This Is the Home Of Ernie Pyle

PYLE, BOYLE, GOFORTH

Posted By: Volunteer: Sherri
Date: 3/21/2014 at 09:30:43

This Is the Home Of Ernie Pyle
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Across Africa and Europe with the American armies, Ernie Pyle and Hal Boyle reported to American newspaper readers, each in his own way, what happened inside the boys at war. They were the two most widely circulated war columnists, yet Boyle never seemed to feel that he was competing. When Pyle won the Pulitzer prize, Boyle was truly elated. When Boyle won it himself he at first refused to believe it-he had never tried to copy Ernie. As a matter of fact, he had set his own pattern in Africa before Ernie arrived. Ernie went to the Pacific and his career was cut short. Hal, now on his way to the Pacific, stopped by to see Ernie's family.
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BY HAL BOYLE.

DANA, IND.(AP) - The roots grow deep in the Middle West-deep enough to anchor even the vagabond soul of Ernie Pyle.

You can feel Ernie's presence even now in the white frame 6-room farmhouse southeast of here where the war columnist spent his boyhood. He always regarded it as his true home.

The keepers of the spirit still live there-his "Aunt Mary," Mrs. Mary Bales, and his dad, Will C. Pyle.

Aunt Mary is a vigorous blue-eyes woman of 79 who still drives her car to town at a 40-mile-an-hour clip to do her shopping. Ernie's dad is 77. He uses a cane and complains mildly that his eyes "aren't what they used to be." He is small and has the puckish humor of his famous son. Aunt Mary has Ernie's great gift of humanity.
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The 77-acre Pyle farm is now tilled by the neighboring Howard Goforth family, friends of longstanding about whom Ernie often wrote.

"Will hasn't been able to do heavy work now for ten years, but he helps out at sowing time," Aunt Mary told me.

"We kept a cow until two years ago. Then it got to be too much for us in wintertime. We still have some chickens. The last time Ernest was home I told him that Will and I were thinking of giving up the place and moving to town, and he just looked at me in that quiet way of his and said, "If you do, I will never come back again."

Aunt Mary looked around the neat parlor hung with pictures of Ernie, tracing his career from childhood to the last days before he left to meet a doughboy's death on faraway Ie Shima in the Pacific. She said:

"I guess we will stay on now and keep things just as he liked them."

Untouched except for her daily dusting is the simple first floor room which once was Ernie's. The plain wood-framed mirror before which he tied his necktie before going off to Indiana university still hangs there. The plain old-fashioned double bed is there, a reading lamp fixed to the headboard.

"Ernest put it there himself," said Aunt Mary. "We still have all his old schoolbooks, too, but they are upstairs put away."

Aunt Mary keeps as busy as ever. She still has many talks over the party-line telephone-Ernie once said people in Dana didn't mind party-line phones because they had nothing to hide anyway-and she goes to monthly meetings of the Merry Housewives' club.

"We don't gossip or play cards at our club," she said. "At least we don't think we gossip."

Aunt Mary has been a widow eighteen years. She has worked hard all her days, and nursed her sister-Ernie's mother-for four years before Mrs. Pyle's death. Holding her work-gnarled hands before her, she said half-shyly, half-humorously: "They aren't the hands of a lady."

But the way she said it you knew she didn't regret a wrinkle or callous in them. She has had the serenity of spirit to rise above every sadness in life except the loss of the one the world knew as "Ernie" and whom she always called "Ernest."

Source: Scrapbook of Unknown Origin, Page 110