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One reason that Ernie Pyle has been able to report this little man's war so successfully is that he loves people and, for all his quirks and foibles, is at base a very average little man himself. He understands G.I. hopes and fears and gripes and fun and duty-born courage because he shares them as no exceptionally fearless or exceptionally brilliant man ever could. What chiefly distinguishes him from other average men is the fact that he is a seasoned, expert newsman. 'His dispatches sound as artless as a letter, but other professionals are not deceived. They know that Ernie Pyle is a great reporter. Young would-be journalists could search far for a better textbook than his life and writings—a profitable study both of skills acquired and handicaps overcome.
Old Dobbin Succumbs. Young Ernie, nicknamed "Shag" for his pinkish, shaggy hair, was a born listener. Too small and bashful to play much with the other kids, he liked to sit around and hear the grown ups talk. What he heard he remembered.
Observant and curious, he pasted in a scrapbook every picture postcard that came to the Pyle house. And he had a solid respect for facts. As a schoolboy, assigned to write a composition about a visit to the county courthouse, he reported; "Many interesting statistics were brought out in the examination of the assessment sheets. It was found that Old Dobbin has completely succumbed to the invasion of the automobile. The total value of horses listed in the county is $297,096, while that of automobiles is $398,322. The average horse is worth a fraction less than $72 and the average auto is slightly above $330. Dobbin still has the advantage of numbers however, as there are four horses to every automobile."
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."
He signed up for journalism because he had heard it was a snap course. The high spot of his college career was a trip to Japan with the Indiana University base ball team. No athlete, he thumbed his way to the coast, worked his passage across the Pacific as a cabin boy. A few months before he was to graduate, his restlessness grew too much for him. He quit school and went to work for the La Porte, Ind.
Herald-Argus. Four months later he moved on to Washington and a job on the News.
There he stayed, except for a brief interlude in New York on the late Evening World and Post, until 1935.
"He was a 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 now.