IU is sending a group of students to Europe to follow the steps of one of my heroes, Ernie Pyle.
How much do I like Ernie Pyle? I've got a million books about him. Oh yeah, and a G.I. Joe figurine of him on my desk. I have taken mounds of shit for that, so you don't need to pile (pyle?) on. I also visited his birthplace in Dana, Ind. It was a bit out of the way of where I was going. I was driving from Chicago to Oxford, Ohio, but decided to go to Dana, then on to visit a girl I had a major crush on in Bloomington. Good trip, long drive.
IU's j-school is located in Ernie Pyle Hall, so it'll be great to visit the places he reported. They'll go to London, to see where he reported on the Blitz with Ed Murrow; they'll also go to Normandy, where Ernie joined invading troops. There he cut his chops as a war correspondent. He wrote about normal, sometimes mundane things, and his dispatches brought a sens
e of closeness for parents worrying about their sons. He wrote a story about Army cobblers and another about the troops who gathered discarded M-1 Garand rifle pieces and repaired broken weapons. He also survived strafing by U.S. fighter planes, which mistook a column of Americans for Germans.OK, this isn't a deal-breaker, for me. It's just really cool. I don't know how excited I'd be to go on a field trip to Emporia, Kan. to see where William Allen White grew up.
UPDATE: I'm an idiot. I was just reading this over, and it sounds like Ernie's first war dispatches were from Normandy. Of course, that's untrue. After covering the Blitz, he joined Bradley's troops in North Africa. Then he covered the invasion of Sicily, where he wrote perhaps his most famous column, "The Death of Captain Waskow."
2 comments:
William Allen White was born in Emporia, Kansas and grew up in El Dorado, Kansas.
Duly noted. Thanks. I should have been more specific, since I meant to imply that he worked in Emporia after purchasing the Emporia Gazette newspaper.
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