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I've got 80 years of stories, what decade do you want to talk about?

I was hit by a hand grenade on June 12, 1945. I remember it well. After I got better, I trained to invade Kyushu but the war ended so I was sent to the Manchurian border in what were called “Liberty Ships.” We called them “Floating Coffins.” I served in Manchuria for almost a year.

If you want to escape a Manchurian snake pit, pile whatever's handy up high to reach a window, crawl out and jump aboard the nearest train. That's what we did when the Russians arrested us after the war in 1945 for being on the wrong side of the border.

I came here in 1949 on a Norwegian steamer from
San Francisco. I was interested in China and got a scholar-ship to study in Peking, but the state wouldn't allow it.

If you look at the clock tower in Kowloon really closely you can still see bullet holes.

Johnson Tu was a Chinese who worked with the US Army against the Japanese. One day I told him to come see me anytime, and the next day he was at my house. He came with nothing, so I gave him a shirt and shoes and we set up a system to monitor the radio from China. Eventually the Taiwan government snatched him up. By the time he left me he had a bike and a bag of clothes. I went to Taiwan years later and it turned out he was the head of the foreign tax bureau.

My wife Pacita Francisco was a Philippine movie star. It took a year to court her, and we've been married 49 years.

Most people are surprised to hear the first official Philippine flag was made right here in Causeway Bay.

There was this guy known only as O'Brien, a fellow without a country who rode the ferry between Macau and Hong Kong for eight months since neither would let him get off. Our reports caught the attention of the UN, who got him a place in Brazil where he became a carpenter.

There used to be a lot of US sailors coming to Hong Kong for a little R'n'R. Some places put up signs that said "US soldiers will be promptly executed."

Mao's No. 2 man, Chou Enlai, was en route from China in 1952 and at the last minute Nehru asked him to come to India, so he switched planes in Hong Kong. Peking warned the Hong Kong Government there was a plot to put a bomb on his plane. As acting bureau chief for the Associated Press, I got the tip. I was at the airport watching them sweep the plane, but they missed it. A cleaner managed to put a bomb in the wheel well and it killed a lot of his people. The guy who planted it fled to a hero's welcome in Taiwan.

I was at the old airport after Chinese fighter jets shot down a Cathay Pacific plane. They said it was an accident but I checked the bodies and they were all shot up, so I broke the news to the world. The US scrambled fighter jets and things got pretty tense.

People forget that Ho Chi Minh used to work here as a dishwasher while hiding from the French police. He was a master of disguise, and once he traveled undercover as a Buddhist monk. He was caught but the Chief Executive's wife got him a lawyer and he got out over Lunar New Year, took a Japanese ship to Canton from the top of Lantau Island, and headed straight to Moscow.

Ahead of the handover, [then British prime minister] Maggie Thatcher asked me to go to the UN to make sure the press got the story right. At the time I was working for the Government Information Service. Thatcher was a victim of history. Hong Kong couldn't defend itself against China; she had to give it back. She was very friendly, and afterwards she made me an honorary British Consul even though I am an American.

Try a Gunner if you're thirsty. The British developed it for thirst in the tropics. It's ginger ale, ginger beer and Angostura Bitters. There's nothing worse than being thirsty.

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