Writer shared childhood experiences of his Indiana hometown, family in early columns
For information on Pyle’s 125th birthday events at the museum, click here.
It’s been 125 year’s since Ernie Pyle was born in an Indiana farmhouse on Aug. 3, 1900 — the farmhouse now comprises part of the Ernie Pyle WWII Museum in the writer’s hometown of Dana.
His Hoosier roots shaped Pyle. While traveling the country in the 1930s for Scripps-Howard, Pyle wrote his syndicated Hoosier Vagabond columns where he often recounted his boyhood memories.
“Pyle shared stories about himself and about the experiences and people that formed him. These columns provide virtually the only evidence we have about Pyle’s youth,” historian Owen Johnson wrote in his book “At home with Ernie Pyle.”
The future WWII correspondent would return to the subject of his childhood in his writing. In his book, Johnson noted that part of the reason Pyle wrote repeatedly about Indiana was that his parents and some friends still lived in Dana after he had left and it gave him an excuse and opportunity to visit.
“I’m pretty smart in making my bosses believe I have to come to Indiana a couple of times a year to get some certain story,” Pyle wrote.
Below is an excerpt from a 1935 column, “A story about a boy, some wild roses, a snake and a spanking.”
I have a horror of snakes that verges on the irrational. I’m not afraid of being killed by a snake. It isn’t that kind of fear. It’s a horrible, unnatural mania for getting away, and it is induced in equal quantities by a 6-inch garden snake and a 6-foot rattler.
I happened to think about snakes because, in 15,000 miles of driving this year, I had not seen a snake until I drove thru southern Minnesota. And there, in less than two hours, I counted 14 snakes on the road.
Ask my mother about snakes. She’ll tell you the snake story, probably. In all the years I have been away, she never fails to tell it over again when I am there on a visit.
I was a little fellow, maybe 4 or 5. My father was plowing at the far end of our farm, a half-mile from the house. I was walking along behind the plow, barefooted, in the fresh soft furrow.
He had just started the field, and was plowing near a weedy fence-row. Red, wild roses were growing there. I asked my father for his pocket-knife, so I could cut some of the roses to take back to the house.
He gave it to me, and went on plowing. I sat down in the grass and started cutting off the roses. Then it happened in a flash. A blue racer came looping thru the grass at me. I already had my horror of snakes at that tender age. It must have been born in me. I screamed, threw the knife away, and ran as fast as I could.
***
Then I remembered my father’s knife. I crept back over the plowed ground till I found it. He had heard me scream and had stopped. I gave him the knife, and started back to the house.
I approached the house from the west side. There was an old garden there, and it was all grown up in high weeds. I stopped on the far side, and shouted for my mother. She came out and asked what I wanted. I asked her to come and get me. She said for me to come on thru by myself. I couldn’t come.
She ordered me to come, and I began to cry. She told me if I didn’t stop crying, and didn’t come thru, she would whip me. I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t come thru. So she came and got me. And she whipped me. One of the two times, I believe, that she ever whipped me.
That evening, when my father came in from the fields, she told him about the crazy boy who wouldn’t walk thru the weeds and had to be whipped. And then my father told her about the roses, and the knife, and the snake. It was the roses, I think, that hurt her so. My mother cried for a long time that night after we went to bed.
***
It has been more than 30 years since that happened, but to this day when I go home my mother sooner or later will say, “Do you remember the time I whipped you because you wouldn’t walk thru the weeds?” And then she will tell me the story, just as I have told it here, and along toward the end she always manages to get the hem of her apron up around her eyes, just in case she should need it, which she always does.
Above: Twelve-year-old Pyle poses with his Aunt Mary’s horse, Old Kate
