Word: pyles
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From Platinum to Molokai. For the next five years, with "That Girl" by his side (small, pert, blond Geraldine Siebolds Pyle was a Government girl when he married her in 1925), Columnist Pyle roved the highways & byways of the Western Hemisphere. He crisscrossed the continent 35 times, wore out three automobiles. He wrote about anything that took his fancy: soap, dogs, doctors, the art of rolling a cigaret, hotel bellhops, hotel rooms, how to build a picket fence, his troubles with a stuck zipper in his pants. He went to Alaska and wrote about being shaved by a woman barber...
These were sound journalistic groundings. But when he entered Indiana University in 1919, "Shag" Pyle had not decided much about his career except that he did not want to spend his life "looking at the south end of a horse going north...
...hell of a good copyreader," recalls his friend Lee Miller, who now, as managing editor of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, sometimes refers to himself as "vice president in charge of Ernie Pyle." Editor Lowell Mellett, who still calls Pyle "one of the best desk men anybody ever saw," promoted him to be managing editor in 1932. But other Newsmen in the dingy city room on New York Avenue never dreamed that quiet, competent, friendly Ernie Pyle would ever be famous. "A good man, but not much drive," is the general recollection...
...same time Ernie Pyle, the professional, was shrewd enough to capitalize on most of these same worries. In his column he kidded himself, dramatizing every little frailty, foible and misadventure. Gradually he created a sort of prose Charlie Chaplin, a bewildered little man whose best intentions almost always led to pratfalls. His readers loved it. People who recognized a fellow spirit, people who wanted to mother and protect him, wrote to him by the hundred. By 1940 he probably knew more people at firsthand or by mail than any man, with the possible exception of Jim Farley...
...Pyle sat through the interview in a daze, went back to his tent and brooded for hours. Finally he cabled his New York office that he could not write the Darlan story. Instead he wrote about the stranger who had died in the ditch beside him. For days he talked of giving up and going home. But when the shock wore off, he knew for sure that his job was not with the generals and their strategems but with the little onetime drugstore cowboys, clerks and mechanics who had no one else to tell their stories...