SOURCE: A biographical essay in Ernie's America: The Best of Ernie Pyle's 1930s Travel Dispatches, edited with an introduction by David Nichols, Random House, 1989, pp. xvii-1.

[In the following essay, Nichols provides an overview of Pyle's career.]

Rare is the American who has not dreamed of dropping whatever he is doing and hitting the road. The dream of unrestrained movement is a distinctly American one, an inheritance bequeathed to subsequent generations by those restless souls who populated the American continent. Travel—away from here, toward a vague and distant destination—is part of our national folklore.

Economic hardship has been a common inducement. Steinbeck's Okies traveled west on Route 66 toward what they hoped would be a better life. Others have had a more spiritual motive: the outer journey has been a mere symbol for the inner, the road a means of finding themselves. Still others have traveled to escape themselves, flight on the open road promising to postpone, if not forestall, some rigorous self-examination.

Motives aside, many are the Americans who could say with Huckleberry Finn, "I reckon I got to light out for the Territory," and do so, hoping in the American way for some transformation, only to be disappointed with the results. Such came to be the case with Ernie Pyle, who, hopeful and excited, set out from Washington, in late summer of 1935, on a big adventure.

Pyle's bosses at Scripps Howard Newspapers had relieved him of what had become an onerous routine—the managing editorship of the Washington Daily News—and were permitting him to go where he pleased and write about what he pleased. There was one stipulation: that he produce six pieces a week, each about a thousand words, for distribution to the twenty-four Scripps Howard papers. Driving a Ford coupe, Pyle and his wife, Jerry, took a leisurely journey through the Northeast and into Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec provinces. Then they crossed back into the United States and traveled through Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana.

During that time, my father, about to turn ten years old, followed Ernie and Jerry's every move in the pages of the Scripps Howard Indianapolis Times, now defunct but then very much alive and delivered to Coats' Garage at Templeton, Indiana, each afternoon by the Indianapolisto-Chicago Greyhound bus. "Delivered" doesn't quite tell the story. Unfailingly, the driver merely slowed, opened the door, and heaved the rolled newspaper in the direction of the office door. If a curly-haired kid named George Nichols was there to catch it, fine. If not, the brown wrapper wouldn't keep the paper from being torn on the paving stones or soaked in a puddle. But he was usually there, waiting. Meeting the Greyhound assured George first crack at Ernie Pyle's column, which fascinated him. Pyle, after all, was on the move, visiting places my father could only dream of. Where had Pyle been today? What had he seen? With whom had he talked along the way?

The boyhood my father was living in Benton County, in and about the village of Templeton, was much like that Pyle had experienced a quarter century before in Vermillion County, Indiana, fifty miles to the southwest. Like Pyle as a boy and later as an adult, my father was hopelessly afflicted with wanderlust. He wanted to break away from his small town and see what there was to see beyond the corn prairie.

The Indianapolis Times subscription belonged to my grandparents, who daily read the news about what Roosevelt was up to, what new New Deal scheme was afoot to help people like themselves, people bent on working for a living but who found themselves frustrated and wary of the future. After digesting the news from Washington, my grandparents turned to Pyle's column, which ran under the standing head HOOSIER VAGABOND. While there's no record of what they thought of Pyle's pieces, they must have enjoyed them, because they kept reading. Whatever their quotient of wanderlust, my grandparents had a good deal more on their minds than travel. They had three children to feed and clothe, and times were tough.

My grandfather was a college history professor, recently out of work, a condition he shared with twenty-five percent of his working-age countrymen. (Another twenty-five percent were "underemployed.") Having looked for other jobs and received no offers, my grandfather had moved the family back to Templeton, his childhood home, where rents were cheap and the soil fertile. The family gardened in the summer and lived through the winter on the canned vegetables. A friendly grocer extended credit for meat and staples.

By the time Pyle finished his first trip as a roving reporter, eight weeks and six thousand miles after he began, the fall term at Templeton School was well under way, and my father and his wanderlust were imprisoned for another nine months in the small brick schoolhouse. When the winter term began, the relentless wind—"the wind of futility" Pyle had so evocatively described on his September pass through the Midwest—was bitter cold and dusting snow through the cornstalks at the edge of town. But by then Pyle was on another trip, this time through the South and Southwest and into Mexico. My father's only escape from school and Templeton and that cold wind of futility was each day's edition of the Indianapolis Times.

My father and his parents were but three of the thousands of readers who traveled vicariously with Ernie Pyle over the next seven years, following him to every state in the Union at least three times, crossing the American continent with him thirty-five times, journeying to Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, Central and South America, and eventually to England in 1940, where Pyle wrote about the German bombings of London and other cities. On the one hand, it was a hard, relentless job, as Pyle often said in his column, but on the other, it was the acting out of a distinctly American fantasy. And while Pyle was sometimes at a loss to see this, readers like my father never were.

REPORTER FROM HOME

It is impossible to reintroduce Ernie Pyle's largely forgotten travel writings without talking about Pyle the war correspondent. Pyle's journalistic reputation is justly based on his front-line dispatches during World War II, when he lived almost exclusively with the infantry in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. So sympathetic and affectionate was his portrait of the infantryman—so adept was he at articulating the frustrations, occasional elations, and constant home-yearnings of men whose lives were lived and lost at the whim of others—that his death assured him a permanent place in postwar mythology. It was a martyr's place, no less, because Pyle needn't have gone to war at all. A profound need to be useful in a time of national crisis was his reason for subjecting himself to dangers he admitted frightened him. When he was killed by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shima, near Okinawa, in April of 1945, civilians and servicemen alike grieved as though they'd lost a personal friend.

Some of his wartime readers had never heard of Pyle before he showed up in North Africa and began filing dispatches datelined WITH THE AMERICAN FORCES IN ALGIERS. It may or may not have occurred to them to wonder how he had acquired the understanding of America and Americans so evident in his columns. But those who had read Pyle before the war knew exactly where those kernels of insight so liberally sprinkled in Pyle's dispatches came from. They knew they derived from years of travel in America before the war sent people off in all directions.

Pyle, in fact, was uniquely equipped to bring the reality of the war and the American men fighting it home to the American people. Few correspondents had traveled so widely in their native country, absorbing regional nuance and making the acquaintance of so many Americans. When Pyle arrived in a new war theater, he could readily describe the countryside in terms of its counterpart in the United States. When a soldier told him about his home, Pyle could resurrect a mental picture of the territory: he'd been there, likely as not more than once. Thus was Pyle able to link the prewar man with the soldier he had become, surrounded now by foreign people and cultures, existing day to day in a world turned upside down, his identity shored up by fond memories of home and a longing to return there.

Pyle's readers appreciated this. Physically insulated from the battles being fought in Europe and the Pacific—but not from home-front deprivations and long, hard hours of work in defense industries—those stateside had to exert considerable imagination to conceive of how these men were living (and dying) so far away, and Pyle's writing helped them do so. It also served to unite, albeit in print, those at war and those at home.

The Pyle pieces that follow will explain a great deal about how Pyle was able to do what he did so well during the war. Present here are the same reporting and writing skills that made him the most popular war correspondent in American newspapers: the intimate approach, the insistence on portraying the people behind the headlines, the physical description that enabled the reader to experience to the fullest what Pyle had experienced, the carefully selected detail. This is not the stuff of ordinary newspaper reporting, but it was the essence of Ernie Pyle's work.

The war changed Ernie Pyle, just as it changed the soldiers he wrote about. The man who wrote the travel dispatches collected here was big-hearted and compassionate; he was also hard-edged and hard-drinking, profane and irreverent. So was Pyle the war correspondent. But there was a difference. At war Pyle was a man connected with his times, engaged and tuned in and daily seeking to evoke such from his readers. During the thirties, Pyle was disengaged and tuned out, seeking to divert his readers' attention from what was bothering them—and him. And those things were not, as we'll see, one and the same.

THE AGENDA

It's worth sorting out just who Ernie Pyle was and how he happened to be at large in America between 1935 and early 1942.

Pyle's roving-reporter pieces answered a need for lighter reading fare in some American newspapers at a critical time in the nation's history, but it would be a mistake to suggest that Pyle had perceived this need and had sought to fill it. Neither he nor his Scripps Howard superiors had given much thought to how they would "market" his work to those twenty-four Scripps Howard editors in places as disparate as New York and Indianapolis, Fort Worth and Knoxville, Albuquerque and Evansville. The Pyle travel column would be included with other material in the company's feature service, Scripps Howard Newspaper Alliance, wired daily to the chain's papers, and would compete for space just as any other feature did.

Pyle's bosses were willing to shelve any concerns they had about this new enterprise and let him have his way for a while. His enthusiasm was infectious, and they knew that was generally an indicator of good things to come. They knew him to be a dependable and resourceful sort, a hard worker, and they didn't want to lose him. But lose him they would if they insisted he continue as managing editor of the Washington Daily News. For his part, Ernie wanted to give the roving column a try and see what would turn up. Regardless of how his pieces fared elsewhere in the chain, he knew they would run in the Daily News. And besides, his agenda was far more personal than professional. Though he saw the travel column as a challenge, he saw it even more as a means of escape.

Ernie's personal agenda wasn't enough, however. There had to be something more, and it came in the form of a public agenda supplied not by corporate headquarters in New York, nor by Scripps Howard Newspaper Alliance in Washington, but by the chain's editors in all those distant cities—and by their often-vocal subscribers. Returning from a meeting of Scripps Howard editors in June of 1936, Frank Ford, editor of the Evansville Press, wrote an encouraging letter to Ernie's parents, Will and Maria Pyle. The editors had discussed the travel column, Ford said, and "almost without exception the editors reported the same experience we have had on the Press. At first they used a few of the articles. Then readers started calling up and writing in about them, until they were practically forced to use them daily, regardless of how badly the space was needed for other things. Right now, on the Press, if we were to omit even one of them indignant subscribers would call in by the dozen." Ford added, "I think most of the editors would agree with me that Ernie's daily column is more widely read than anything else in the paper."

Ernie's column soon became a daily habit with many editors and their phone-calling and letter-writing readers, who saw his pieces as the perfect antidote to the "too-heavy grist of political, economic, and international news" of the day, as one editor put it. It was refreshing, this "gentle wholesomeness and wide-eyed country-boy absorption with homely but essential trivia," as another wrote. "Escape" was the operative word—escape for Pyle and for his readers, most of whom faced hard times.

There was a depression on, after all—the Great Depression, one of the biggest economic and social catastrophes in American history—and what to do about it was a source of bitter controversy. Americans' enthusiasm for politics has been at best inconstant, but in these years virtually everyone had an opinion about how to get the country moving again, and with good reason. This calamity had affected almost everyone, from the wealthiest industrialist to the poorest day laborer. After the prosperity of the 1920s, the 1930s had been a bitter shock: something had gone terribly wrong with the dream. Bitterness and anxiety were playing themselves out daily in newspapers nationwide.

Pyle knew all about this. The Depression had entered its third year and the American electorate's patience with President Herbert Hoover was all but shot when Pyle became managing editor of the Daily News in 1932, just as Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt were campaigning for the presidency. From his vantage point in the newsroom, Pyle saw the American people's hopes rise with Roosevelt in office, only to dip again when the economy failed to revive during the first years of the New Deal. He saw accounts of labor strife, bank closings, the rise of rightand leftwing pressures alike. He saw photographs of unemployed men standing in long lines, seeking work or a bowl of soup and a slice of bread—pictures of men in business suits selling apples for a nickel on street corners. And frankly, none of it interested him much. It was important stuff, of course, and it had to receive prominent play in the paper, but politics, economics, and all the attendant wrangling left him flat. So, for that matter, did newspaper management.

Only reluctantly had Pyle accepted the managing editorship. He had been Scripps Howard's aviation editor and columnist from 1928 through 1932. As a lifelong admirer of men of action, Pyle had been perfectly suited to convey to an equally admiring public news of the pilots, their "ships," and the fledgling airlines that employed both. He had thoroughly enjoyed his first attempt at personal journalism and his first experience with insider reporting—becoming intimately involved with a group of people and then explaining that group to outsiders, just as he would do with the infantry during the war. In those years he had developed a highly readable style, intimate and anecdotal, and the column had enjoyed extraordinary success in the Daily News and later in other Scripps Howard papers. Pyle's readers had been an expressive lot and had sent letters from all over the country when a column had especially touched them.

By 1932, aviation was no longer the rough-and-tumble business it had once been. Much of its early pioneering spirit had given way to a more businesslike approach, its randomness to regulation. The old romance was waning. Even so, Pyle had been reluctant to give it up, and even more reluctant to return to the copy desk, where he'd spent most of his early newspaper career. A facile copy editor and a good headline writer, he hated doing both. He had accepted the position because during the Depression it made sense to take a job his bosses badly wanted him to take.

His decision dismayed aviation readers. "Sorry to read you are leaving—seems like losing an old friend," wrote one. Another closed his letter with a cautionary note that proved prophetic. "Please don't forget the old aviation column, however," he wrote, "and also don't forget that work behind the desk without air is bad."

There followed three difficult years of trying to put out a daily newspaper on the tightest of budgets, haggling with upper management for meager pay increases for his staff only to have them taken away when the economy worsened. He had done a good job of it. In his three years as managing editor, Pyle had fired only one employee, an incompetent copy boy. A diplomat, he could extract hard work from his people under circumstances that tried everyone's patience. But working every day in the noisy, congested newsroom, breathing air thick with tobacco smoke, a fair portion of which was his, Pyle had longed for release. Work behind a desk without air truly was bad. So was hard drink, consumed at the regular intervals and in the fantastic quantities Ernie, Jerry, and their friends were accustomed to in these years.

This was an era when heavy drinking was as essential a part of being a newspaperman as speedy two-fingered typing. Ernie and Jerry had been drinking to excess for years, but his stint as managing editor had been an especially stressful time, and now they were drinking more than ever. Although both were alcoholics by 1935, Ernie's nights of "alcoholic insanity," as one Daily News associate called them, were offset by his having to be at work the next morning. Jerry had no such check on her drinking. She was a recluse, spending her days alone in their shabby apartment, reading books, writing poetry, playing the piano, having a drink or two at lunch—anything to take the edge off the despair she kept tacitly at bay.

Pyle worried about Jerry, and she about him. He feared he was a burned-out newspaper hack at age thirty-four. The job aged them both, Jerry no less than Ernie, for it was up to her to soothe his sagging emotions. When Pyle had been slow to recover from influenza in December of 1934, the Daily News had granted him a leave of absence, and he and Jerry had left Washington for an auto tour of the West and South-west. The trip had been redemptive. Pyle returned to Washington convinced that travel had to figure prominently in his life, just as he'd thought it would during his years at Indiana University. He wrote a series of eleven articles about his trip for the paper, and one of his bosses said the pieces had "a Mark Twain quality that knocked my eye out." Ernie decided that never again could he allow his writing skills to go unsummoned.

Here, too, the trip had made him question his staying in Washington. It had been a good city to be young in, but those wide-open spaces out West exerted a powerful pull. The small towns were a welcome change, too. Washington had become too big, too busy, too congested with New Dealers trying to save the world. And he knew that as long as he stayed in the city, his social circle would continue to consist mostly of newspaper people, and that the drinking would go on and on. It was time for a change.

Such was Pyle's personal agenda in early August 1935, when, doubtless hungover after a rousing farewell party, he and Jerry locked their apartment door, put a few bags in the trunk of the car, and drove their Ford coupe out of Washington and onto the open road. Pyle had no way of knowing that his personal agenda would mesh nicely with the public agenda editors and their readers would set for him in the months and years to come. Nor would he have cared. For now, just getting out of town was enough.

NO EASY JOB

Americans born around the turn of the century had grown up with the automobile. Pyle was eight years old when Henry Ford introduced the Model T, an adolescent when Ford began mass-producing his car for the common man on an assembly line. By the time Pyle began his roving-reporter assignment, the automobile had gone a long way toward transforming American life and the American countryside.

Even a decade earlier, Pyle's travel assignment would have been a terrific hardship. Roads had been either haphazardly marked or not marked at all, their quality a study in diversity. Roadside accommodations had been bleak or nonexistent, and the cars themselves had been too uncomfortable for anything but local travel. Drivers had justly considered motoring a perilous undertaking. Traffic on any thoroughfare had been constantly assaulted by traffic on intersecting roads. Americans had just begun getting used to automobiles in any number, and drivers' safety habits still left much to be desired. Night driving of any distance had been especially dangerous.

By 1935 things were much improved, but driving long distances was still altogether more rigorous than it is today, all the more so in Pyle's case because of the frequency with which he traveled. Roads were still of un-even quality; interstates, with their limited access, were years in the future. Cars of the day were more comfortable than their predecessors but still lacked such amenities as automatic transmissions, air conditioning, and comfortable seats. Pyle was a short, skinny man, and after a long day of motoring cross-country, he often ached from the car's constant bumping over rough back roads. He never knew whether the hotel bed he would sleep in that night would be comfortable or as bumpy as that day's roads. Ernie and Jerry weren't fussy about food, and they were fortunate in this: the quality of road-side restaurants varied as widely as the quality of the roads themselves. And these were the least of their difficulties.

Having already sustained a daily column for almost four years, Ernie knew something of the difficulty of turning out an appealing piece on deadline. But this was harder by far than the aviation column. Here there was no focus, no network of contacts to tie into. Nor were there any economies of effort. Pyle's every travel column was the result of his effort and his alone, not an elaboration of an item someone had phoned into his desk at the Daily News. Six pieces a week—six thousand words—is a lot of copy, the product of hours of labor at the typewriter. Consider, too, the travel and interviewing time, and it's no wonder Pyle was defensive when his friends accused him of being permanently on vacation. Even so, the fruitfulness of Pyle's efforts was at one with the difficulty of getting there, because getting there, wherever that was, always became part of the story. Ernie considered what happened along the way to be worth writing about, and his readers agreed.

Network radio had come into its own by the mid-1930s, and national magazines were abundant, but the mass-market economy, slowed now by the Depression, had yet to work its leveling effect on American regions. America was a teeming patchwork of local variety, its regional distinctions potent. The day of a television set in every home was still decades off, and people in one region were still curious about how people lived elsewhere. To the observant and curious visitor, local color and custom abounded. The continental United States was a big place, three quarters the size of Europe. There was lots of ground for Pyle to cover and lots of people to meet.

Local editors could be counted on for tips, and so could readers, who sent Pyle letters and postcards by the score. He filed reader suggestions by state in a little wooden box he carried in the car. Mostly, though, Pyle found his columns by chance. He rarely took notes, rarely conducted anything approximating a formal interview. Where he went and when were almost always up to him. He would collect material for a week or so, then find a congenial hotel in which to write. There followed a hellish several days of frantic composition, revising and re-typing, keeping carbons for his files, and sending the originals to Scripps Howard Newspaper Alliance. With few exceptions, Ernie dispatched his pieces via first-class mail. In seven years, not a single one was lost.

NOSTALGIA

In 1893, seven years before Pyle's birth, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner had declared the American frontier closed and with it the first period of American history. But in Pyle's fanciful imagination—and to a lesser extent in actual fact—the American West was still frontier country. During his travel years, Pyle returned again and again to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado, their big skies and vast, thinly populated spaces a delightful contrast to the crowded East, which he had grown to dislike intensely. "Am I glad to get West again!" he wrote a friend from Seattle in the spring of 1937. "The three months in the East damn near killed me (literally)—too many things to do, too many people to see, too much of everything. When I crossed the Mississippi River I felt as though I'd shed a big burden."

It was in the West—the most fabled of American regions, object of our national restlessness and our search for a better, less restricted life—that Pyle felt the freedom he'd hoped for. A child of the midlands, he longed for drama in terrain, nature writ large. The far-reaching horizons of the desert country and the sheer rugged beauty of the mountain country inspired in him a sense of independence and well-being. It also fueled his yearning for a mythic past, the lawless, excessive, hard-driving Old West of the frontier, known to men of his grandfather's generation but alive now mostly in legend and in the romantic imaginations of men like himself.

True, he loved the land and the freedom implicit in its openness. He liked Westerners for their democratic sensibilities, their friendliness and general companionability. In this they were like the rural Midwesterners he had grown up with, not at all like Easterners, for whom class lines were sharply drawn and forever the object of hushed speculation. But the greater part of Pyle's attraction to the West was pure nostalgia. He was a man approaching middle age who believed he'd lived his life one step removed from dramas spectacular beyond imagination. Missing World War I because his parents wanted him to finish high school had been an especially bitter disappointment, all the more so because his closest neighborhood friend had gone to the war.

People for whom the past exerts such a bittersweet tug harbor the sense that time has betrayed them by positioning them in such prosaic circumstances as the present. They reluctantly content themselves with searches for others' imperfect memories and the discovery of a few relics here and there. So it was with Pyle and the West and, to a lesser extent, Alaska. Many times in the following pages occur sentiments much like these from a column on Virginia City, Nevada, atop the Comstock Lode, "the richest vein of ore ever found in America." Virginia City's glory days were past by the time Pyle arrived in November of 1937.

I wanted to be impressed, and excited, when I came around the bend and saw this sight of my grandfather's day. But I don't even have that privilege. The skeleton is there, but progress has slipped inside the bones and made a mundane stirring.…

Why, I wonder, can't an old place really die? Why can't it lie down amid its old drama and wrap its romantic robes about it and pose there, unstirring and ghostlike, for the trembling contemplation of us latecomers?

Pyle's nostalgia found its best expression in the West, but it was by no means limited to that region. Nostalgia, in fact, was endemic to the whole roving-column enterprise. "American roads have always been more about the past and future than about the present," Phil Patton has written. Pyle's avoidance of the big cities and his fondness for small towns and the open countryside was in itself evocative of the recent past, though less obviously so.

As a boy, growing up on a farm a few miles outside Dana, Indiana—population about a thousand—Ernie had been a restless child, anxious for an expanded life. Early on he had decided that most of what interested him was happening elsewhere, and that he wanted badly to be a part of it. Arriving in Washington to work on the Daily News in 1923, after a few months of reporting on a newspaper in La Porte, Indiana, Pyle had been pleased not only to have a job in the nation's capital, but to leave the Midwest behind as well. Washington represented all the expanded possibilities he'd hoped for. Now in his mid-thirties, Ernie entertained the notion that what he'd left behind had a validity all its own, though he would never have dreamed of returning to the farm or settling in a small town. In reality, what he had left behind had changed dramatically, and he knew this.

By 1935, America was primarily an urban-industrial nation, but the folk memory of a recent past lived on farms and in small towns was still vivid, all the more so during the Depression. For no matter how elementary was unemployed workers' understanding of economics, they soon learned that their misfortune in these hard times was largely outside their control, the result of their dependence on a system that had gone awry. The temptation to romanticize the past in agrarian America was hard to resist. (Conveniently overlooked in these moments of reverie was the truth that rural America was beset with problems all its own in the Depression years, and had been for well over a decade.) Living in a city often meant surrendering the close personal contact with friends, neighbors, and family that had marked their early years. Thus Ernie's datelines from small, out-of-the-way places were themselves a pastoral look back. When Pyle wrote about his family on the farm in Indiana, he chronicled the near-term American past, still recognizable but changed forever. And his readers, most of whom lived in cities, responded warmly. One wrote Pyle's mother in 1939, "I hope that you may sometimes think, as is true, that through your son you have a part in bringing interest, entertainment, education, and a greater faith in the goodness of people to so many who read his column. It seems to me you have contributed largely to the world."

In any but its mildest form, nostalgia is at cross purposes with life as it's lived. Ernie was pensive about the changing American countryside, but he was still very much the individualist who as a boy longed to shed the restrictions of country life. Thus many of the people whose stories Pyle told were a bit offbeat, living slightly apart from, if not exactly contrary to, the mainstream. This was no accident. For in Pyle's view, character proceeded from eccentricity. The greater the likelihood of an individual's neighbors considering him to be an oddball, the greater his character quotient. When Pyle wrote about people on the road, he defined their character as the sum total of observable details of personal thought, circumstance, or action, and he piled these on at great length. Some were revealing, some not, but all spoke to Pyle's incomplete understanding of character—an understanding based on externalities. He once wrote a column about the world bowling champion, a man who was "intelligent and friendly and a gentleman, but he is not colorful. He doesn't brag or say odd things that make a man interesting in print." Pyle searched out people sufficiently odd to be interesting in print.

The routineness, the banality, of most people's lives struck Ernie and Jerry as the equivalent of premature death. In a 1935 piece on movies versus real life, Pyle wrote:

Of course, characters on the screen are made to suffer their tragedies, just as we humans do. But their suffering is so dramatic and romantic, while ours here on the globe is the dull, achy kind that embitters and wastes, with so little drama to soften it.

Why in real life, he asked, can't we humans "just go stare out a window and bow our heads and look grave and heartbroken for a few seconds, denoting a long period of grief and yearning, and not have to go through the actual months and years of it?" For Pyle's part, a "flash of happiness" would be preferable to "happiness strung out," because then "there is no dulling." He concluded:

Yes, just wake me up for the peaks and the valleys, just the tops and the bottoms of them, and please have the anesthetist ready when we come to the plains, and the long bright days when nothing happens.

During his travel years, Pyle went a long way toward acting on these sentiments. Forever on the move, he sought the peaks and valleys, a journalistic outsider who arrived and departed quickly. In New Mexico, an isolated family so enjoyed a visit from the Pyles they begged them to stay. "But we had engagements ahead and we had to run away, as we always have to run away," Ernie wrote.

THE TRAVELING LIFE

Although the 1930s were a time of unusually strong community sentiment among the American people, the Pyles shared in this not at all. They had friends from all walks of life, but their rootlessness allowed them to control their interaction with other people to an unhealthy degree. They were without the scrutiny that close friends and family, living nearby, can bring to bear on misguided ideas and actions. Ernie and Jerry created for themselves an insular life on the road, neatly contained and free of obligations other than maintaining the column. "Stability cloaks you with a thousand little personal responsibilities, and we have been able to flee from them," Ernie wrote of their traveling life.

It was a manageable existence—bags systematically packed in the trunk, hotels picked according to a scheme Pyle worked out—and despite its being premised on constant movement, it had a quirky rhythm, broken only by periodic drinking bouts and frequent ailments, the alcohol often contributing to the illness. Ernie and Jerry were aware of what was happening in the country, but their traveling life protected them from most of the details. They were out of touch with the world around them and eventually with each other. On a 1937 trip to Alaska, Pyle wrote his college friend Paige Cavanaugh, "I haven't had any mail for three weeks, and haven't seen a newspaper or heard a radio for a week, so I don't know what's going on in the world and furthermore don't give a shit." Even when he was getting mail, reading newspapers, and listening to the radio, Pyle showed little interest in the big events that shaped his times.

Though their origins were common enough—his in rural Indiana, hers in small-town Minnesota—Ernie and Jerry had consciously distanced themselves from middle-class America for most of their adult lives. When they were married by a justice of the peace in July of 1925, they didn't tell their Washington friends; they simply moved in together and told everyone they were "shacking up"—everyone, that is, except their parents. Jerry even substantiated the fiction by refusing to wear a wedding ring until she was in her early forties.

Even as youthful puckishness goes, this was bold for the times and an indication of the extent to which the Pyles saw themselves as immune to middle-class pieties and expectations. Though they were without the smugness that so often attends success, the very idea of success was something they made fun of. The way they had lived in Washington reflected this. Their priorities had been to pay the rent, send a little money home to their parents, buy food (not much, for neither cared about eating), and spend the balance on liquor and tobacco. Clothes, furniture, having a family—none of it interested them. Their outlook on life, fatalistic and frankly self-indulgent, was primarily a product of Jerry's manic swings and Ernie's emotional pliability, which rendered him all too vulnerable to her moodiness.

Ernie and Jerry were both master dissemblers who, for the most part, had the good sense and good taste to keep their contempt for convention to themselves. Most everyone they met genuinely liked them, particularly Ernie, who, though shy, had an easygoing, democratizing manner. This spilled over into the column and accounted in no small part for its success. "I find that kids, Civil War veterans, capitalists, professional men, and WPA workers all read everything you write," the editor of the Rocky Mountain News told Pyle in a letter. And from the editor of the Oklahoma News came this: "[Readers] say, 'Ernie talks our language.' That, I think, is the … key to the column's success. It's folksy, human and as unsophisticated as nine out of ten readers"—a compliment, apparently.

What the Oklahoma editor mistook for a lack of sophistication in the writing was actually a savvy bit of calculation on Pyle's part. Because the subject matter of the column was in constant flux, Pyle himself was the only link between daily installments. He understood this. He knew his popularity was based upon his readers' illusion that they knew him personally, and his approach to the column fostered the perception. The voice of the travel columns was a carefully developed product that owed its variety to the demands of the marketplace and to the rigorous nature of the assignment itself. And though it shared much with Pyle, it belied much, too.

Most human-interest columnists today produce three or four pieces a week and draw their material primarily from the local. Pyle operated nationally and published six times a week. Column material was abundant, particularly early on, but six thousand words a week was a tall order. Because he had to allow for travel time and the occasional unproductive segment of a trip, Pyle often resorted to personal essays to keep the column going.

The essay persona was that of a Chaplinesque character forever beguiled by faulty zippers, lingering colds, errant drivers, dreams of glory as a race car driver, and snake phobia. Here was a likeable reporter with an uncannily good ear for American idiom, an endearingly self-effacing manner, and a good sense of humor (laconic, in the Midwestern way)—a man for whom the American romance was alive and well, the Depression be damned. "We must print [the] bad news—but fortunate is the newspaper publisher who can balance that bad news with your wholesome and cheerful account of your journeyings," the editor of the Memphis Press-Scimitar told Ernie.

Pyle was often not so temperate in his private correspondence. Here the column persona gave way to the more acerbic side of his personality. From the Yukon, Pyle wrote Cavanaugh:

[Alaska is] too damn cold for me, even in June. It's just like Hollywood—warm for about three hours in the middle of the day, and the rest of the time you freeze your balls off. Haven't had a comfortable day since I left Seattle two and a half weeks ago. I'm a hot-country man.…

Mostly, Pyle's columns were characterized by a moderate voice, but sometimes he let fly at people he clearly disliked—auto mechanics were frequent targets—or disapproved of. Here he is on Americans living and working in the Panama Canal Zone:

One of their own, who sees them clearly, has called them "stall-fed." They have surrendered the important quality of egotism—the eternal conviction that you could do it better than the other guy. They have given up all personal ambition, natural instincts of competition, all the lovely mystery of life, for a security that gives them a life of calm and a vague discontent.

That last clause is interesting: for a security that gives them a life of calm and a vague discontent. It describes with some disdain the aspirations of the very audience for which Pyle was writing: Depression-bound stay-at-homes who looked to his column for a vicarious lift from their troubled circumstances. For many Americans in the Depression years, security was a much-sought-after commodity in whose name they would have happily endured discontent, vague or otherwise. His bohemian posturing aside, Pyle's restlessness was forever at war with his own deep need for security. Every so often he needed to trumpet his disdain for the latter, as if seeing it in print would confirm his defiance of it.

THE CURSE

For Pyle motion was an end in itself, a trait he shared with millions of his countrymen. Unlike most of them, though, he had the means to realize his restive dream, and increasingly it became a curse. The pressures increased with the column's success; what had begun for him as a flight from encroaching obligations and responsibilities had become a tremendous burden. Editors began to vie for his circulation-building presence in their areas, just as military units would compete for his morale-building attention during the war. Five Scripps Howard editors in Ohio sent a joint telegram to Pyle's superiors in Washington in June of 1938:

OHIO SERIES BY ERNIE PYLE WOULD BE OF VITAL IMPORTANCE IN DEVELOPING VACATION READING TO HELP HOLD CIRCULATION IN THE OHIO INDUSTRIAL CITIES PARTICULARLY HARD HIT BY THE DEPRESSION.… PLEASE GIVE THIS IMMEDIATE URGENT CONSIDERATION BECAUSE ERNIE PYLE IN OHIO WOULD BE A PRACTICAL ASSET WHICH COULD NOT BE EQUALED BY ERNIE PYLE IN NEW ENGLAND, SOUTH AMERICA OR ANY OTHER REMOTE PARTS.

Pyle went, begrudgingly.

Readers, too, applied pressure. They wrote him long, appreciative letters, some pouring out their problems, some enclosing tips for future columns, a few chiding him for his not-always-perfect grammar or his occasional use of mild profanity in the column. Whatever the content of the letter, Pyle believed its author deserved an answer. At first he responded to reader mail himself, but later he hired a secretary in Washington to answer the letters. More problematic were those readers who showed up to meet him in person. "We fled San Diego yesterday," Pyle wrote his friend Paige Cavanaugh in October 1939.

… I am disillusioned with fame. Not disillusioned, for I never had illusions about it, but I'm badly frightened. For in San Diego, Mr. Pyle is not second even to God, and the clamor that was set up down there really got me panicky, and we almost went under for the third time under the tidal wave of dinners and drinks and visitors and people who "just want to shake hands" and you know.… The whole thing, Mr. Cavanaugh, is something that I do not want anything of, and why can't a fellow just quietly make an honest living?

Readers in the Southwest reciprocated Pyle's enthusiasm for their region with enthusiasm for him and his column. On stops in Deming, Silver City, and Lordsburg, New Mexico—all within the circulation area of the El Paso Herald-Post—Pyle couldn't leave his hotel room or eat in the coffee shop without fans crowding around him, all expressing pleasure in his work. Pyle wrote Lee Miller, his editor:

I know it must sound awful to you for a guy like me to say this, but we actually know what it is to have to eat in our rooms and sneak out the back way. I'm not trying to overtoot my own horn and I certainly couldn't have the courage to be so immodest to anyone else, but I am just trying to show you that the powers-that-be have no idea what a hold the column really has—and what a basis for selling it if they were interested.

Pyle was alternately pushing for and retreating from syndication outside the Scripps Howard chain, but he was always cranky over whichever way management was leaning at the moment. Already a celebrity, he knew the pressures on him would redouble with increased circulation; on the other hand, as he told Miller, "I'd gaily take a little more money if I could get it, but even that isn't on my mind, for we're able to save some as it is. I guess I'm just like an old screwball I wrote about up at Silver City—all I really want is to be appreciated."

Appreciated by the masses, he might have added, for just as Pyle had learned how intoxicating constant travel is, he was learning how addictive is the attention of strangers. Never mind how "panicky" this made him, or how fame was something he wanted nothing of. Pyle knew perfectly well that a man whose name and picture appeared above a daily newspaper column—especially one that touched as many responsive chords as his did—had no basis for bemoaning his inability to "just quietly make an honest living." He also knew that he had given up any semblance of a normal life for an enterprise that was getting way out of hand.

PARTING

When Ernie and Jerry said goodbye to each other at the Toledo railroad station in April of 1937—she bound for Washington to close out their apartment and put their furniture in storage, he to Alaska for three months of hard travel—both were sad, as Pyle said in the column. Though he believed the Alaska trip would be too much of a hardship for Jerry, the prospect of a three-month separation from her was a difficult one for Ernie: Jerry had been a big help to him on the road, just as she had been during their Washington days. She had helped him overcome his melancholy over the column's not being well received one place or another, or over his inability to get a particular piece just right.

Jerry was an extremely literate person, a good critic, and a shrewd judge of character. She was also an ideal traveling companion for Ernie in that she talked very little (thus giving him time to think as he drove), made few demands on his schedule, and could generally be counted on to retype his columns once he'd pencil-edited the drafts. This is not to say she was passive; on the contrary, she exerted a powerful influence over Ernie and his sensibilities. But she had no career aspirations of her own—none that she voiced, anyway. Pyle's readers knew her not as Jerry but as "That Girl who rides with me," which sounds condescending and offhand, but which was actually a bow to Jerry's demand for privacy. She had no desire to be known through the pages of a newspaper.

Jerry wasn't particularly interested in the traveling life, but this didn't alarm Ernie. As he saw it, life anywhere—their old life in Washington included—held very little for her. Jerry was chronically uninterested in anything but reading, writing poetry, working crossword puzzles, and playing the piano. With the exception of the piano, her interests were mobile enough: couldn't she read The New Yorker or work crossword puzzles in Garden City, Kansas, every bit as well as she could in Washington? It was all right that she didn't accompany him to interviews—she was forever waiting in a hotel room or in the car—or share in the romance of the open road. The traveling life was still better than sitting alone in an apartment all day, dwelling upon whatever it was she dwelled upon.

As it turned out, Jerry didn't agree. And although they traveled together periodically in subsequent years, their parting in Toledo was the beginning of ten years of being more apart than together, with Pyle either traveling around the United States or reporting from war zones thousands of miles away. It was also me beginning of Jerry's descent into a hellish spiral of depression and drug addiction.

THE CRACK-UP

One expects to return home at the end of a journey, but where was home for Jerry? A changing woman, she lacked so much as a permanent address against which to measure the scope and nature of the changes. Her life was without context, anything or anyone to divert her attention outward, away from the churning emotions that so frequently kept her in the darkest of troubled states.

Living with her mother in Minnesota or her sister in Denver, staying with friends in Washington or Albuquerque, Jerry's mental health badly deteriorated. Already an alcoholic, she became addicted to Benzedrine, an amphetamine, which, mixed with alcohol, gave her a short-term synergistic high and unnatural vigor, after which she would be listless and without appetite for days. Add this cross-addiction to her longtime dependence on caffeine and nicotine and her lack of interest in food or exercise, and it takes little imagination to see that Jerry was physically and psychologically headed for disaster. But Ernie missed or ignored a great many signs of what was to come.

After all, it's difficult to comprehend the depth of another's despair when you're forever lighting out for the territory. Out of personal preference and professional necessity, Pyle was long accustomed to ignoring suffering around him. As we have seen, he moved quickly in and out of the lives of the people he encountered on the road, quick to sense where the story lay and quick to move on. Now he moved in and out of Jerry's life, too, seeing her when he could, traveling with her when she was able or willing to ride along, but always, always on the move. Just as he had fled Washington to avoid the debilitating complexities of the managing editor job, now he fled Jerry to escape the seeming hopelessness of her condition and what it implied for both their futures. He had so arranged his life that his personal compulsions took on the force of necessity: there was always the column to think about.

A deeply intuitive man capable of expressing what he saw or felt clearly and powerfully, Pyle was nonetheless badly confused about intimacy—its meaning, what it demands of those who share in it—just as he was confused about character and what it comprises. He once wrote, "We have worked up a whole new continent-wide list of intimate friends, and consequently we keep up a personal correspondence with about three hundred people." It's impossible to maintain a personal correspondence with three hundred people, or even half that many, but the statement reveals much about Pyle. Like most of us, he was an uneven sort, operating at some remove from his deeper self. Constant travel only abetted this. A man spread too thinly over too great an area, he was incapable of the depth of understanding, the jumps of creative intuition, that Jerry's situation called for.

Ernie had long worried that Jerry's not having a permanent interest in something that at least marginally involved other people would lead to problems. His sense of all this was vague but nonetheless prescient. For as Ernie's popularity grew, Jerry's feelings were mixed. Much as she believed he deserved the recognition and was glad he was getting it, Jerry clearly resented the extent to which Ernie's readers and the editors who ran his column had taken her place in his life.

He was no longer hers. She no longer exerted a major claim on his attention. "I'm just a pawn in the great newspaper game," she wrote a friend. Sure, his letters were profusely sentimental, yearning for the old days when they were always together, but he chose to live his life away from her. Oh, she understood the reasons, and they made sense enough. Yes, she could rejoin him on the road anytime she wished, and he'd be glad of it; but except for certain spectacular instances when she became too sick to care for herself, it was the road and the column and all those readers who held sway. Though Ernie seemed genuinely delighted at their reunions, he also seemed to have gotten along well enough without her in the interim. She could hardly say the same for herself.

In the best of circumstances, marriage is a complex web of interdependency, hard to sort out; in difficult circumstances, it virtually defies scrutiny—certainly from without and often from within, too. But that complex web becomes a hopeless tangle when asked to accommodate mental illness, multiple addictions, and sexual dysfunction. According to Lee Miller, Pyle's editor, "during some of their years together [Ernie and Jerry's] was a nonphysical union, due to a functional incapacity on Ernie's part.…" Pyle was impotent and had been since early in the travel years. When they traveled together, Ernie and Jerry slept in twin beds, except in those rare instances when only a double bed was available—and then both slept poorly.

Ernie's problem further compounded Jerry's troubles, especially when, lonely and depressed, she decided that having a child would answer her emotional needs. She apparently had some doubt about whether her husband's impotence was organic or emotional, a reaction to her, perhaps, or a general fear of intimacy. When Pyle answered her letter about wanting a child, he told Jerry that it would be irresponsible for people their age—forty-one—to have a baby; and further, "I can't give you a child, as you know. I haven't been lying when I've told you that the power of sex had gone from me."

Traveling together through New Mexico during the summer of 1940, Ernie and Jerry had to part ways when they received news that Jerry's mother had broken her shoulder and needed Jerry to look after her. Ernie took her to the airport. "We are wandering people," he wrote in the column, "and fate hurls us about to odd destinations. We don't know when we will see each other again. When she got on the plane, we both felt a kind of futility, a small desire to travel again, for a little, in the same direction." They were traveling in the same direction, toward mutual disaster, and it came in the early spring of 1941, when Ernie returned from three months in bomb-torn England.

The trip had been a great success for Pyle and the column. It had revived his flagging spirits and had given his writing new energy and increased circulation. There was also the pleasure of returning to a real home: the Pyles had built a house—the first and only one they would ever own—on what was then the outskirts of Albuquerque, and Jerry had seen to its decoration during Ernie's absence. She had looked forward to his homecoming after a long absence on a trip that had horrified her. But there was to be no break from the pressure, no quiet pleasure in their new house with its wonderful view of the mesa. Pyle had to rent a hotel room in which to write by day, so many were the friends stopping by to see him after his long trip. After a short time at Albuquerque, he had to hit the road again to keep the column going: his editors didn't want to lose the new subscribers the column had gained during Ernie's time overseas.

There followed a tortuous year during which Jerry, alone, tried to kill herself by turning on all the gas jets on the stove and closing herself off in the kitchen, and during which, also alone, she almost bled to death in her bed when a stomach ulcer, irritated by alcohol and poor diet, hemorrhaged. On both occasions Ernie dropped the column and stayed at home to care for her. Continuity is the lifeblood of any column, particularly one as personal as Ernie's, but his Scripps Howard superiors were understanding, although many papers outside the chain dropped Pyle for other features during his protracted leaves.

Ernie resumed the column in December 1941, the week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the American declaration of war on Japan. Jerry's stomach had healed, and her health continued to improve under the watchful eye of a private nurse Ernie had hired—or so the nurse and Ernie thought. His letters tell the story. "I've talked with Albuquerque every night for the last four nights—one night twice," Pyle wrote to Cavanaugh on March 19, 1942:

Jerry has been put under opiates for three days. Nurses around the clock again. Just went clear to pot again the last couple of weeks. Fooling everybody in the daytime, and drinking all night apparently. The nurse told me she carried from her room ten empty quart [bourbon] bottles at the end of one week!

Pyle felt himself thinning out, the roving-reporter adventure gone pale; his writing lacked the verve of the earlier years and was now a flat recitation of a city or a region's vital statistics or tourist appeal. Increasingly he relied on his column persona to carry the daily installment, but it, too, had thinned, its tone becoming desperately chatty. Pyle had found the traveling life held endless banality, just as the everyday, rooted life did. Now no amount of road noise could diminish the hum between his ears. Alone, he had much time to think about himself and Jerry—their onetime life together and their lives apart, the wreckage of it all.

Ernie had hopefully sought treatment for his impotence from a group of San Diego urologists in the spring of 1942. This, too, was a disaster and left him convinced his sex life was over forever. The treatments were "agonizing and cruel" and yielded no results. Bitter, he wrote Cavanaugh, "The doctors all say, 'Now get lots of intercourse.' Which is like W. C. Fields' sure cure for insomnia—'Get lots of sleep.'"

Jerry was a difficult person, dismissive in her dogmatic way of others' attempts to scrutinize her. And yet, she reached out for help in her own tortured fashion, assuring Ernie that at last she was on the way to recovery, that she had regained some of her earlier resilience and composure and could begin to put herself back together. There was a time when Ernie would have been only too happy to hear this, only too willing to believe it. But now he was beyond ignoring the reality of their lives by pining for the time when Jerry's inner life had been more in check and his limited powers of comprehension less taxed. Now, in March 1942, he voiced to friends his doubts about Jerry's ever recovering.

After a month of exchanging tortured letters and phone calls with Jerry, Ernie was on the verge of collapse himself. He dropped the column—forever, he thought, or at least until the war was over—and returned to Albuquerque. On April 14, Ernie and Jerry were divorced. Both regretted the move, and yet neither could think of any other solution. Ernie hoped the shock of the divorce would force Jerry to right her life. Remarriage was a possibility, assuming she got busy and solved her problems. Meanwhile, they continued to live together in the house in Albuquerque, and Ernie continued to look after her. Her condition worsened. Jerry, Ernie wrote Cavanaugh on May 5,

has been in a Christ-awful shape this week. Nurse and doctor here almost constantly. Part of it is genuine, part of it self-induced. She hasn't had any Benzedrine since January, but yesterday she pleaded with the doctor and cried like a baby for some. It was so pitiful I couldn't even stay in the room. He told her no, that she had to face it this time right out of her own soul. And she is much better this morning, although still very depressed. She just can't accept the fact that we are divorced and that I'm going away again.

Again leaving Jerry in the care of private nurses, Pyle traveled to Washington to discuss his future with Scripps Howard management, which wanted him to start writing again, perhaps take another foreign trip. Shortly, the government would cease to draft men thirty-seven and older, but for now Pyle was eligible for service. He took the Army physical and was declared 1-A. Meanwhile, the Army's having delayed his induction, he prepared to travel to Britain, this time to report on the training of American troops. While the government processed his travel request, Ernie worked on the copy desk of the Washington Daily News. He wrote to Jerry on May 8 that his friends and former colleagues in Washington were "under the impression that I've gone all to pieces, and damned if they haven't got me about half convinced of it myself." His letter to Jerry continued:

I feel that if I could just run back to Albuquerque and start a life of utter simplicity I would be happy. But I guess I can't, and I have determined not to come back until you have won your great fight. I can't tell you the sadness and almost overwhelming frenzy and depression I've been in these three days; and the feeling that I couldn't live unless I came back to you; but I won't, darling, I'm determined that even should I go clear under, I will not come running back until you have had a chance to do your job under these new conditions. I am confident that you can and will do it; otherwise I would be utterly insane with despair.

Nineteen days later, Jerry's sister and brother-in-law, with the support of Ernie and other family members, took her by train to a sanitarium at Pueblo, Colorado. Jerry was sedated to the point of unconsciousness. Ernie's travel plans were firm by mid-June, and he arrived in New York to await a plane to Ireland. From the Hotel Algonquin, he wrote Jerry a farewell note. The date was June 18, 1942.

Darling—

I am taking off within the hour. I came here because I couldn't stand to go to the Piccadilly without you. I am not excited about going, but do feel a last-minute sense of fatalism or something. I am all alone. Be my old Jerry when I come back. I love you.

Ernie

THE STEADYING POINT

Pyle's was a generation born to calamity. Many a young man born at the turn of the century had fought in World War I, had difficulty finding employment upon his return, had struggled to raise a family during the Depression, and now, in early middle age, watched as a son or sons left home to fight in yet another global war. Pyle had shared in none of this. His parents had blocked his joining the Army during the first war, and he had been steadily and profitably employed throughout the Depression. Because they had no children, Ernie and Jerry were spared both the expense of raising a family and worry over how sons would fare in what promised to be another long, bloody war.

In his seven years of travel, Pyle had stiffly resisted doing pieces on serious matters. Apart from a series on the Dust Bowl and one on public relief in the small town of North Platte, Nebraska, Pyle's dispatches had been mostly free of any but casual references to the economic disasters visited upon millions of Americans in the 1930s. When his editors suggested the North Platte series, Ernie bristled. "I don't like that idea, it sounds too important!" he complained to Cavanaugh.

In the range of options open to him, in his freedom to indulge his restlessness, and in his disconnectedness from community ties, Pyle shared little with his countrymen. By the time America entered the war he was a man so out of step with the times that he despaired of ever finding a place again. In the American way he had equated movement with growth, and circumstances had proved the fallacy of the notion. "Being on the move is no substitute for feeling," Eudora Welty has written. "Nothing is. And no love or insight can be at work in a shifting and never-defined position, where eye, mind, and heart have never willingly focused on a steadying point." The war was to be Pyle's steadying point, and love and insight the hall-marks of his writing. What would make Pyle's war reportage of enduring value would be his decision—and it would be his alone to make—to stop fleeing unpleasantness. In his years as a war correspondent, Pyle would still be on the move, but now the movement would have meaning: the link between the columns would no longer be Pyle and his restlessness but the war and the changes it worked in the men who fought it.

Much as he was a case of arrested maturation, badly as he needed a moral education, Pyle had nonetheless developed considerable skill as an observer and writer. Soon he would find both personal and professional salvation through service to his countrymen, by plying his skills on behalf of the all-consuming effort in which they were engaged. He would become for the first time in his life morally connected to an undertaking of great moment, and he would enjoy the sensation. The war would strike him as an unqualified disaster, not like the great bombing of London on the night of December 30, 1940, had struck him—as something out of a show. Pyle had watched the bombing from the balcony outside his hotel room, and it had all

seemed more like something put on just to look at; like some ultimate Billy Rose extravagance, at last attaining to such proportions of Rose giganticism that it passed beyond the realm of human credence—but still remained a form of entertainment.

Curious sentiments, those, considering that down below people were burning to death and others were losing everything they owned. It was not the sort of thing he could have written after even a month of living with the infantry in North Africa, so quickly would experience burn away his romantic understanding of war.

Like so many Americans, Pyle had been painfully slow to respond to the gravity of events overseas. The war that was now to claim his attention and eventually his life had for so long been an abstraction, something real enough but remote from his personal experience, just as the Depression had been. The man who had been in Death Valley looking for the castle-like home of a desert recluse the day German troops marched into Austria would soon be with American men as they marched into North Africa—and thence to Sicily, mainland Italy, France, and the Pacific.

And Pyle would be especially good at describing a particular kind of soldier with a particular kind of American past. Throughout the war he would insist that a goodly number of the men he wrote about derived their strength of purpose from an upbringing close to nature or from the ties of a small community. His fondest profiles would be of men fresh from the country or small towns, unsullied by the fractiousness and wise-guy posturing of the big cities. It wouldn't be that these men were necessarily better soldiers than their city counterparts, or even better human beings; but they would strike him as somehow more American, or at least closer to what an American ought to be, anyhow.

Such sentiments would hardly be unique to Pyle. The celebration of rural and small-town values and people would be a set theme in much World War II feature writing. But Pyle's affection for such men would be neither a stylistic crutch nor a jaundiced bow to wartime convention. It would be heartfelt, an outgrowth of his own rural past and his years of prewar travel in the United States. Main Street may have been dead, as Bernard De Voto had declared in 1940, but it was to have a bright future in the nation's wartime mythology. And Pyle would have much to do with its resurrection.

A FAMILIAR VOICE

Like millions of men his age and older, my father went abroad during World War II, and my grandparents, still subscribing to the Indianapolis Times, continued to read Pyle's column. Now they relied on Pyle for news of a different sort: they wanted to know how young men like George and other boys from the neighborhood were getting along all those thousands of miles away. Sure, George wrote letters home, but the letters were censored. And the frontline news dispatches—with their breathless leads and action-packed headlines—said so little about the men themselves. Pyle bridged the gap, daily telling the folks at home what was happening to their loved ones across the seas. He told them their young men were changed forever, coarsened by what they had seen and done. Pyle's was the sort of copy few censors bothered to hack away at; in their eyes it was pretty benign stuff. But it had a potency all its own, as thirteen million daily readers could attest.

My father's being overseas didn't prevent his reading Ernie Pyle. By arrangement with Scripps Howard's United Features, Pyle's column ran daily in Stars and Stripes, the newspaper for service personnel. While state-side readers read about the boys overseas, the boys over-seas read about themselves. Almost always they were pleased with what they read: here was a guy willing to share their fate, not because he had to—he was too old for this crap, anyway—but because he wanted to, felt somehow he had to.

A fair number of these young men had read Pyle's column before the war. They were happy to still get their daily dose of Ernie Pyle. It was ironic, though. Pyle's column had inspired in many of them, like my father, a desire to see the country. And what happened? The world went to hell, the Army latched onto them, and their first real taste of travel was to war in Europe or the Pacific. Well, anyway, it was good to read Pyle just the same. His was a familiar voice, sort of like getting a letter from home.

EPILOGUE

Ernie and Jerry were remarried by proxy in early 1943, while Ernie covered the infantry in North Africa. As she had during their travel years, Jerry continued to move in and out of extended periods of depression. Sometimes she wrote Ernie several long, loving letters over a two-week period; at other times she wouldn't write for months. Her drug abuse and heavy drinking continued.

Ernie made two trips home during the war. And in both cases he met with crushing pressure from friends and strangers alike. When he came home for the last time, in September of 1944, his emotions were "wrung and drained" after covering the Normandy invasions and the liberation of Paris. "My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused," he wrote before leaving France. "All of a sudden it seemed to me that if I heard one more shot or saw one more dead man, I would go off my nut."

Shortly after he arrived in Albuquerque, he returned from the dentist's office one day to a scene as bloody as many he had seen at war. Jerry had locked herself in the bath-room and had tried to commit suicide by stabbing herself numerous times in the throat with a pair of long-bladed scissors. Ernie broke down the door to discover Jerry standing before the sink, the bathroom awash in blood. He held her as a surgeon cleaned and sutured her many wounds. Surprisingly, given their severity, Jerry's physical wounds healed quickly, though her emotional ones never would.

Still badly shaken by Jerry's suicide attempt, wanting to stay home but drawn back to war to finish the work he had begun, Ernie began his long journey to the Pacific Theater on January 1, 1945. He died instantly when a sniper's machine-gun bullet pierced his left temple the morning of April 18, on the small island of Ie Shima, near Okinawa. He was buried in a shallow grave between the bodies of two soldiers. According to the newspapers, "That Girl" took the news bravely, but in truth she lost all will to live.

Jerry flew to Washington that summer to accept Ernie's posthumous Medal for Merit, jointly awarded by the Army and the Navy, and to see a preview of Lester Cowan's film The Story of GI Joe, based on Ernie's dispatches and with Burgess Meredith playing Ernie. Seeing Washington again undoubtedly increased Jerry's pain. There were surely many memories of meeting and falling in love with Ernie half a lifetime ago. The candlelight dinners in their first apartment. Parties with the crazy newspaper gang and the airmail pilots from National Airport and Boiling Field. Fires in the fireplace on a winter's evening as she talked Ernie through another blue period. How hysterically they'd laughed about the uniformed chauffeur's having to deliver the White House Christmas card to their shabby little apartment. And that Christmas Ernie had surprised her with a brand-new piano, a baby grand, with a big red ribbon tied around it—the elaborate ruse he'd concocted to get her out of the apartment so the deliverymen could wrestle the piano into the living room. And then his somewhat sheepish announcement that he'd bought it on time. But the payments weren't too much, he'd said, and the dealer would take it back if they were unable to pay. She'd tried to object, really tried to give him hell for that, but she hadn't been able to conceal her pleasure—a baby grand of her own!

During the fall of 1945, not long after her forty-fifth birthday, Jerry, more emaciated than ever, contracted influenza. A short time later her kidneys stopped working. She died of uremic poisoning the morning of November 23 at St. Joseph's Hospital in Albuquerque, where the good sisters of St. Joseph had befriended her during the lonely years when Ernie was overseas, even allowing her to live for a time in a cottage on the hospital grounds. Perhaps it was from watching them that Jerry had decided she wanted to learn to pray, a notion she had mentioned in a letter to Ernie shortly before he was killed and which he had been at a loss to understand. When the sisters of St. Joseph gathered for chapel the evening of November 23, they likely prayed that their troubled friend had finally come to peace, and that her wish had been granted.

All too often our perception of the Great Depression is one of unmitigated gloom, a notion helped along by those duotone archival photos that appear in magazines and on book covers, the tinge of brown accentuating the period's distance from the Kodachrome present. What we forget is that amidst the suffering, everyday life went on, though greatly altered in many cases. We forget that these years were also a time of celebration of things and places American.

The Great Depression was the most amply documented period in American history. Writers and photographers, some on their own and others employed by the federal government, took to the road in unprecedented numbers to record in words and pictures the pulse of America during a troubling time. In its subject matter and tone, Pyle's travel work closely parallels some of the entries in the Federal Writers' Project American Guide series and the life-history interviews Ann Banks collected in First Person America; but with few exceptions the Depression in the pages that follow is a mere backdrop.

For my part, I'm glad Pyle chose not to write directly about the Depression and its victims during these years; I'm glad he wasn't out jamming a thermometer down the throats of the people he came across. We're the richer for that escapist agenda of his, for while part of the America he wrote about has long since passed into memory, we still have a vivid picture of it in his writings.

As I see it, this book amounts to a documentary look at America during an important time in its history. I believe Pyle's dispatches can add to our understanding of the era just prior to America's coming to the fore of world leadership, the time before the war that changed the world forever. During his travel years, Pyle consistently wrote the kinds of stories more conventional journalists ignored. We're left with a richly descriptive record that tells us much about the rhythm and tone of American life in the 1930s, through the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entrance into World War II. It's a highly selective record, for reasons I've discussed, but a rich one nonetheless. Almost fifty years later his rendition of people and places casually encountered is still exciting.

Many mornings over the years I've worked on this book I've awakened with a vividly familiar picture of a place or a person in my mind. One was a vision of New York City on a freezing winter evening, just as the neon signs were coming on. I was looking out the window of a hotel room, watching the colors explode in the darkness. Another was of lushly forested mountains, their green tops lost in rain clouds. Yet another was the face of an old black man, seated in a restaurant booth, talking about his not having had the chance to meet Franklin Roosevelt.

Sometimes I was momentarily at a loss to distinguish whether the vision was mine or Pyle's. Invariably I concluded that I was dreaming of a scene from a Pyle piece I'd read the evening before, probably for the third or fourth time. But there were times the illusion persisted that I'd been to this or that place, experienced the very thing I saw in the dream, met that exact person and had that conversation with him.

Morning torpor accounts for some of the confusion, but the greater explanation lies in Pyle's considerable narrative gift. The people and places in his word portraits stick with me and have a way of planting themselves in my conscious mind at unlikely moments. It's snowing outside my window as I write, and I'm thinking of Pyle's description of a snowstorm in the Cumberland Mountains. In a way I can't quite explain, I'm curiously animated recalling his lines. And my animation has to do with that American restlessness I spoke of earlier, a vague discontent with here and now that would be nicely eased by lighting out for the territory.

I'm going to do just that. My father and I are going to pick up what was once Route 66 in Illinois and drive to California—the southern route, through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. America has been my home for thirty-two years, but what I've seen of the country has been limited to what little you can see from the window of an airliner at thirty thousand feet, or through the windshield of a car on the interstates that so often circumscribe the indigenous.

One of Pyle's biggest gripes was that from what his contemporaries read in the newspapers or heard on the radio, they could easily get the idea that American life centered in New York and Washington and sometimes Los Angeles—that nothing in between mattered. At great cost to himself, Pyle worked hard arguing for the specificity of person and place as an important part of our American past and present. And today that's more important than ever. Meager assumptions are what we get from most media reports about what's going on "out there." I'd be hard pressed to prove it, but I suspect our immersion in this so-called information age has more blunted than enhanced our sense of the country's teeming diversity of geography, local custom, and individual character.

I have a hunch vestiges of the country Pyle described are still out there, and I want to see them. Reading his pieces over and over—sifting, selecting, editing—I came to realize the extent to which I've been affected by those meager assumptions I speak of. I realized, too, how deeply set in me is the American romance of movement—not as a way of life, but as a periodic tonic. It's more than time to get out of town, clear my head, and listen to a few American voices speaking unself-consciously in their American places.

So we're going to take the back roads, my father and I, and eat in small-town diners and maybe sleep in some of the remaining tourist cabins. It will be a leisurely trip.

We're going to fixate upon the journey itself, not the destination. I'm going to take a copy of this manuscript along and refer to it as we go. I want to measure the country as it is now against Pyle's rendering of it almost half a century ago. I guess that will make this doubly a book of nostalgia—mine and Pyle's. That's fine with me; my restlessness can always use a little structure.

My father tells me old Route 66 will be hard to find. Interstates have replaced most of the old route, sometimes overlapping the same right-of-way, in other places taking a whole new course. Sections of the old pavement remain, but it will likely take some doing to stay on course. We'll probably have to ask questions of many strangers.