This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Gene Jacobsen
1921-2007
Gene Jacobsen refused to die during the notorious Bataan Death March.
Instead, the young soldier survived a 42-month captivity and returned home - free of contempt for his Japanese captors - to become a prominent Utah educator and author.
More than a half-century after his World War II imprisonment, Jacobsen died Friday at his St. George home of a war-related kidney problem. He was 85.
He leaves behind the riveting personal history of his confinement in the Philippines and Japan, in which 70 percent of his fellow officers in the 20th Pursuit Squadron perished.
The account - which tells of his starvation, torture and ultimate forgiveness of the Japanese - earned him national recognition by the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge in 2005 and the respect of his peers.
"Gene was a powerful influence for compassion and understanding in our world," Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson said. "The stirring account of his experiences as a World War II prisoner reflects not only his heroism, but his incredible decency and grace as a human being."
Jacobsen returned from war in 1945 to marry his high school sweetheart, Barbara Perkins, who had served as a gunnery instructor in the U.S. Navy WAVES.
He began his career as the first director of Edith Bowen Laboratory School in Logan - coincidentally serving as administrator when Anderson attended grade-school there. He later served as a professor of educational administration at Utah State University.
But Jacobsen would stray far from the Beehive State. He would travel to Ethiopia to create an educational faculty at Haile Sellassie I University; to Singapore as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization expert for the country's Ministry of Education; and to Saudi Arabia as superintendent of the International School System in Dhahran.
The University of Utah later named him assistant dean of its Graduate School of Education and chairman of the Department of Educational Administration.
Yet Jacobsen remained a man who doted on his family and treated people of all colors and economic backgrounds with the same respect, according to his daughter and former Salt Lake Tribune columnist JoAnn Jacobsen-Wells.
"He was my hero," she said. "He taught me that we were put on earth to do one thing: to serve others and especially the less fortunate."
Jacobsen never shied from speaking about his imprisonment during World War II and ultimately published his memoirs in the book, We Refused to Die: My Time as a Prisoner of War in Bataan and Japan, 1942-1945.
He wrote of the 60-mile death march to a Japanese prison camp, in which thousands of U.S. troops were fatally shot, bayoneted or beaten. He wrote of soldiers digging their own graves, of prisoners working in coal mines without shoes and of protracted starvation and abuse.
Yet he also wrote of the day he forgave his captors - a moment that molded Jacobsen into a man who spoke ill of no one, his daughter said.
Funeral services are scheduled Wednesday at the Southgate LDS Ward chapel in St. George. Burial services will follow at 1 p.m. Thursday at the Murray City Cemetery.