TELLING THE TRUTH WITH ERNIE PYLE-[R, 4-2-20]

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

I suppose I had never even read one of his columns when I decided I wanted to be the next Ernie Pyle. I’m not quite sure when that was, probably along about 8^th grade.

Our 8^th grade was part of high school, not for pedagogical reasons, but because that’s the way the space worked out, for dividing 12 classes between two buildings. It was great for me. I got to be on the school newspaper staff for a year while my sister, Mary V, was still on the staff, before she graduated.

We were readers, Mary V and me, especially newspapers. We liked books, too, but they were harder to come by, especially in the summer, when the library was five miles away in town, and we had no car. But the Evansville Courier came each day to our rural mail box. It was yesterday’s paper, and thus yesterday’s news, but it was new to us.

That was about the time “The Big Story” appeared on radio, too. Each week it featured the tale of how some reporter got his big story. They were exciting. I figured there couldn’t be a better life than reading stories and getting them and writing them. The way Ernie Pyle did.

My uncles had been in WWII. [My father was too old, and blind, although they did try to draft him once by putting a special tunnel with controlled light on his eyes. Even that didn’t work, though.] I loved my uncles. Three were in the army, one in the navy, and one a marine. They were in both the South Pacific and Europe. They always said that Ernie Pyle told the truth about The War better than anybody else. I wanted to tell the truth about people like my beloved uncles.

So I went to the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism at IU. After a year, I got shanghaied into the ministry, so I never got around to being Ernie, but I never lost my appreciation for him.

When I was around forty, Ernie’s home town of Dana, IN made his boyhood home into a memorial. We lived only a few hours away. There weren’t many other folks, and I think my teenage daughters wondered why we were spending a pretty Saturday this way, but I had a great time.

Ernie and I are both IU guys, and I suppose that is one reason why his story has continued to appeal to me over the years. We were both farm boys who were desperate to get off the farm and go to IU so we could tell stories.

There is a wartime statue of Ernie, sitting at his typewriter, in front of Franklin Hall, which was the main library when I was a student, but is now the IU Media School, of which Journalism is just a part now. Ernie was the editor of The Indiana Daily Student when he was in school, and the first person ever to receive an honorary doctorate from his university.

All this comes up now because I have been re-reading books that are already in the house, since the library and book stores are closed because of the corona virus. One of those is edited by Owen Johnson, himself a retired prof at the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism. It’s a collection of Ernie’s columns before the War, his columns about his home in Indiana, At Home With Ernie Pyle.

Ernie is still one of my heroes. It seems that almost all of my heroes are people who tell the truth.

John Robert McFarland