Word: pyles
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...past six months Ernie Pyle has padded around North Africa, talking with infantrymen, artillerymen, pilots, truck drivers, nurses, doctors, and writing a uniquely refreshing column in the identical manner in which he had written about the U.S. for many years...
Several weeks before Tunisia fell to the Allies, Reporter Pyle went into battle with the infantry. He was shelled, bombed, strafed, machine-gunned. Once he had, for a whole day, the sole attention of a German sniper. In one day's fighting, he wrote, thousands of shells passed over his position, and one German dud bounced so close he could have fielded it like a hot grounder. He returned to the rear a little greyer, slept almost continuously for three days, then sat down to write a fistful of columns. Examples of his stuff...
...afternoon Lieut. Duncan Clark of Chicago, one of the press censors, came to cheer me up." (Pyle at this time had what he called "African Pip" or "Puny Pyle's Perpetual Pains.") "I was busy killing flies. . . . Lieut. Clark said he had discovered . . . that flies always take off backwards. Consequently if you'll aim about two inches behind them, you'll always get your fly on the rise. So for the next few days I murdered flies under this scientific system. And I must say that I never missed a fly as long as I aimed behind...
...Pyle's columns are distributed by the United Feature Syndicate, Inc. Pyle's salary is approximately $25,000 a year, including a percentage of the varying amounts newspapers pay for his columns. He does not pay his own expenses. (He lives frugally, especially since he has been in Africa; recently his expenses have run about $15 a week.) When he left for North Africa in November he had 42 papers on his string, with a combined circulation of 3,347,765. This week he had 122 papers, with a combined circulation...
Sand and Cigarets. More satisfying, probably, to Ernie Pyle is the wide acclaim that has come to him. He gets thousands of fan letters from big and little people. The Charlotte, N.C. Civitan Club sent him a letter of appreciation and a bag of sand, after he had said facetiously in a column from sandy North Africa: "If somebody will just send me a little sackful of sand for Easter, everything will be wonderful." From admirers (members of the Indiana Legislature, the National Press Club in Washington, and just plain people) Pyle has received over $6,000 worth of cigarets...