Dear Friends:
Jim Halsema died peacefully following another stroke in the early hours of February 18th. His great joy in life was sharing his wide ranging interests with his many friends. We will all miss him deeply. A memorial service in planned for the coming weeks.

With warmest regards, Alice

James Julius Halsema, Philippine scholar, war correspondent and US Foreign Service officer died on February 18, 2005 in Glenmoore, Pennsylvania his home base of 20 years. Born on January 1, 1919, in Warren, Ohio, Jim moved to Baguio in the mountains north of Luzon in the Philippines at five months old, where he remained through graduation from the Brent School in 1936. He attended Duke University, graduating in1940 with honors in history. He returned to the Philippines to become the editor of the weekly Baguio Supplement to the Manila Daily Bulletin. Captured in the Japanese invasion of 1941, he spent the next 37 months in internment camps in Baguio and Bilibid Prison, Manila before liberation in 1945.

Following the war, he covered news in Indonesia and the Philippines for the Associated Press. His interview with guerilla leader Luis Taric created a sensation. In 1949, he received an M.A. in International Relations at what is now the Nitze School of Johns Hopkins University. During his thirty year career with the US Foreign Service, he served in Singapore, Manila, Bangkok, Cairo, Santiago de Chile and Washington DC and attended the National War College.

In retirement, he authored Bishop Brent’s Baguio School (1988), a biography of his father, E.J. Halsema: Colonial Engineer (1991) and numerous articles on the American era in the Philippines published in the Bulletin of the American Historical Collection. He was active consultant on Philippine American affairs from the Colonial era onward.