Famed Hall of Fame sports
writer Bob Hammel was recently walking along 7th street, going from
the parking lot to the IU Union Building for a meeting. He was behind some students
as they passed Ernie Pyle Hall. One of them asked another, “Who was Ernie Pyle,
anyway?” The answer: “I don’t know, but he must have given a lot of money to
get a building named after him.”
No, he didn’t give a lot
of money. He didn’t even make very much of it. But Friday, August 3, was the
inaugural Ernie Pyle Day, a new national holiday. Declared so by Congress,
since they have nothing better to do. Or at least nothing else that they can
agree on.
Banks were not closed. Nor
post offices. Nor anything else. No celebrations of the day, outside of the
Media School building at IU, housed in what was the library back when I was a
student here, the Media School incorporating what little is left of the
Journalism Department that straggled over from Ernie Pyle Hall, with a statue
of Ernie out in front, sitting at his typewriter, pecking out one of his
columns. But it was a special day for me, because Ernie Pyle was my first role
model.
I can’t remember now if I
wanted to be a newspaper reporter first and then took Ernie as my newspaper
reporter model, or if Ernie came first. Either way, I wanted to be the next
Ernie Pyle.
Ernie was the first and
foremost of the “embedded” reporters, slogging along with the foot soldiers in
WWII, suffering just as they did, although he was old enough to be the father
of most of them—in his 40s—and facing the same dangers. His columns about the
war, told from the standpoint of those dogfaces in the front lines, were simply
but elegantly written, and the soldiers said that Ernie told it like it really
was.
That was important to me,
because my beloved uncles were among those soldiers. My father was too old and
too blind to be drafted. Well, not according to some. The draft boards became
desperate enough to fill their quotas that Daddy was called in for a physical,
even though he was 35 years old and the father of two and blind. [1]
His brothers were good
draft material, though. Bob and Randall and Mike were in the army, Randall in
heavy fighting in the South Pacific, where he got malaria that continued to
plague him off and on through the rest of his life, and Mike in the worst of
the fighting up through Anzio in Europe. Mother’s brothers were on the watery
side of the military, Jesse in the navy [pilot] and Johnny in the marines.
These were the men Ernie Pyle wrote about, the kinds of men I wanted to write
about one day.
The war was almost over
when Ernie was killed by a sniper, on the island of Ie, just west of Okinawa.
Ernie became an icon of
his times. He was even featured, along with Bill Mauldin, the WWII cartoonist,
in Peanuts cartoon strips, whenever Snoopy took on his military alter ego, the
WWI flying ace. Now Ernie is remembered only in his home state, especially in
his alma mater, Indiana University, where he was the first person to receive an
honorary doctorate, remarked on by young people only as one who must have given
money to get a building named after him. It’s not their fault, of course. They
live in an age when buildings of all sorts are named only for those who bought
the honor rather than suffering and dying for it.
I did go to IU, to the Ernie Pyle School of
Journalism. I even had a class in Ernie Pyle hall. Stuff happened that caused
me to detour from the newspaper route. But I became a different sort of war
reporter. I learned from Ernie the importance of being embedded with the real
people, and telling well the stories of ordinary folk as they did their best
under difficult conditions, like that one about the man who was going down to
Jericho when he saw a guy who had been wounded and…
Happy holiday, Ernie.
JRMcF
johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com
1] Daddy was blind in one
eye and almost so in the other, but one doctor tried to fix up a tunnel for him
to look through to shut out peripheral light so he could pass the exam. It
didn’t work.
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