Ruth Witmer

Tickets on sale now for dinner, show to benefit memorial park project

The Friends of Ernie Pyle are set to transport people back in time with WWII-era entertainment and dinner. Tickets are $10 per person for the dinner and $15 per person for the performance that follows. Ticket sales will raise funds for the FEP’s latest project — the Ernie Pyle and Veterans Memorial Park.

The event will take place at South Vermillion High School, 776 Wildcat Dr., in Clinton, Indiana. Dinner is 4:30-6:30 p.m., and the show begins at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 2.

Performers include students from both North and South Vermillion High Schools, professional musicians and more, said Becky Holbert, chair of the FEP operations committee and one of the event organizers.

“We’re thrilled to bring this USO-style show to the Wabash Valley to honor veterans and today’s military,” Holbert said. “It’s one more opportunity to share the legacy and writings of Ernie Pyle while showcasing local, regional and military talent.”

FEP is a charitable foundation that runs the Ernie Pyle WWII Museum in Dana, Indiana. The group is committed to honoring the legacy of the legendary WWII correspondent and the memory of those who served in our nation’s Armed Forces. FEP previously organized a USO-style show in 2018. That event raised more than $3,100 for the museum. Funds raised from this event will go toward the memorial park project including developing land adjacent to the museum to provide a gathering space for the community, performance stage, healing garden and more. The park will also feature an already commissioned bronze statue of Ernie Pyle created by Clinton sculptor Bill Wolfe.

Ben West, North Vermillion High School director of bands and choirs, said the audience can expect to enjoy an evening showcasing a variety of acts — musical and otherwise — in the fashion of the WWII-era USO stage show.

The USO, United Service Organizations, was founded in 1941 as a non-profit entity. It is known for providing live entertainment to boost the morale of members of the U.S. Armed Services. This museum fundraiser is taking its inspiration from those USO performances known as “camp shows.”  The shows started during WWII and have featured singers, dancers, comedians and celebrities through the years.

West is working with Halea Ellis, South Vermillion High School choir director, and Marilyn Fisher, a retired teacher from South Vermillion who served as the director of the 2018 FEP show.

 “This event has been a fun and challenging opportunity for our students to work on,” West said. “I think the community will be pleased to see many professional and amateur acts come together in this honoring of traditional stage performance — with the format of a 1940s-era USO show no less.”

Tickets can be purchased in advance at the Ernie Pyle WWII Museum, 120 Briarwood Ave., in Dana, Indiana, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday and Saturday and noon-5 p.m. on Sunday. For more information about the Nov. 2 fundraiser, text 812-249-5780. For more information about the Ernie Pyle WWII Museum and the Ernie Pyle and Veterans Memorial Park project, visit erniepyle.org.

Pictured above: Takoma Wisor and Olivia Haney perform to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” during a 1940s USO-style show at the Helt Fire Department in 2018. The Friends of Ernie Pyle are hosting another show taking inspiration from WWII-era entertainment on Saturday, Nov. 2 at South Vermillion High School in ­­Clinton, Indiana.

“Short snorter” signed by famous journalists, boxing champion, actor & others will be on display

The Ernie Pyle World War II Museum will receive formally a “short snorter” signed by Ernie Pyle and several other notable figures during the annual Ernie Pyle Fireman’s Festival in Dana, Indiana, on Saturday, Aug. 10. The presentation be 5:30 p.m., on the festival main stage. The artifact was signed by Pyle and others just three and a half weeks before he was killed on Ie Shima during the Okinawa invasion.

The tradition of short snorters originated with Alaskan bush pilots in the 1920s, but spread to other commercial pilots and the military, particularly during World War II. The pilots learned quickly than alcohol and flying didn’t mix well, so their portions or “snorts” of whiskey were less than others while imbibing at local watering holes. They became short snorters and the term became associated with the dollar bills fellow pilots would sign and exchange. When the pilots met again, if one didn’t still have the “short snorter” in his possession, it was his obligation to buy the other pilot’s drinks.

Click here for a complete schedule of festival activities.

Dr. Angie Bethel of Carmel is donating the artifact on behalf of her parents Doyle and Elvie “Bobbie” Bethel. It was Bobbie who received the signed dollar bill years ago in change from a purchase she made. Noticing the handwriting on the bill, she set it aside rather than spending it somewhere else. In 1974, Doyle wrote another signer of the short snorter, Pacific War correspondent Robert Sherrod a letter to try and determine where the bill was signed and who were the other signers.

Sherrod, a correspondent for Time and Life magazines in the Pacific, went on after the war to become an editor of the Saturday Evening Post and vice-president of Curtis Publishing Co. He affirmed that the bill had to have been signed at the March 25, 1945, farewell party held on Asor Island, a part of the Ulithi Atoll where the invasion armada preparing for Okinawa were anchored. The task force set sail for Okinawa the next day.

The party for war correspondents, military brass, and nurses from six hospital ships was hosted by the base commander, O.O. “Scrappy” Kessing. After the war, Kessing became the commissioner of the All American Football Conference – an early rival of the NFL, which folded in the early 1950s, but provided the NFL the San Francisco 49ers and Cleveland Browns, along with the name for the original Baltimore franchise – the Colts. Kessing’s signature is on the bill.

Sherrod recalled that everyone got drunk that night and that Ernie Pyle was “the lion of the party.” Pyle apparently initiated the short snorter – writing “To Margaret Clift From Ernie Pyle.”  Clift was a nurse on the U.S.S. Hope, a hospital ship that had arrived at Ulithi on March 20. She was one of 70 nurses and two female Norwegian radio operators who attended the party. It was a rarity to have women at a party during the war. Sherrod wrote Doyle that the hospital ship doctors were “sore” because the nurses didn’t return onboard until 4 to 5 a.m.

At this point, we have no idea the path the dollar bill took when Clift’s ship left Ulithi or where it exactly came into the Bethel’s possession. Clift was from Lewiston, Idaho. A scrapbook of photos from the war belonging to her now resides with the Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

Two surprising autographs on the short snorter are heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey and actor/director Jackie Cooper, whose real name was John Cooper Jr.. Dempsey joined the Coast Guard during the war and was in Ulithi preparing to command an assault boat onto the beaches of Okinawa. Cooper, who was a child actor and part of the “Our Gang” cast later played newspaperman Perry White in the 1978 Superman movie that starred Christopher Reeve. Cooper served in the Navy during World War II, but we don’t know at this point why he was at Ulithi or whether he was part of the Okinawa invasion.

“We are thrilled that Dr. Bethel decided to donate this artifact created by Ernie less than a month before he died to our museum,” said Steve Key, president of the board of the Friends of Ernie Pyle Development Fund, Inc., which operate the Dana museum. “The short snorter is an example of how the war brought people from diverse backgrounds all across the United States together in unusual places all across the globe.”

Join us in Dana, Indiana Friday, Aug. 9 and Saturday, Aug. 10 for the annual Ernie Pyle Fireman’s Festival. The two-day event features kids games, food, live music, a parade and more. Above, Keith Kraehmer volunteered his time to get the Museum Jeep running. Visitors can see it in action during the parade beginning at 6 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 10.

Click here for a complete schedule. 

Over the years, the Friends of Ernie Pyle have continued to develop new ways to honor the famed WWII correspondent and the soldiers he wrote about.

The home where Pyle was born was saved from demolition by the FEP and moved to downtown Dana in the 1970s where it was designated as an Indiana State historic site. In 2022, the house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The home shows visitors from across the country what daily life was like for Pyle’s generation.

The museum next door was operated by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources until 2009 when it was closed due to financial cutbacks. The FEP stepped in the following year and re-opened the museum through a special arrangement with the state. Through the years, the museum has continued to provide invaluable educational experiences and serve as an archive for important historical artifacts chronicling Pyle’s life and “The Greatest Generation.”

Now, the FEP is aiming to again expand its efforts with the Ernie Pyle & Veterans Memorial Park on the land adjacent to the house and museum in Dana.

The FEP Development Fund’s vision for the park is to further promote awareness about Pyle and his contributions, honor veterans and our shared history, enhance visitors’ experience to the museum and provide a gathering space for the community.

“The proposed park ties the legacy of Ernie Pyle and generations of veterans together in a project that honors both and serves to enhance the quality of life in Vermillion County and surrounding communities,” said FEP President Steve Key.

Input from the public on the plan was sought at the annual FEP meeting in August 2023. Attendees were able to view a preliminary design concept for the park done by Indianapolis-based Land Stewards Design Group. Its plans for the park include the construction of an event pavilion, a performance stage, a healing garden, a Victory Garden exhibit and a bronze statue of Pyle.

Artist Bill Wolfe, from the neighboring town of  Clinton, was commissioned to do the statue that features Pyle sitting next to his typewriter.

The performance stage will be a place for educational speakers and musical guests and also a location for the community to gather for events like the annual Firefighters Festival. In addition, it would be available to reserve for family events like weddings and reunions.

“The proposed park ties the legacy of Ernie Pyle and generations of veterans together in a project that honors both and serves to enhance the quality of life in Vermillion County and surrounding communities.”

— Steve Key, Friends of Ernie Pyle president

“The components of the park not only makes the museum experience better for visitors, but adds a community gathering place for local organizations and residents,” Key said.

The price tag for the project is estimated to be more than $1 million and the board has launched a nation-wide fundraising campaign.

Individuals, groups and businesses can donate time, in-kind services, materials or money.

Financial contributions come in many levels from Private at $25-99 to Five-Star General at $25,000 and higher.

The project is set to unfold in four stages: Phase one and two include, among other things, the sculpture and memorial plaza; phases three and four include the event pavilion, performance stage and more.

“The Ernie Pyle and Veterans Memorial Park will offer healing and inspiration, education and solitude,” said Becky Holbert who co-chairs the park committee with fellow FEP board member Roxann Scott.

“It will be a place to gather, remember and celebrate our nation’s heroes as Pyle would have wanted,” Holbert said.

In the second of three D-Day columns in this series, Ernie Pyle sees the terrible cost of victory on the Normandy beaches.

Listen to the audio version of the column on the IU Media School site.

NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 16, 1944 – I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.

It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.

The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. In the center each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes.

I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite.

The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.

*

For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water – swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost.

You could see trucks tipped half over and swamped. You could see partly sunken barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.

On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had been burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There were half-tracks carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single shell hit, their interiors still holding their useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files.

There were LCT’s turned completely upside down, and lying on their backs, and how they got that way I don’t know. There were boats stacked on top of each other, their sides caved in, their suspension doors knocked off.

In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved.

In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges.

On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.

On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it.

We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of their sum total. Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.

*

A few hundred yards back on the beach is a high bluff. Up there we had a tent hospital, and a barbed-wire enclosure for prisoners of war. From up there you could see far up and down the beach, in a spectacular crow’s-nest view, and far out to sea.

And standing out there on the water beyond all this wreckage was the greatest armada man has ever seen. You simply could not believe the gigantic collection of ships that lay out there waiting to unload.

Looking from the bluff, it lay thick and clear to the far horizon of the sea and beyond, and it spread out to the sides and was miles wide. Its utter enormity would move the hardest man.

As I stood up there I noticed a group of freshly taken German prisoners standing nearby. They had not yet been put in the prison cage. They were just standing there, a couple of doughboys leisurely guarding them with tommy guns.

The prisoners too were looking out to sea – the same bit of sea that for months and years had been so safely empty before their gaze. Now they stood staring almost as if in a trance.

They didn’t say a word to each other. They didn’t need to. The expression on their faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final horrified acceptance of their doom.

If only all Germans could have had the rich experience of standing on the bluff and looking out across the water and seeing what their compatriots saw.

Read more of Pyle’s wartime columns on the IU Media School site.