Ruth Witmer

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.

JUNE

• Flag Day Celebration  •  10 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday, June 14  •  Free

Join us for a celebration of our country’s Flag Day at the museum. There will be a flag program and painting from 10 a.m.-noon and 2-4 p.m. Sections of the museum’s fence will be available to paint and take home with you. There will be an ice cream social fro noon-2 p.m.

JULY

• Jeep Show  •  10 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday, July 12  •  $20 pre-registration, $25 day of registration

The Ernie Pyle WWII Museum is sponsoring its inaugural Jeep Show on Saturday, July 12, 10 AM-3 PM EST in Dana, Indiana. There will be military and Jeep categories for the vehicles, prizes, dash plaques for the first 100 Jeeps. Vendor show and food available. Veterans recognized at 11 a.m.; awards at 2:30 p.m. Proceeds benefit the museum.  Register here.

AUGUST

• The Ernie Pyle Fireman’s Festival is Aug. 8-9. annual event features a parade, music, games, contests, food and more. For a schedule and more information, click here.

• Ernie Pyle 125th birthday celebrations. Join us for a week of events to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Pyle’s birth in 1900. Festivities include a party with cake and ice cream a nd a screening of the classic 1945 film, “The Story of G.I. Joe” starring Burgess Meredith as Pyle. For more information and a complete schedule, click here.

Editor’s note: Ernie Pyle’s last, unfinished column was found in his pocket on April 18, 1945, the day he was killed on the island of Ie Shima.

And so it is over. The catastrophe on one side of the world has run its course. The day that it had so long seemed would never come has come at last. I suppose our emotions here in the Pacific are the same as they were among Allies all over the world. First a shouting of the good news with such joyous surprise that you would think the shouter himself had brought it about.

And then an unspoken sense of gigantic relief-and then a hope that the collapse in Europe would hasten the end in the Pacific.

It has been seven months since I heard my last shot in the European War. Now I am as far away from it as it is possible to get on this globe.

This is written on a little ship lying off the coast of the Island of Okinawa, just south of Japan, on the other side of the world from Ardennes.

But my heart is still in Europe, and that’s why I am writing this column.

It is to the boys who were my friends for so long. My one regret of the war is that I was not with them when it ended.

For the companionship of two and a half years of death and misery is a spouse that tolerates no divorce. Such companionship finally becomes a part of one’s soul, and it cannot be obliterated.

True, I am with American boys in the other war not yet ended, but I am old-fashioned and my sentiment runs to old things.

To me the European War is old, and the Pacific War is new.

Last summer I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits it is so easy for us to forget the dead. Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.

But there are so many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.

Dead men by mass production-in one country after another-month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.

Those are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went way and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.

We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.

We hope above all things that Japan won’t make the same stubborn mistake that Germany did. You must credit Germany for her courage in adversity, but you can doubt her good common sense in fighting blindly on long after there was any doubt whatever about the outcome.

• Read President Harry Truman’s announcement to the country of Ernie Pyle’s death in 1945 here.

       After Ernie Pyle was killed on the island of Ie Shima on April 18, 1945, President Harry Truman announced the news to the nation in the statement below. Pyle’s death came a week after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. 

      The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle. No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. More than any other man he became the spokesman of the ordinary American in arms doing so many extraordinary things. It was his genius that the mass and power of our military and naval forces never obscured the men who made them.

      He wrote about a people in arms as people still, but a people moving in a determination which did not need pretensions as a part of power.

      Nobody knows how many individuals in our forces and at home he helped with his writings. But all Americans understand now how wisely, how warmheartedly, how honestly he served his country and his profession. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen.

— Harry S. Truman

 • Listen to Ernie Pyle’s last column here.

• Listen to the museum podcast: The 80th anniversary of Ernie Pyle’s death here.

• View the 46-minute Story of Ernie Pyle here