News

By Ruth Witmer

The latest addition to the Ernie Pyle WWII Museum is a bust of the renowned correspondent created by journalist-turned-sculptor David Ross Stevens.

 Stevens graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in journalism. 

“I became a journalist only eight years after Ernie died,” Stevens said.

Stevens started his career as a roving feature writer for the Telegraph-Herald in Dubuque, Iowa, and then became a wire editor. He spent two years as a managing editor in Henderson, Kentucky, before moving on to the Courier-Journal in Louisville. At the CJ, he was the paper’s first investigative environment writer.

Stevens said he always had a latent interest in art. He considered the act of building his own solar house a creative venture — almost like sculpture — and decided he wanted to do more things like that.

“I happened to be friends with a bunch of artists. In my 40s, that’s when the turning point came,” said Stevens who took his first drawing class at age 46.

“I hadn’t touched a piece of clay before age 50,” said Stevens who makes his home in southern Indiana with his wife, Rose.

Stevens said most of his pieces are commissions but he did Pyle on his own initiative and then decided to donate it.

“That was just a fun thing for myself since I had been in journalism,”  he said. 

The artist has a variety of sculptures and busts displayed in public places. In Indiana, his work includes renderings of abolitionist Frederick Douglass at Division Street School in New Albany; Supreme Court Justice Sherman Minton in the Floyd County Public Library; Lucy Higgs Nichols, an escaped slave who served as a nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War, at the Carnegie History and Art Museum in New Albany; and a full-body bronze of golfer Fuzzy Zoeller at his course in Sellersburg.

Stevens said he has become a big fan of Pyle’s writing and can relate him to people he knew growing up.

“A half dozen guys within site of our house were in WWII and they were all the kinds of guys Ernie was writing about — the sergeants and corporals and privates.”

Stevens said the bust he’s donating to the museum is about 10 inches high and was done using cast stone.

The method was new to Stevens when he created the piece. It involves mixing a powdered marble material with a catalyst and water.

“I had made him in clay then made a rubber mold around the clay. I took that rubber mold and pressed this new cast stone into it and out came Ernie Pyle — and I was so pleased.”

David Chrisinger is currently writing a book about famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle for Penguin Press tentatively titled The Unhappy Warrior: Ernie Pyle and the Second World War. Included below are entries from his travels in the footsteps of Pyle.

     In addition to writing about war and trauma, David directs the writing program at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, where he teaches storytelling and political communication strategies to the next generation of public policy professionals. He is also a Contributing Writer for the New York Times Magazine’s At War Column and teaches memoir writing for The War Horse News, the only non-profit newsroom dedicated to covering post-9/11 military and veteran issues.

Ernie Pyle in Tunisia

Ernie Pyle in Sicily

Ernie Pyle in Italy Part I

Ernie Pyle in Italy Part II

The year 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably thinking a lot about how much the world has changed since VJ Day and where we as a country are headed next.

To help make sense of this critical moment in time, I’m spending the next year retracing the steps of famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle for a book being published by Penguin Press. I believe the realities of war Pyle documented and the sometimes uncomfortable truths he brought to the “folks back home” need to be reexamined with a 21st-century lens if we are ever to understand the stories we tell ourselves about war and trauma.

Back in December I completed the first of four research trips–this one to Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy. Here’s me at the top of Djebel Hamra, outside Sidi Bou Zid, Tunisia, where Pyle watched the American forces take on–and get clobbered by–two German Panzer Divisions in the days leading up to the infamous 1943 Battle of Kasserine Pass.

Next month I will spend two weeks in France, and this summer I’ll be visiting the Pacific, where Pyle was killed, as well as London, where Pyle’s career as a war correspondent began. In addition to engaging with the mythology that has settled over him and his writing, in each locale I visit I will also explore what Pyle’s columns can tell us about the lasting effects of war on the people who are forced to endure it.

Above all else, it’s my goal to paint a thoughtful portrait of a man who found himself caught in the maelstrom of war, who tried mightily to make the unimaginable aspects of what he saw imaginable to the reader back home, and who struggled just as much to make sense of the gaps that existed between what he witnessed and what he could report.

And I’d like to bring you along for the ride.

If you’re interested in learning more about the stories we tell ourselves about war, please visit my new and improved website — https://www.davidchrisinger.com/ — and sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of the page.

Live from the Front is a show by actor Rick Plummer, portraying Ernie Pyle. Rick performed his show Saturday evening November 9, 2019 in Vermillion County. The article below is from the write up about his show in the Daily Clintonian newspaper in Clinton, Indiana.

Click the link below to view.

http://s2.temporary-access.com/~erniepyl/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Live-from-the-Front.pdf