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About Charles Mock

Charles G. Mock

About the author: Charles Gordon Mock (1908 – 1964) an American originally imprisoned together with other Allied civilians in the University of Santo Tomas, kept a journal of his time in the prisoner of war camp in Los Baños, Laguna.

The introduction by Rev. Charles W. Mock follows:

Charles Gordon Mock was born in Harper Kansas on October 17, 1908. His father, Charles Whiting Mock of Boston MA was a Harvard trained dentist, who was later ordained a Congregationalist minister. His mother, Clara Guild Carter was a native of Cape Cod MA, (Falmouth) and it was there that the family returned to live soon after Charles’s birth, and where he spent his childhood and adolescence. He graduated from Lawrence Academy in Falmouth in 1926 and enrolled as a freshman at Harvard that Fall.

After graduating from Harvard in 1930 with a BA in history, Charles moved to New York with his first wife and there began working as supervisor of Liberty Mutual’s New York office. He was divorced from his wife in 1940 and in the summer of 1941 was sent by Liberty Mutual to the Philippines to supervise their work with the US Navy at Sangley Point, Cavite. Later that year he met Charmian Boomer, the daughter of a long-time American resident and they became engaged shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

After the Japanese occupation of the Philippines Charles along with his fiancée and her family was interned at first at Sto. Tomás and subsequently in Los Baños where they were married in April of 1944.

After liberation the couple was repatriated to Boston where their fist son was born. By 1947 they were on their way back to Manila with the intention of settling there permanently. It was there that their second son was born.

However the outbreak of the Korean War prompted them to leave the Philippines, after a brief sojourn in Plymouth MA, during which their third and last son was born, Charles was assigned by Liberty Mutual to head their office in Caracas, Venezuela, where the family settled in 1951. In 1956 Charles left Liberty Mutual and after stints with several insurance companies was hired to head up the Caracas office of ROLIBEC, a New York based company that handled Rockefeller interests in South America. He was still in that position when he died suddenly on July 22, 1964.

About the diary: The Diary of Charles Mock is from “Charles Mock’s Los Baños Journal: May 14, 1943-Oct. 6, 1943″, which is Part 8 of “Childhood, Love and War in Manila: A Memoir” by Charmian Boomer Mock, his wife. Her husband’s prisoner of war camp journal was included in her serialized memoirs, published in The Bulletin of the American Historical Collection.

The serialized portion containing the prison camp journal on this site was originally published in Volume XXX Number 4 (121) October-December 2002 of The Bulletin of the American Historical Collection (for more information visit the American Historical Collection’s website) and is published here with the permission of the author´s eldest son, Rev. Charles Mock,  of Brent School, Manila.

 

Allied prisoner of war and civilian internee camp site in Los Baños, from Mansell.com
Allied prisoner of war and civilian internee camp site in Los Baños, from Mansell.com

 

 

2 thoughts on “About Charles Mock”

  1. Thanks for the wonderful presentation of Charles Mock’s diaries from Los Baños. I only wished to correct the final detail of your intro: The permission to publish is granted by the author´s eldest son, Rev. Charles Mock, and not his grandson.
    Keep up the good work!

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