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âI Wanted to Get Out âŚâ
ROOTS AND RISING, 1900-1935
OUTSIDE THE LITTLE TOWN OF DANA, THE TABLE-FLAT PLAIN OF WESTERN Indiana rises ever so slightly to form what natives still call âthe mound farm,â a small cluster of white buildings on eighty acres of grain. The thin boy who lived atop this modest elevation in the early 1900s gazed over fields whose peaceful monotony was interrupted only by the little oasis of Dana a mile to the northwest. Only one image would have captured his attentionâthe tiny silhouette of a wagon or an automobile traversing the horizon on State Highway 36. In other words, the landscapeâs most notable feature was the means to escape it. In one way this seems fitting, for the goal of escape possessed the boy from an early age. In another way he never escaped this place.
âThat long, sad wind âŚâ
Sadness verging on bitterness always colored Ernie Pyleâs memories of his early years. When he was a traveling newspaper columnist in the 1930s, he once found himself on a remote country road where he felt the dry breeze of his childhood brush his face, awakening a haunting mental picture of small men straining against circumstance and time.âI donât know whether you know that long, sad wind that blows so steadily across the hundreds of miles of Midwest flat lands in the summertimeâŚ.â he wrote in his column. âTo me [it] is one of the most melancholy things in all life. It comes from so far, and it blows so gently and yet so relentlessly; it rustles the leaves and the branches of the maple trees in a sort of symphony of sadness, and it doesnât pass on and leave them still. It just keeps comingâŚ. You couldâand you doâwear out your lifetime on the dusty plains with that wind of futility blowing in your face. And when you are worn out and gone, the wind, still saying nothing, still so gentle and sad and timeless, is still blowing across the prairies, and will blow in the faces of the little men who follow you, forever.â This was âjust one of those small impressions that will form in a childâs mind, and grow and stay with him through a lifetime, even playing its part in his character and his way of thinking, and he can never explain it.â1
âMelancholy ⌠worn out ⌠gentle and sad ⌠little menââthis was a description of Pyleâs father, a carpenter at heart, who farmed because he could not make a steady living from his true vocation. âHeâs very meek and no trouble,â Will Pyleâs son once told friends. He might have been summing up Willâs life.2 Ernie depicted him in later writings as a kind but hapless figure, âthe man who put oil on his brakes when they were squeaking, then drove to Dana and ran over the curb and through a plate-glass window and right into a dry-good store.â Willâs face would break into a brilliant, sparkling smile when he was pleased or amused. But he spoke little, even to his family. âHe has never said a great deal to me all his life, and yet I feel we have been very good friends,â Ernie once told his readers. âHe never gave me much advice, or told me to do this or that, or not to.â3
The formidable Maria Taylor Pyle, not Will, filled the role of family protector and leader. Always called Marie, she stood no taller than her husband, but she gave the impression of being much the bigger of the two. She was a woman of ferocious dedication to the practical tasks at handâraising chickens and produce, caring for her family, serving her neighbors. She âthrived on action,â her son remembered. âShe would rather milk than sew; rather plow than bake.â Ernieâs closest boyhood friend recalled her as âa woman of unusual characterâshe was husky of build, [with] red hair and florid complexion, an unusually hard worker, even for a farm woman, a strict disciplinarian, very considerate of other people.â4 Devout and abstemious, she liked a joke and laughed easily and heartily. She could doctor a horse and play the violin. When the neighborsâ children were born she always attended their mothers, and those children grew up to obey her as readily as their parents. With adults she could be devastatingly blunt. âMarie Pyle didnât wait to tell my dad what she thought of him,â recalled Nellie Kuhns Hendrix, who grew up next door and was close to the Pyles for many years. âIf he done something she didnât like, sheâd tell him about it.â5 No one doubted that, as Ed Goforth, another neighbor, put it later, âShe wore the pants in the family.â Goforth remembered arriving one morning to help Will with some work. âShe looked over at Mr. Pyle and said, âWill, take Ed and go shear the sheep today.â Well, Ed and Will sheared the sheep that day.â6
She raised her only child, whom she always called Ernest, with a mixture of toughness and tenderness. One of Pyleâs strongest memories captured the contradiction. On a summer day when the boy was four or five, he was walking behind his fatherâs plow when he stopped to fetch some wild roses for his mother. Cutting the stems with his fatherâs penknife, he suddenly saw a long snake approaching swiftly through the grass. He screamed, bringing his father on the run, and Will sent him back to the house a half-mile away. Ernest came to a patch of high weeds rising between himself and the house. Fearing another snake might be lurking there, he called to his mother, who appeared at the door and summoned him to come ahead through the weeds. He froze and began to cry, whereupon Marie came and whipped him for his apparent stubbornness. âThat evening,â her son wrote thirty years later, âwhen my father came in from the fields, she told him about the crazy boy who wouldnât walk through the weeds and had to be whipped. And then my father told her about the roses ⌠and the snake. It was the roses, I think, that hurt her so. My mother cried for a long time that night after she went to bed.â For the rest of her life she retold the story on herself, as if to expiate a sin.7
The other woman in Ernieâs life possessed a will to match his motherâs. She was Mary Taylor, Marieâs older sister, who lived with the family until she married a neighbor, George Bales, at the age of forty, when Ernest was six. âTall and straightâ with âmore energy than a buzz saw,â she dominated Bales as Marie dominated Will Pyle. Uncle George was likable and smart but he was a dreamer, preferring grand, unrealized schemes to the myriad small tasks necessary for success on his farm. So it was Mary Bales who put in the long days of labor, raising enough chickens, hogs and cattle to get by. As a boy, Ernie saw a great deal of her. Later, after Marie Pyle and George Bales died, Aunt Mary and Will Pyle lived on together in the Pyle farmhouse.8
Though not prosperous, the Pyles were respected, hardworking, churchgoing people. To their son they passed on decency and compassion, sensitivity toward others and a capacity for hard work. Yet there was some obscure unhappiness in this small family that planted in Ernie the seeds of a lifelong melancholy. It drove him to flee not only Dana but all spheres of safe, straitened routine, to assay large achievements far beyond Danaâs field of vision. The exact sources of these drives can only be guessed at. But they had something to do with Ernieâs enduring image of his small, silent fatherâand perhaps his uncle, tooâtoiling with little pleasure or worldly success in the shadow of the two strong-willed sisters. In Ernieâs mind, his father would always be the âlittle manâ straining against âthe wind of futility.â And so, Ernie feared, might he become such a man himself. The image persisted in his life and writings. His low points would always be shadowed by the fear that he was nothing but an ineffectual man striving mightily to no purpose, and governed by the whims of a powerful woman. Yet the endearing character Pyle established for himself as a writer, and the subjects of his legendry in World War II, were common men transcending the grinding circumstances of everyday existence. Will Pyleâs memory cut both ways.
Ernie grew up as a keenly intelligent child in a home and a town where intellect and big dreams were not especially esteemed. Homely, small for his age, and fussed over by a strong-willed mother, he tended toward self-pity in a world of boys who all seemed bigger, more easygoing, and blessed with fathers who cut a wider swath than Will. Being a âfarm boyâ instead of a âtown boyâ exacerbated his itchy sense of inferiority. âI was a farm boy,â he wrote nearly thirty years later, âand town kids can make you feel awfully backward when youâre youngâŚ. Even today I feel self-conscious when I walk down the street in Dana, imagining the town boys are making fun of me.â9 While the other kids in the schoolyard wrestled and roughhoused, âI always sat under a tree and ate my apple.â10 His closest friend, a boy one year older named Thad Hooker, often urged Ernie to try sports. But Thad would be pushed away with a bitter âAw, hell, you know Iâm no good at games.â11 Because his voice cracked when he spoke loudly or excitedly, he developed a lifelong habit of clearing his throat before speaking, then using a low and even tone to lessen the chance of a humiliating squeak. At some point he grew anxious about his teeth, cleaning them constantly with twine.12 Intelligence and insecurity fought in Ernieâs mind, pushing him to the role of the outsider looking in, unsure whether to test himself against the big boys or feign disinterest and wish them all a short trip to hell.
Certainly a farmerâs life held no appeal for him. When Ernie was nine, Will led him into the fields and showed him how to use the harrow and plow. From that point on, Ernie remembered, âI worked like a horse,â an animal he came to despise. He once estimated he rode five thousand miles to school and back on the Pylesâ nag, and he trudged for many more miles behind horses in the fields. That was more than enough. During his years of constant cross-country travel, he refused to stay at farmhouses that rented rooms to guests, saying simply, âIâve had enough of farms.â âHorses were too slow for Ernest,â Will remembered later. âHe always said the world was too big for him to be doing confining work here on the farm.â13
He cherished his glimpses of that wider world. Whenever a post-card arrived in the Pyle mailbox, he would snatch it and paste it into a scrapbook. He read as much as he couldâmostly newspapers and adventure tales. On a trip with his father to Chicago about 1910, he got his first impression of the big-city newspaper trade amid the noisy traffic of autos and street vendors. âI remember as a kid ⌠how impressed I was with the ads I could see on the sides of huge trucks hauling loads of newsprint for the Chicago Herald-Examiner,â he once told a friend, âthe pictures and names of the writers, and the colored pictures of the comic-strip heroes.â14
One species of hero just then emerging into public consciousness held a special allure. In Ernieâs early teens, the walls of his bedroom sprouted sketch after sketch of race carsâthe boxy, big-wheeled behemoths of racingâs earliest days. His inspiration was the Indianapolis 500, then in its infancy but no less redolent of masculine glamour than it is today. One year his parents allowed Ernie to attend the race. He was enthralled by the giant crowd lining the two-and-a-half-mile brick oval, the spectatorsâ black Model Tâs jamming the grassy infield, reporters rushing in and out of the speedwayâs five-story âpress pagoda,â the howl of engines and the glimpse through the smoke of drivers in their helmets and goggles. The annual race, which he witnessed several times, excited his imagination for many years. Even in his thirties, he daydreamed of racing at Indianapolisâa clue to the yen for glory that stirred beneath his self-deprecating facade. âI would rather win that 500-mile race than anything in this world,â he confessed in 1936. âTo me there could be no greater emotion than to come down that homestretch, roaring at 130 miles an hour, those 500 exhausting, ripping miles behind you, your face black with grease and smoke, the afternoon shadows of the grandstands dark across the track, a hundred thousand people yelling and stomping their excitement, and you holding up your proud right arm high in the Speedway tradition of taking the checkered flagâthe winner! I have dreamed of myself in that role a thousand times.â15
Not surprisingly, the boy who longed for speedway heroics also longed to join the Army when, in 1917, President Wilson committed American forces to the Allied cause in World War I. Too young for service by more than a year, Ernie watched in frustration as other Dana boys left for Europe, including Thad Hooker, who was permitted to leave school early in 1918 to join up. At the high school commencement that spring, a flag-draped chair took Thadâs place among the graduating seniors. âI could hardly bear to go to commencement, I was so ashamed that I wasnât in the Army, too,â Ernie recalled later.16 In October 1918 he enlisted in the Naval Reserve, hoping to see action eventually. But that hope burst only a month later, when the warring powers announced an armistice.
With no war to escape to, Ernie searched for alternatives. After the prospect of battle, college seemed a pale second choice, but at least it promised a route away from the farm. So, in the fall of 1919, he left for Bloomington with a single suitcase and an aimless ambition. âHe always had big ideas,â said Nellie Kuhns Hendrix, for whom Ernie, ten years older, was a big brother figure, telling the neighborhood youngsters of faraway places and imagined adventures. âHe wanted to do things.â17
âWe aspire to become journalists âŚâ
The warâs end brought Indiana University its biggest enrollment to date in the fall of 1919: 2,229 students, more than twice the population of Dana. Among the young veterans flooding the campus was Paige Cavanaugh, a wisecracking iconoclast from the small town of Salem, Indiana, who would become Ernieâs lifelong surrogate brother. The two could be serious or raucous together, and they shared many likes and dislikes, though Ernie never could share Cavanaughâs contempt for war veterans who paraded their special status. âErnie had a hero complex,â Cavanaugh said later. âHe and I both had a good eye for phonies around the campus, and we used to sit around and mimic them. But nobody who had been overseas could do wrong in Ernieâs eyes, no matter how big a blowhard he was.â18
Cavanaugh later enjoyed claiming credit for launching Ernieâs newspaper career, if only by suggesting they enroll in journalism as sophomores because the course was reputed to be easy. In fact, Ernie had expressed a strong interest in the field as a freshman, but university rules prev...