State of the Art Their War Columbia Journalism Review Ernie Pyle

The Road Book

Before Ernie Pyle went to war, he wrote most America

In the leap of 1932, Ernie Pyle took over every bit the new managing editor of The Washington Daily News, an afternoon tabloid whose rackety little newsroom occupied the 3rd flooring of a narrow building a few blocks from the White House. His desk was about the urban center editor and the telegraph editor, and among the headaches he inherited was to referee their competing demands for space in the paper. He was thirty-ane years old, and it was a task he thought he was supposed to want: a top editor for a big paper in the newspaper chain he had joined soon after leaving Indiana Academy, at the start of what promised to be a bright presidential campaign between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. He was miserable.

Indoors was non his natural habitat. Pyle preferred to be out chasing stories, not inside shaping them, but he was such a swift, deft hand with copy—a borderline poet who could make lesser writers sing in voices they didn't know they had—that his bosses at Scripps-Howard kept calling him off the hunt and lashing him to a desk. His frustration in his latest desk task only grew as he watched his reporters come back to the newsroom without the kinds of stories he wanted to put in the paper.

"Keep your eyes open," he wrote in a memo to his staff. "In that location are neat stories floating effectually your beats every day that you either don't see or don't carp to practice annihilation most when yous do see them."

He continued encouraging them in a tone that was almost wistful, as if he were addressing himself. "Yous can hardly walk downwards the street, or conversation with a agglomeration of friends, without running into the germ of something that may turn upwards an interesting story if you're on the lookout for it. News doesn't have to be important, just information technology has to exist interesting. You can't find interesting things, if you're non interested."

Pyle himself was about as interested every bit a man could exist, and he knew those interesting stories were out there because he had proved skilful at getting them himself. To become managing editor he had left a job he loved equally an aviation columnist, which was, in the era of Lindbergh and Earhart, something like existence a technology columnist at the dawn of Jobs and Gates. He regretted that determination now.

"Routine and tedious," is how he described the managing editor's task in a letter to a friend. "It is difficult and fatiguing piece of work, and I become no take chances to practice any writing."

Then, in Dec of 1934, a bit of luck came his way: a lingering dose of influenza. Pyle weighed 108 pounds ("pocket-size, frail … bashful and unimpressive," as his first editor described him), and when sickness got in him information technology tended to stay awhile. Caput someplace warm, the medico told him. Pyle loved to drive—not fast, merely far—so he and his wife, Jerry, pointed their new Ford coupé south.

They had fallen in love with the Southwest on an earlier journey, only this time as they passed through Arizona, New Mexico, even California, all they institute was an unsettling dampness. They gave upward their search for the sun in Los Angeles, where, in the rain, they loaded themselves and their car onto a deadening freighter for a three-calendar week cruise that eased them through the torrid zone before delivering them dorsum to the E Coast. There was a hole in the paper when they returned: the spot reserved for the syndicated columnist Heywood Broun, who was on holiday. Pyle filled it himself with an eleven-part serial of the kind he had e'er dreamed of writing.

"Y'all know, my thought of a good newspaper task would be just to travel effectually wherever you'd desire without whatsoever assignment except to write a story every day about what you'd seen," he had told a friend soon after first joining the News. Now, a decade later, that was just what he had done.

Readers loved the stories, and his bosses did, too. The editor in chief of Scripps-Howard described them as having "a Mark Twain quality that knocked my eye out." Pyle soon had a new job, and a $v enhance: $100 for half-dozen columns a week, about a chiliad words apiece, mailed dorsum to Washington from wherever he happened to state and find something interesting.

"I will become where I please and write what I please," he wrote dorsum to the friend to whom he had earlier complained about his task. "Information technology's but the kind of job I've ever wanted and I hope I tin make a become of it."

So on August 2, 1935, the day before his xxx-fifth altogether, he and Jerry started driving due north in their coupé, spending $3.lx for twenty gallons of gas, $2.20 for dejeuner and dinner, and $2 for a room near Doylestown, Pennsylvania—the first day of five years during which he crossed the continent xx times, touched downward at least 3 times in every state, and visited every state only 2 in the Western Hemisphere. "We accept worn out ii cars, v sets of tires, 3 typewriters, and pretty soon I'grand going to have to accept a new pair of shoes," he subsequently wrote. He filed something similar 2.5 1000000 words.

In 1947—after the war that brought Pyle fame, adulation, and death—his editor, friend, and fellow Hoosier, Lee Yard. Miller, culled and stitched those columns into Domicile Country, a posthumous contribution to a familiar and persistent genre of American nonfiction: the road book. Home Country was besides the fulfillment of a wish that Pyle, when he uttered it, didn't know would exist among his last.

"I hope that someday yous people volition publish the book of mine that I like best myself," he told his publishers earlier leaving for the Pacific theater in 1945—a trip that ended when, terminally curious, he stuck his caput up too soon from the roadside ditch into which he and his companions had leaped from their Jeep to seek embrace from a Japanese machine gunner. "That'southward the book with all the stuff I wrote before the war, the volume about my own country. Virtually dwelling. I think that's the best writing I've ever done."

Information technology wasn't, merely and then how could it be? Equally engaging as Pyle is virtually his tour through Monument Valley, it inevitably pales when compared to his walk along the beach at Normandy. But Pyle'southward peacetime dispatches were, as Orville Prescott wrote in his review of Domicile Country for The New York Times, "more than truly an authentic contribution to Americana" than whatever of the other star columnists of the era. "And because Ernie Pyle was a good reporter and an extraordinarily attractive personality all his columns were readable, many of them were thoroughly interesting and quite a few were delightful."

Delightful plenty that, in 1989, when I took my own journey across America for my ain route book, Home Land was among the scattering of books I brought along for the ride in my 1980 Chevy Commendation. I read information technology then to measure out how the country had changed since Pyle was on the road. When I read information technology again recently, I saw that it was a measure of something else now, too—of how much journalism has changed since I was on the road.

Because of the way it was cobbled together from Pyle'southward daily columns, Home Country is, equally the Times review noted, "necessarily choppy, scrappy and fragmentary." It does not have the kind of narrative engine that drives route books similar Travels With Charley or Blue Highways—a single, purposeful journeying in quest of a big idea, incrementally accumulating and dispensing wisdom forth the route. What it does have is something it shares with Pyle'south far better-known collection of war columns, Brave Men: it has an index.

My journey for my book was largely done in the dark—chronicling the Americans who went to work each night while the rest of the land slept—and Pyle'south index was a useful torch. It permit me quickly observe if he had been where I was going, and he usually had: Boston, St. petersburg, Laredo, Seattle, and plenty of other places almost which he always had something interesting to say.

But the alphabetize is also useful for the way information technology illuminates Pyle'southward notion of what a reporter'southward chore is. The index consists entirely of the names of people and places; nothing but homo beings you lot could buttonhole with questions, or cities, towns, and crossroads where you might try to discover a medium-boiled egg, crisp salary, and some dry toast, his preferred breakfast. No entry for "Grit Bowl" or "Low" or "New Bargain" or "Civilian Conservation Corps," although he wrote well-nigh all of those things. A few of the names are famous (Walt Disney, Gene Autry, George Washington Carver), but nearly belong to people whose 1 plow in the national spotlight came when Ernie Pyle happened to bump into them.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is in the index, too, but when you plow to page 56, y'all find no commentary upon his policies, only a tenderly observed account of the way he maneuvered himself out of his touring motorcar at his hotel in Rapid Urban center, South Dakota:

The President put both easily on i leg, and pushed downward, locking the jointed steel brace at his knee. He slowly did the same with the other leg. Then he put his hands on the side of the car, and with his arms lifted his body out and up and onto his legs. He straightened upwardly. I accept never seen a man and so straight. And at that moment the tenseness bankrupt, and the crowd applauded. The President's dorsum was to the crowd, and he did not expect around. It was brief and restrained applause….Information technology was as though they were maxim with their hands, "We know we shouldn't, but we've got to."

Far more than space in Home State is allotted to the shepherds, hat-bank check girls, tugboat captains, crab fishermen, silver miners, moonshiners, revenuers, soda jerks, agate hunters, abalone divers, sharpshooters, and Decease Valley cave-dwellers whom Pyle chatted up in the like shooting fish in a barrel, unassuming way that led one of them to tell him, "Why, I experience like I'd known you all my life." He didn't recall celebrities had cornered the market place on interesting lives. "Every time I go to a night social club I waste as well much of the evening downwards in the men's section trying to detect out from the whisk-broom boy how much he makes in tips," he wrote when he was in Los Angeles and itching to get out.

Pyle was much happier in a leper colony in Hawaii, or above the Arctic Circle in Fort Yukon, Alaska, with Maud Berglund, her iii daughters, and the xx-two dogs they used to run a trapline from their one-room log cabin. "11 months of the year they did not see a living soul," he wrote. "They lived alone among snow and wolves and moose and mountains." He was peculiarly fond of prospectors—Josie Pearl, in her tar-paper shack in the desert thirty-5 miles outside Winnemucca, Nevada, is a especially memorable one—perhaps because their merchandise so virtually resembled his own: hunting for shiny bits of light in a world so frequently dimmed past shadows.

Pyle did much of his prospecting in the newsrooms of local papers, picking up tips on where the adept stories were waiting in each new boondocks he visited. He carried in his automobile, along with his carefully annotated AAA Hotel Directory, a wooden box in which he filed leads, contacts, clippings—the raw cloth for future columns. His editors occasionally put in requests. "I don't like that idea," he said to a proffer that he take a await at the touch of government relief efforts in one small metropolis. "It sounds too important!" Merely he did have a await, and the resulting series was prepare in North Platte, Nebraska. He wrote another series, nearly the drought in the upper plains, that was good enough for Scripps-Howard to nominate for a Pulitzer. (Information technology didn't win; the war is what finally earned one for him.)

Pyle traveled with one suit, iii neckties, a supply of ten-cent white cotton fiber socks, and a Borsalino felt hat that he finally lost on the ready of a Joan Crawford movie, one more reason to hightail it out of LA. He would report for a few days, collecting material for several columns or more than, so hole upwards in a hotel room to write them in batches. He spent seven days in Monument Valley and the Four Corners region, and and then, sunburned and nursing a cold, spent the next week in an Arizona tourist cabin writing nearly it: twenty yard words, enough for three weeks of columns.

The job wore on him, a hole with his name on it that he had to fill every day, and he was irked by friends who regarded it instead equally a permanent vacation. "One story a day sounds as easy as falling off a log," he wrote in 1 cavalcade. "Try information technology sometime." He tried to build upwardly what he called his "cushion" of columns, the more weeks ahead the better, and to plump that cushion he sometimes told stories from his own life—sometimes serious (his columns nearly his mother's stroke brought her sympathetic get-well wishes from across the country), and sometimes not (i of his near popular pieces documented his struggle with a recalcitrant attachment on his trousers).

When Pyle wrote about himself information technology was almost begrudgingly, as if he couldn't quite figure why anyone would be interested in the life of a no-account bumbler like him. He was a "funny picayune hothouse man—no chest, no tan, no muscle" in 1 column, "scared to death at meeting strange people" in some other, and in still another he imagined what a historical marker might say in his birthplace of Dana, Indiana: "In his later years Mr. Pyle rose to a state of national mediocrity equally a letter of the alphabet-writer, a stayer in hotels, a talker to obscure people, and a commuter from town to town."

But that, of form, was why he was such a good reporter, and why the people he met found him so piece of cake to talk to: he knew it was the story that mattered, not him.

Pyle's star dims a bit each yr, every bit his original readers—those who eagerly turned to his cavalcade during the war to larn what life was like for the soldiers overseas—gradually dice off. So sparsely visited was the museum in his childhood home that, in 2009, the state of Indiana cut its funding and demoted information technology from the ranks of state historic sites. His typewriter is now in the state museum in Indianapolis, and his habitation is open up by appointment only, tended by volunteers.

What too seems to have faded over the years is the journalistic genre Pyle was a main of: the "human-interest" story, as it was once then widely and quaintly known. Tethered just loosely—if at all—to the news, human-interest stories were based on the premise that humans were inherently interesting, and that other humans were interested in reading about them. Such stories remain a staple for metro columnists at daily newspapers, only theirs is a dwindling band. (A notable and enduring holdout is David Johnson at Idaho's Lewiston Tribune, who for a quarter-century at present has been opening the local phone book at random to find the subjects for his "Everyone Has a Story" column.) And CBS News recently resurrected the On the Road franchise once held by the late, and avowedly Pyle-esque, Charles Kuralt.

Only when the lives of non-newsmakers make information technology into the news these days, it tends to exist for reasons other than elementary human being interest. They are usually characters in a larger drama, illustrations of a bigger story—the family unit fighting foreclosure, the unemployed breadwinner looking for a job. The Cyberspace is dense with the minutiae of ordinary lives, from diary musings to elaborate video productions, just much of it is impenetrably private, and spread randomly across an unmapped wilderness. Fewer reporters with Pyle's kind of curiosity and empathy, or his regular forum, are artfully crafting all that minutiae into stories that, like his, speak to a wider audition. America has more twice as many people now as it did during his Dwelling State wanderings. Are their lives not worth the attention of professional person storytellers?

The traditional apprenticeship system of journalism tends to motility reporters steadily upward a ladder from small stories to bigger ones. Young reporters cover cops and courts, maybe try some features and sports, at a minor newspaper or station, learning how to get inside the lives of people unlikely to always draw the attention of a sleeky magazine or national network. Only equally they rise, they tend to exit those smaller stories behind; it's the big stories, after all, where the prizes await. What Pyle never forgot as he rose is that all stories are, at middle, small stories. All the all-time stories, no affair how big, are congenital effectually human beings faced with something tragic or joyous, epic or transcendent. And he remembered that when he parked his Ford and crossed the Atlantic into the biggest story of all.

The index of dauntless men, like the index of Habitation Country, is nothing but names and places: the servicemen Pyle interviewed, and the hometowns they left when they marched off to war. Enlisted men outnumber officers. Full general George Patton is non in the index. Helm Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas, is.

"I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Captain Waskow down," Pyle wrote in what might be my favorite sentence in all of journalism—an entire philosophy and methodology in xvi words.

Waskow was a visitor commander in the 36th Division, fighting in the mountains of Italian republic, and he was loved by his men in a mode that no one else would have e'er known had Pyle non been there to witness it. Pyle was with them before Waskow died, and he was with them when Waskow's body came down the mountain lashed to the back of a mule, and he was with them as they gently said their goodbyes. Information technology was Pyle'due south most famous column, taking upwardly the whole forepart page of The Washington Daily News, and providing a narrative frame for the movie Hollywood made nearly him, The Story of G. I. Joe.

For all his inconversable, homespun, shoe-gazing way, Pyle had some business firm ideas almost his trade. He was a stickler almost his copy: "I try to make information technology sound nigh like music," he in one case wrote to Lee G. Miller, complaining about injudicious editing. "And ofttimes the dropping of a give-and-take or the cutting of one sentence into two shorter ones destroys the whole rhythm of it." He had low regard for the reporters on the White House beat: "They're all so goddamned smart and know everything—only a bunch of super boys out looking downwards upon the country hicks." And he had what might exist chosen, although non by him, a credo: "to make people see what I come across."

You go there, and yous get the story—that's what he did in Fort Yukon, Alaska, and what he did in the mountains of Italy, and what he was doing when he died on Ie Shima. Yous don't pontificate or speculate, analyze or muse. You lot go there and you ask and you watch and you lot mind and then you lot tell what you learned. You bear witness to the world beyond your readers' globe. You accept them to the places and introduce them to the people they might otherwise never see.

Home Country was Pyle's boot camp. It was across those years of travel—years when, as he wrote, "I have no abode….America is my home"—that he sharpened his eye as a reporter and his vocalisation equally a writer; that he proved large audiences would read small stories almost ordinary people; that he came to know so well the country the soldiers he met later were fighting for. Overseas, in the war, he always asked those soldiers where they came from, and it was oft someplace he had in one case been.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than at present? Help u.s. by joining CJR today.

Kevin Coyne , an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, logged many fewer miles than Ernie Pyle when traveling across the country for his book, A Day in the Night of America.

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Source: https://www.cjr.org/second_read/the_road_book.php

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