Quantico Monday to tape part of an episode about the jacket. A producer contacted Miller in January and asked him to find the coat’s first owner.<\/p>\n
The show got the wool coat from a California man, whose son bought it for him on eBay.<\/p>\n
After some serious sleuthing, Miller determined that the jacket had originally belonged to the late Michael W. Dowhan, who was stationed in Shanghai, China, from 1937 until 1940.<\/p>\n
The 4th Marines, also known as the China Marines, spent almost 15 years at an international settlement in Shanghai during the Chinese Revolution and the second Sino-Japanese War.<\/p>\n
Dowhan returned to America in 1940, a year before the 4th Marines were transferred to the Philippines.<\/p>\n
On Monday, “History Detectives” host Gwendolyn Wright talked with Miller about Dowhan and life in Shanghai. Miller has written a book called “From Shanghai to Corregidor: Marines in Defense of the Philippines.”<\/p>\n
It’s unclear how Dowhan’s jacket, listed as an Asian antiquity, ended up on the online auction site. But during his research for “History Detectives,” Miller found that Dowhan had once placed second in a “shoe race.”<\/p>\n
It’s an activity in which each competitor puts one of his shoes into a pile. The men, wearing just one shoe, then race to the pile, find their footwear and cross the finish line.<\/p>\n
He also learned that the Marine placed first in a basketball free-throw competition in the late ’30s, making 60 out of 75 shots.<\/p>\n
“He wasn’t a Medal of Honor winner or a general,” Miller said in an interview yesterday. “He was just an average Marine private and his experiences over there really personify the jacket.”<\/p>\n
Shooting for the episode lasted six hours, with multiple takes of the same scene.<\/p>\n
Some of the footage showed Miller and Wright flipping through old magazines, supposedly searching for evidence of the jacket’s owner. Unbeknownst to viewers, they had already marked the pages with Dowhan.<\/p>\n
Before Monday, Miller had seen only pictures of the jacket, which looks brand-new.<\/p>\n
“It really made history come alive because you flip through pages and all of those things, but here is something real,” he said.<\/p>\n
Jeff Branscome: 540\/374-5402
\nEmail: jbranscome@freelancestar.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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