By Deborah Larsen
John “Jack” Brown Austin Mason
John “Jack” Brown Austin Mason, known to his friends as Jack A. Mason, was born in Avon Township on January 20, 1917, the son of William P. and Nellie Hotham Mason. He attended Rochester High School and graduated with the class of 1936.
Jack enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in January 1940, nearly two years before the U.S. entered World War II. He was at Manila with the 4th Marine Regiment when the Philippine Islands surrendered to the Japanese forces in January 1942. Jack was captured and placed in a Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan. The camp at Cabanatuan was one of the largest prisons operated by Japanese forces and at times housed as many as 10,000 men. It was also rife with disease and lacked adequate food and medicine. During the time that Jack was a prisoner there, deaths at Cabanatuan sometimes numbered as high as 20 per day. Jack was stricken with dysentery in May 1942 and died of the disease in the prison camp infirmary on October 16, 1942.
Jack’s remains were originally interred at the prison camp but were recovered in 1946. His mother, Nellie Mason, requested that his remains be placed in a permanent American military cemetery, and he was then laid to rest at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines.
Rochester’s Jack A. Mason Post, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), was organized in 1944 and named in Jack’s memory.