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Connecting with World War II Correspondent Ernie Pyle in Dana, Indiana

3/1/2014

9 Comments

 
A Memorable Encounter in a Small Indiana Town
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The memory of this "encounter" is fresh and nurturing now, eighteen months later. I was traveling through Indiana in my RV, hauling a motor cycle. I had just spent a week at a campground near Bloomington, where I had grown up more than half a century before. As I was driving along I was thinking of my father and especially of a man named Ernie Pyle whom he introduced to me and my brother. Pyle was an Indiana University graduate and the greatest journalist of the Second World War. He had died in the war before we learned about him, but in my father's memory his reports from the front still lived.

Driving through forests and fields and small towns along Route 36, in the late afternoon. I particularly remembered Dad reading Ernie Pyle's immortal account of "The Death of Captain Waskow." Pyle wrote the article "At The Front Lines in Italy" on January 10, 1944. Here are passages from Pyle's report:

In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.
Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.
"After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me.
"He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He’d go to bat for us every time."
"I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair," another one said.
I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.
Pyle goes on to describe the parade of mules that came down the trail with the bodies of dead soldiers. Then the body of the beloved Capt. Waskow was laid on the ground. One-by-one men came forward and paid their respects. "God damn it," said one. "I sure am sorry, Sir," said another. The most eloquent tribute came from a soldier who said nothing at all:
[He] squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.
I remember the emotion welling up in my father's voice as he told the story of Capt. Waskow, especially the account of the soldier holding the dead captain's hand. He wanted his children to be fully aware of just how powerful Ernie Pyle's account was. "Just imagine being loved that much," Dad said. 

Picture
All color photos in this posting are by Bill Youngs.

Ernie Pyle and Capt. Waskow and my father were in my mind as I was driving through Indiana corn fields when I saw in the distance a solitary gas station. I was slowing down to fill up when I spotted an electronic sign in front of the station. 

Now I have a theory that we historians have our own Greek god, Clio, who still appears once in a while to enrich our lives and profit our work. I sensed that force a few years ago in New York City when I felt the presence of the newsboys who gathered on the street outside the elder Theodore Roosevelt's home on the night that he died of cancer; and I felt it again last Spring while attending a slavery conference in Barbados when school children sang a wonderful new song about their ancestors coming from Africa. In my very limited experience, Clio appears in those moments when (1) we are deeply engaged in a project, and (2) we may need some information or insight that is not immediately evident. Clio may have been on duty that afternoon outside the town of Dana, Indiana, where it turns out, Ernie Pyle was born. At any rate, here was a sign, beckoning me.

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What was an "Ernie Pyle Festival" I wondered, and so after gassing up I followed Indiana 71 a short distance off the main road to the little town of Dana.  From what I could tell everyone had gathered at the town center for a street fair.
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There must be thousands of these town festivals across the country in any year complete with corn dogs and amusement rides. Dana offered these attractions, and much more: the main event turned out to be an auction to raise funds for the local Ernie Pyle World War II Museum:
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I joined the crowd.
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I was impressed by the community spirit: the affection in the audience for Ernie PYLE was palpable. I decided to make a contribution to the museum -- and to my own collection of historical artifacts by bidding on a first-day envelop with an  Ernie Pyle image and stamps.
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Evening was coming on, and I needed to get back to my RV and seek a camp ground. But on the way out of town, I paused at the Ernie Pyle house and museum. They were closed because, presumably, anyone connected with the displays was at the street fair and auction.  Here is the house with the museum in a Quonset House in the background.
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Outside the museum was a plaque with another of Ernie Pyle's famous statements about the soldiers in the war. A few months later I was at West Point giving a talk on "The Army and the National Parks" and visiting with a friend, Major Ryan Shaw, a Military Academy instructor and veteran of the Iraq War. I wanted to mention the Ernie Pyle memorial, and I asked Maj. Shaw to read the lines that follow for use in my talk. I like the recording so much that I am including it here, confident that Ernie Pyle would have been pleased.  Click below for the reading by Ryan Shaw. The image follows.
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A few minutes later I was on the road again, driving west on Route 36, deeply moved and profoundly inspired by the little festival in the little town celebrating the life of the great man.
• For the full text of Ernie Pyle's article on Capt. Waskow, click here.
• To visit the web site for the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum, click here.
• Indiana University hosts a wonderful web site on Ernie Pyle including a a selection of his articles in print version and also as readings by Owen Johnson. Click here.

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9 Comments
Tom Cundiff link
3/2/2014 03:27:17 pm

Howdy,

I'm one of the directors and a military historian on the board of the Ernie Pyle WWII Museum in Dana, IN. Thank you for your kind words. I hope you will stop again on your way through and when you do, there's a phone number on the front door. IF no one is there, call it, and I promise you I will be there in 10 minutes to give you a personal tour. I'd be happy to do so.

Sincerely,
Tom Cundiff, Director
Ernie Pyle WWII Museum
www.erniepyle.org

Reply
Cindy Taylor-Matuse
2/5/2015 11:02:10 am

Mr. Cundiff, thank you for taking care of this museum. I do wish you would change the following sentence in your website: "The house in which Pyle was born was rescued from demolition in the mid-1970s and restored by an upstart organization which became the Friends of Ernie Pyle." As Ernie was not born in this house, but in the tenant house where his parents, Aunt Maria and Uncle Will lived. That line was used so the house wouldn't be destroyed as the tenant house was destroyed shortly before this house was saved. They continued to live in that house until Ernie was about 1, when my great great grandfather, Lambert Taylor, moved them into his home - The Mound. I remember how very upset my Grandpa, Samuel Taylor, was when they used that line at the dedication, as he and Ernie were cousins, and he knew the truth. It's been several years since I visited this museum, and it was a very nice memorial to him, but it was not where he was born, and he never lived there. Thank you.

Cindy Taylor-Matuse

Reply
Lacey Sipos
6/27/2014 02:48:16 am

Greetings! After reading your blog about Ernie Pyle I asked a few of our friends from Indiana if they had heard of the festival,or of Dana, In. One of our friends is from Cayuga. Apparently not that far from Dana and has indeed, heard of the Ernie Pyle Festival.

Reply
Owen V Johnson link
2/5/2015 10:47:19 am

The website I've listed (http://mediaschool.indiana.edu/erniepyle/) includes a considerable amount of material relating to Pyle. Included are 40 of his written columns from World War II, which you can also listen to with me reading.

Reply
Bill Youngs link
2/5/2015 11:23:56 am

Owen, I just checked out that Ernie Pyle website at IU, and it is terrific -- very well designed and your readings are excellent. In fact, I will edit this post to include a link to the site.

Reply
Tom Cundiff link
4/7/2015 04:21:57 am

There has been on going controversy about just where Ernie was born. What is definitely known is that in neither the 1900 or 1910 Census or Tax records is there any record of a Tenant House. The tax record indicates the presence of only one building on the Elder farm at the time. The Elders who owned the farm lived in Dana in a mansion that still stands today. There is also the sworn testimony of Mrs. Angeline Parr, the midwife's daughter, who at 17 years old at the time of Ernie's birth, arrived on the day after the birth to see the newborn child. She provided sworn affidavits that yes, Ernie was born in that house and indeed goes even further to say that the downstairs parlor was made into a birthing room and it was there that Ernie was born and where she saw the child but one day old.

I tend to discount the memories of distant relatives who had themselves to have been either very tiny or not yet born at the time. Remembering a structure that came into being in the time of their own childhood, but that didn't exist at the time of Ernie's birth is something of a common occurrence that historians have to deal with. One must judge things and ask, "is it likely that a small child not yet born at the time could have such a definite memory of something that occurred before their time? Are they relying on the failing memory of their own aged relatives?" These are but a few of the questions that pop into the mind of a historian writing history.

For myself, I'm satisfied by the records of the Census Bureau, the Vermillion County Tax Records, and the affidavit of Mrs. Parr who went to such trouble in 1975 when she was over 90 years of age to provide sworn testimony. All of these things indicate to me, and indeed to the Board of Directors of the Friends of Ernie Pyle, that Ernie was indeed born in the house preserved at the location of the Ernie Pyle WWII Museum.

Reply
Cindy Taylor-Matuse
4/7/2015 10:48:03 am

Thank you for your reply. There was a reason the name was changed from Ernie Pyle's Birthplace to the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site before being renamed again. Bob Bales who knew Ernie and Aunt Mary Bales also wrote about it in his book (Ernie Pyle: A Hoosier Childhood Hardcover – May, 2002). He specifically addressed this issue. Aunt Mary had told Bob how she was there when Aunt Maria went into labor, and how Uncle Will had to go get the doctor, and about the delivery.

And another former Dana resident, Ralph Hixon, who has since passed, took my father and myself to the place where the old tenant house stood before being torn down prior to this home being named the Ernie Pyle Birthplace back in 1983.

I have yet to see his census record saying that he was born in that main house though, as census records don't record that information but in the 1900 Census, Ernie hadn't been born yet and Uncle Will and Aunt Maria lived alone, next to the large Peer family with their servant. In the 1910 Census, he was living at the Mound in his grandfather's home, which Aunt Maria inherited when my great great grandfather died.

I have no home to save from being torn down, and I need no tax money to preserve said home. But I am just a family historian who has looked for, and found the truth regarding my cousin and my great aunt and uncle.

As far as a Vermillion county tax record goes, I haven't seen any to verify or not verify. But I can say a woman of 90 can have memories enhanced as people recite to her what she may or may not have said. As you stated yourself, "are they relying on the failing memory of their own aged relative". Oh, and when Aunt Mary died in 1960 her memory was still very sharp, as she stayed with my parents, and went through old family photos identifying all of them to be wrote down.

Reply
Tom Cundiff link
4/7/2015 12:23:54 pm

As I have said, the Vermillion County Tax Records show only one building on the property in 1900. I am aware of Bob Bales writings. For me the records I've indicated are the best record.

Reply
Pyrodynamo link
11/1/2023 05:46:31 am

Hi tthanks for posting this

Reply



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