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Ernie himself was never happy at a desk. Despite his shyness, something drove him on to move around, meet new people, see new things, get his facts firsthand. For a while he wrote a successful column of aviation chitchat. In 1935, after a severe attack of influenza, he went to the Southwest to recuperate and wrote a dozen travel pieces about his trip. "They had a sort of Mark Twain quality and they knocked my eyes right out," remembers Scripps-Howard's Editor in Chief George B. ("Deac") Parker. When Ernie proposed that he become a permanent roving reporter, Mellett and Parker agreed.
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 in the mining camp of Platinum, near the Arctic Circle. He went to Molokai and wrote about the lepers. He flew around South America. And for most of the five years he worried.
He worried about his health ("I claim to have been sick in more hotel rooms than any man on earth"). He worried himself into repeated attacks of nervous indigestion over approaching interviews, finally got so he never made an appointment more than a few hours ahead. He grew moody and morose when some Scripps-Howard papers failed to print his column every day. Time & again he decided that his stuff was no good, that he should have stayed on the farm in Dana.
But at the 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, in the U.S. And he had become a master of the art of putting people at their ease and drawing them out, observing and remembering the significant detail, and reporting his findings in vivid, folksy, readable language. However little he himself may have suspected it, he was ready now for his great assignment.