Remembering great columnist Ernie Pyle

 

Bill Knight column for 4-22, 23 or 24, 2021

Annually, National Columnists' Day is April 18, which is also National Animal Crackers Day (appropriate, some might say) and National Lineman Appreciation Day (which I love, as the son of a power-company lineman).

Columnists decided on that date to honor Ernie Pyle, and this year I spent some of that day re-reading a Pyle essay I wrote for the encyclopedia “Forties in America” 10 years ago. With the Greatest Generation fading with time, Pyle’s story is worth re-telling, if in abbreviated form. After all, few recall even ideal members of the vocation.

(New York newspaperman and satirist Stanley Walker once wrote, “What makes a good newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages.  He is not only handsome, but he has the physical strength which enables him to perform great feats of energy. He can go for nights on end without sleep. He dresses well and talks with charm. Men admire him; women adore him; tycoons and statesmen are willing to share their secrets with him. He hates lies, meanness and sham but keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as his profession; whether it is a profession or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it. When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.”)

            Ernest Taylor Pyle was born in rural Dana, Ind., on Aug. 3, 1900. As a youngster he helped his tenant-farmer father and attended school until he enlisted in the Naval Reserve during World War I. The war ended before he shipped out, and he enrolled at Indiana University, where he studied journalism. He left in 1923 before graduating to be a La Porte (Ind.) Herald reporter, then moved to Washington to work as a reporter, then copy editor, for the Daily News.

In 1925, he wed Geraldine Siebolds to start what would be a rocky marriage. He worked at both the New York World and the New York Post before returning to the Washington Daily News in 1928. There, Pyle was a wire editor, aviation columnist and managing editor until 1935, when he became a roving reporter, writing six columns a week for Scripps-Howard, eventually published in hundreds of newspapers.

After World War II broke out, Pyle went to England in 1940 and covered the Battle of Britain and the war in Europe for about six months. He returned to the United States in mid-1941 but returned to Europe in June 1942 as a correspondent for United Features. Accompanying troops through North Africa, Italy, the D-Day invasion and the liberation of Paris, Pyle wrote columns featuring regular soldiers and everyday life and death.

Producing about 2.5 million words of simple, effective journalistic writing over a decade, Pyle became a craftsman of short nonfiction that took readers to people and places they hadn’t known – or thought much about.

Pyle’s coverage in more than 200 daily and 400 weekly newspapers for three years largely avoided stories about generals or armies, instead writing from the point of view of the common GI. He was so loyal to the troops that he lobbied Congress to enact extra “combat pay” for soldiers.

Pyle briefly returned home in 1944, the year he won a Pulitzer Prize, then in January 1945 he joined Allied forces in the Pacific, where he was killed by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shima, on April 18.

The aftermath of his death included posthumous honors, including a Medal of Merit from the Army, Navy and federal government, presented to his wife at a July screening of the film based on Pyle and his reporting, “The Story of G.I. Joe,” starring Burgess Meredith as Pyle and featuring Robert Mitchum. Not long after, Geraldine’s health deteriorated and she died of complications from influenza that November.

Pyle eventually was buried alongside Army and Navy dead in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Punchbowl Crater on the island of Oahu Hawaii.

Indiana has an Ernie Pyle State Historic Site, his Albuquerque home is now a library, and the Albuquerque Museum has a collection of who they call “America's Most Loved Reporter.”