Scripps-Howard’s Columnist Eleanor Roosevelt once last week led off her Day with a few words of praise for another Scripps-Howard writer. Said she: “I don’t know whether any of you are reading about Ernie Pyle’s trip to England with as much interest as I am, but I have read everything since he left. . . .”
Until last week Ernie Pyle, an inconspicuous little man, with thinning reddish lair and a shy, pixy face, was not celebrated as a straight news reporter. Once, for a few years, he was managing editor of he Washington News against his better judgment, distinguished himself by putting the arrest of Hauptmann, kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby, at the bottom of page 1. But five years ago Ernie left Washington, went to New Mexico for a rest. He sent some informal stories to the News about things and people around him, soon got a roving commission from Scripps-Howard to write about whatever caught his fancy. His itinerant column now runs in 18 Scripps-Howard newspapers, 26 others. Ernie has put some 150,000 miles behind him in the Western Hemisphere—including Alaska, Hawaii, South America.
Once Ernie picked out a typical relief town in Nebraska, wrote ten columns about it. Once he did a notable piece about his difficulties with zipper pants. Whenever Ernie takes a vacation, editors are apt to reprint it.
Never since he started traveling had Ernie had a place he could call home. He just left a few things with a friend here, a few more with a friend there. But early last year he bought a lot in Albuquerque, N. Mex. (Grumbled Lee Miller, Scripps-Howard syndicate editor: “I don’t know what he’ll use it for.”) A few weeks ago his house was completed. So he dropped by Washington to confer with his bosses, and few days later he was on the high seas, bound for Lisbon, thence by air to Britain.
Ernie Pyle went to London to cover World War II as a tourist, to write about it as he used to write about the summer wind that blows across the prairies, about folks in Guayaquil, El Paso, Kalamazoo. He had been there just four days last week when Nazi bombers turned the city into a lake of fire—and overnight turned Tourist Pyle into a war correspondent.
From a hotel room high above Britain’s blazing capital, Ernie Pyle last week sent one of the most vivid, sorrowful dispatches of the war. “Some day,” he wrote, “when peace has returned to this odd world, I want to come to London again . . . and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges. And … I want to tell somebody who has never seen it how London looked on a certain night in the holiday season of the year 1940. . . .
“It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire. . . . The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. . . . The sky was red and angry, and overhead, making a ceiling in the vast heavens, there was a cloud of smoke. . . .
And now & then, through a hole in that pink shroud, there twinkled incongruously a permanent, genuine star—the old-fashioned kind that has always been there. . . . These things all went together to make the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known.”
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