A Quiet Place of Powerful Tribute: The Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in Dana, Indiana

Dana, Indiana is farm country, the kind of Midwestern land where fields stretch to the horizon, where a state route below the blazing summer sun feels like it’s going to roll forever through endless rows of corn and soy all the way to the Pacific, and when you stop the car and pull over you feel the blanketing heat and the silence is almost deafening.

The birthplace home of the great journalist and war correspondent Ernie Pyle is in Dana, located next to two WWII-era Quonset huts that house a museum about Pyle and his career. Its official title is the Ernie Pyle WWII Museum. It’s a quiet, out-of-the-way kind of place and all the more powerful for being so. The absence of noise and activity focuses the attention on Pyle and the world he came from—this rural town in Vermillion County in western Indiana.

A short distance outside of town is a small roadside park named for Pyle: the Ernie Pyle Rest Park. An old covered bridge is located here, and there is also a replica of the monument the 77th Infantry Division dedicated to Pyle on the spot where he was killed on the island of Ie Shima. It has the same inscription as the original: “On this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy–Ernie Pyle.”

I visited the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum on Sunday, June 4, 2017. My mind was crowded with Hoosier history before I even reached Dana. I spent the previous two days visiting Indiana historical sites. My first stop was the James Whitcomb Riley Boyhood Home and Museum in Greenfield. The next day it was the Eugene Debs Home in Terre Haute, followed by some time driving around the city seeking out the streets where Theodore Dreiser and his family had lived during their time in town. The next morning I drove around Terre Haute one last time and admired the Vigo County Courthouse before heading further west towards Dana.

I had soaked up a lot in those first two days. There was Riley’s home, hand-built by Riley’s father and full of original family items, and the museum next door was full of the poet’s artifacts. I also located Riley’s famous swimming hole and spent time staring into that water, recalling his famous poem and summoning Riley’s rural childhood. Then there was the Debs home, also chock full of original furniture and memorabilia, and redolent of his days of Midwestern socialism and the old union cause, a world of train whistles in the smoky morning and workingmen arguing in taverns and Debs shivering in his jail cells in Illinois, West Virginia and Georgia. Then I walked and drove Terre Haute, thinking of Dreiser and his siblings searching for chunks of coal by the railroad tracks to burn during cold weather.

But with Ernie Pyle I felt history coming closer to home. My father is a Marine combat veteran of World War II. I grew up hearing about Ernie Pyle and the war. The war was part of our family history, a kind of shorthand and set of references and allusions that surfaced in conversation. The war had profoundly shaped how my parents viewed the world, as it did for millions of others in their generation not only in the U.S., but also around the globe.

Places like Anzio, the Corregidor Tunnel and Normandy were familiar references. Many of my father’s friends had served. His two brothers served, as did other relatives. This monumental cataclysm was also a touchtone of popular culture. During my childhood and youth in the Seventies and early Eighties it was still common fare for TV shows and movies. Most of the Presidents during my upbringing were WWII veterans—LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush. As a kid I learned of Jack Kennedy and the PT-109. Jimmy Carter had been at Annapolis during the war, training to be a naval officer. In short, the war had ended twenty-one years before I was born, but it was still everywhere, and much of our world had somehow sprung from it, been shaped by it, or somehow affected by it.

These memories surfaced as I drove through the rural countryside, which also evoked another dimension of the war. Tens of thousands of men who served came from obscure places across the country like Dana. I was reminded of my mother’s small rural hometown of Richland, Missouri, a place marked by WWII as local boys enlisted and nearby Fort Leonard Wood brought business and change to the region.

This hot and sunny June Sunday seemed an appropriate time to be there. This was Ernie’s Pyle’s native soil, where he felt the sun beating down as he worked the fields. The home and Quonset huts are located just across some railroad tracks in Dana. The site’s isolation and stillness felt alive with the past. The words “home country” came to mind, the title of a collection of Pyle’s columns from his days as a roving reporter during the Great Depression.

To visit the Ernie Pyle site in Dana is to experience the strongly contrasting yet complementary dual nature of his life. On one hand, here was a man who emerged from obscure origins and rose to the heights of fame as a war correspondent, even becoming the subject of a movie made when he was still alive, but was uneasy with the attention. He came from a place where family roots and local ties can run deep but spent much of his life on the road, serving as the nation’s first ever aviation columnist, then as a roving reporter who wandered both the U.S. and Central and South America before becoming a war correspondent. He was a witness first to the local and regional life about him, then to the staggering variety of America and eventually to the devastation that was World War II. He saw the American Century unfold.

And yet there was always a centeredness in him that seems to have emerged from his time in Dana. He often returned here for recuperation and family visits. He grew up among farm people and country townsmen, and he had a knack for connecting with everyday citizens, a capacity for relation honed and deepened traveling thousands of miles across the country during the Depression years and talking with everyone from business executives and prominent politicians to construction workers and strippers. He knew fame, but those with fame and fortune weren’t the ones who intrigued him. It was always the uncommon common men and women of the world who held Ernie Pyle’s attention.

For me, the site’s setting captures these dual aspects of Pyle’s life. The house and Quonset huts are located on one side of railroad tracks running through Dana. In the distance are tall grain elevators along the tracks. Beyond the house is the quiet main street of Dana. It’s peaceful here. But occasionally a freight train will roar past the site, and the presence of those railroad tracks and the tumult of the passing train evokes the wider world that has always called to small town boys and girls, the means of travel and escape, the promise of large cities and distant places. Here is the museum that is testimony to his service as international war correspondent, and here is the rural home he was born in, so evocative of small town life and farm culture at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ernest Taylor Pyle was born south of Dana on August 3, 1900 on the Sam Elder farm where his parents were tenant farmers. His mother was a vibrant woman who enjoyed the farm life; his father, who also worked as a carpenter, was just the opposite. Ernie shared his father’s opinion of farming, later writing of his days as a plowboy “anything was better than the south end of a horse going north.” Ernie was a shy and sensitive farm kid who felt uneasy around town children and insecure about his teeth and voice. He racked up miles walking behind the plow but dreamed of a different life. He avidly read newspapers and adventure stories and devoured accounts of faraway places. He collected postcards from friends and family members on the road and pasted them in a scrapbook.

A trip to Chicago whetted his appetite for further travel. He also became interested in race cars and attended the Indy 500. He would go several more times and dreamed of winning the race. He graduated from the local high school and enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve during World War I, but his training ended when the Armistice was signed in November of 1918. The following autumn he enrolled at Indiana University where he worked in student journalism and left just shy of his degree to take a job with the LaPorte Herald in Indiana. After just a few months on the job he was lured away to the Washington Daily News, a Scripps-Howard paper. In 1925 he married Geraldine “Jerry” Siebolds, a fellow Midwesterner from Afton, Minnesota.

Beginning in 1928, Pyle began a stint as the nation’s first ever aviation columnist, which had him on the road. A switch to a desk job as managing editor of the Daily News was miserable for Pyle, and he eventually persuaded higher-ups at Scripps-Howard to let him go on the road as a roving reporter—a dream job for Ernie Pyle. He and Jerry roamed all over the forty-eight states, the territories of Hawaii and Alaska as well as Canada, Mexico, Central and South America. He did this kind of work for much of the 1930s.

Pyle loved the job, but also wearied of writing six columns a week. His first turn as a war correspondent came when he traveled to England to cover the Battle of Britain in November 1940. He tried to enlist in the Army after the Pearl Harbor attack but was rejected, so he continued working as a war correspondent, covering the North African landings, Sicily, D-Day, the fight across France and the liberation of Paris. His reporting earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1944. He traveled to the South Pacific in January of 1945 to cover the fighting there but was killed by machine gun fire on the island of Ie Shima on April 18, 1945. During the war his column had become virtually mandatory reading for millions across the country. His death was like a personal loss for many readers and service personnel.

A key part of Pyle’s success was his simple and straightforward writing style, as well as a deep understanding of everyday life and people. He was interested in regular men and women and spoke directly to his readers, who felt they were with him on his travels through Depression-era America or overseas in the fighting. Pyle would often mention or describe particular servicemen in his columns, giving not only their names but often identifying their hometowns and sometimes even street addresses. His writing is fascinating and makes for rewarding reading.

The Ernie Pyle site has its own interesting history. In 1976, Pyle’s birthplace home—he was born there and lived in this house for about a year—was relocated from a farm outside of Dana to its current spot by the railroad tracks. Later the Scripps-Howards Foundation donated the Quonset huts, which had been in storage, and the museum was created in 1995. It was operated as a state historic site by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources until 2009, when the state of Indiana, seeking to trim its budget, shuttered the site, despite intense opposition.

The state removed a number of Pyle items from the site and transferred them to the state museum. The museum and house were reopened under the control of the Friends of Ernie Pyle, the non-profit organization that continues to operate and promote the site. The state gave ownership of the site to the Friends of Ernie Pyle in 2011 and it was formally renamed the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum on January 1, 2012. For those who care about this history and want to preserve it, we can be grateful that the dedicated board, membership and volunteers rose to this challenge and keep the site running.

The tour begins in the rear Quonset hut. Visitors make their way through one hut and into the other through a connecting breezeway. I was the only visitor when I arrived, although a group of about four or five people arrived about a half hour later. Janice Duncan, a docent and lifelong resident of Dana, welcomed me to the site. Visitors see a brief video presentation about Ernie Pyle. It concludes with the screen rising and a bust of Ernie Pyle gently illuminated. I was moved by this and found that it set the tone for the kind of quiet retrospection and appreciation a museum of this kind seeks to foster. One of the first exhibits shows manikins of two soldiers sitting together on packing boxes playing cards in a dugout. A field telephone, heavy machine gun and other weaponry are nearby. A grenade is on hand if needed. A pinup picture is on display. The display accompanies a reprint of one of Ernie Pyle’s columns featured in the Dana News entitled “Coffee Time.”

Examples of Pyle’s columns are found throughout the museum, which serve to highlight Pyle’s remarkable writing and also emphasize his connection to both the everyday soldier and the folks back home. The museum could be said to work on two different levels. It tells the story of Ernie Pyle, but as he was a chronicler of the everyday soldier, a journalist writing “the first draft of history” as the old saying goes, it also helps to tell the story of World War II’s GI’s. Pyle was a link between these men and the home front. “This isn’t just about Ernie Pyle and his memory,” said Steve Key, president of the Friends of Ernie Pyle. “It’s also about the accomplishments of a whole generation.”

One section of the museum is accessed through doors and a ramp similar to those on an LST like LST 392 that Pyle used to land on the beach at Normandy on D-Day +2. Immediately beyond the doors is one of the site’s most powerful exhibits—a reproduction of a section of beach that Pyle encountered and wrote about in his powerful columns called “This Is The Way It Was” and “Normandy Tides” that appeared respectively on June 16 and June 17 of 1944.

In his column “Normandy Tides”, which I featured here on Buckeyemuse.com in June 2017, Pyle describes the detritus of war left along a section of beach as a small dog wanders lost among the wreckage. The items in the sand powerfully evoke those dead and wounded who landed on the beach. It is a moving and somber meditation on mortality and the cost of battle as Pyle describes the objects he sees, which include family photos sticking up through the sand. The dog makes his way through discarded shells, ammo boxes, medical supplies, cigarette packages and other items strewn near a landing obstacle.

One exhibit captures the death of Ernie Pyle—a soldier stands next to a sign like the one used on Ie Shima that initially marked the place where Ernie Pyle was machine-gunned.

One of the most powerful displays pays tribute to Captain Waskow and Pyle’s famous piece about him. Captain Waskow served with the Texas National Guard. He was killed in Italy. Pyle’s column on Waskow, which is one of his most well known, describes the men bringing Captain Waskow’s body back to the base and the men seeing his dead body in the moonlight. The column is read aloud by actor William Windom, and then a curtain is raised and a light slowly illumines a manikin of the captain’s body on the ground as another soldier leans over him. The effect is sobering and powerful, and the silence was all encompassing as the presentation came to an end. All of us who watched it got up in silence and moved on to other sections of the museum. Janice Duncan told me that the presentation on Captain Waskow is the one usually most commented on by visitors to the museum.

There are also displays honoring those from Dana who served in World War II—the list is long—and photos of service men and women from the area. In addition there is an excellent display of division patches from the war.

Some items reflect the popular standing of Pyle. There is a Nestle’s ad featuring him that includes a message from Pyle encouraging home front folks to donate blood.

There is a Zippo lighter in honor of Ernie Pyle that commemorates the occasion when Pyle wrote the word “Tokyo” on the bottom of an officer’s lighter on the USS Cabot. The officer had asked Pyle where he thought they were going since new orders were about to be given and the men were feeling a current of excitement and anticipation. Pyle scratched the word on the man’s lighter and asked him not to look at it until after the orders were released a half hour later. The mission’s destination was Tokyo. It is a mystery whether or not Pyle really knew where they were going, if this was just a hunch, or just an acknowledgement that Tokyo was the ultimate destination in the Pacific Theater.

Pyle’s status was such that he was the subject of a movie made during the war, as noted earlier. One of the items on display is an advertisement for The Story of G.I. Joe, the film about Pyle starring Burgess Meredith. There is also a letter from Meredith about meeting Pyle. Meredith liked Pyle and described him as witty.

In addition, the museum also has two war-related items from his time on Ie Shima. One of these is a captured Japanese rifle that Pyle mentioned in a column: he was with the Marines when they captured two Japanese soldiers and this weapon. This was Pyle’s first up-close glimpse of the enemy in the Pacific.

Another is a captured Japanese flag from Okinawa signed by Pyle and radio newsman Norman Paige of Oklahoma. Pyle’s sudden death is brought home to the viewer by two photos, one of the terse written orders given by an officer to men to retrieve Pyle’s body and another of the telegram to Pyle’s father from Navy Secretary Joseph Forrestal informing him of the correspondent’s death.

Other treasures abound. The museum has a copy of what is believed to be the last known photo of Pyle alive taken by Harry Momi of the 77th Division’s 305th Infantry. There is also a model of the USS Cabot, the ship that transported Pyle into the South Pacific, and there is also the Scripps-Howard Foundation Library, a collection of books on WWII named in honor of the organization that donated the Quonset huts to house the museum.

There are a number of items on display that actually belonged to Pyle or are reproductions of items of his. There is a silver and turquoise ring given to his longtime friend Paige Cavanaugh that is exactly like one Pyle owned and that was buried with him. Actual items that belonged to Pyle on display include his razor and case, which was with him on Ie Shima, and his sewing kit. Reproduction items include his passport, press credentials and a knit wool cape similar to one he often wore. Ernie’s passport reflects the itinerary of a globetrotting war correspondent. The consular stamps include Northern Ireland, England, Bermuda, Morocco, and Tobago.

Of special note is the Purple Heart posthumously awarded to Ernie Pyle. It is rare for civilians to earn the Purple Heart, but Evelyn Hobson, curator of the Pyle site from 1978 to 1997, applied for and accepted the medal of Pyle’s behalf. Congress awarded the Purple Heart posthumously to Ernie Pyle on April 23, 1983.

One aspect of the museum I especially enjoyed was seeing photos of Ernie Pyle with the servicemen. These men meant so much to him. The museum features several photos of a Franco-American Marine from New Hampshire named Urban Vachon. Pyle became friends with the young Marine, who reminded him of the infantrymen drawn by Pyle’s artist friend Bill Mauldin.

But his great love for these fighting men also meant that this life took a toll on him. Pyle was a tough but sensitive man who was deeply depressed by   the amount of death and suffering he saw. He longed to escape the battlefield, but when back on the home front he was often frazzled by the demands on his time and the incessant attention. The irony is that he had to return to the fighting to escape the circus of celebrity. He had his own struggles in his personal life.

For a number of years he and Jerry had been happy together, and she often  traveled with him as he roamed the country as a roving reporter, but she grew tired of this life, and the couple eventually purchased a house in Albuquerque, New Mexico. However, the marriage was troubled. Ernie’s work still meant he was gone for long periods of time, and at times he drank heavily. Jerry eventually developed mental health issues and became alcoholic. Like many famous people, Ernie Pyle had his problems outside of the spotlight.

The museum concludes with a gift shop area near the exit door in the upper Quonset hut. Along with books, postcards, refrigerator magnets and other typical gift shop items, there are also a number of GI Joe D-Day special edition Ernie Pyle action figures! I made sure to purchase one of these. I also purchased an out of print copy of Lee Miller’s photo biography of Ernie Pyle. Lee Miller, a Seymour, Indiana native and long time friend of Pyle’s, also served as Pyle’s editor and wrote books about him after the war. I want to note that in addition to a number of good books on Ernie Pyle and World War II, including collections of his writing, there are also out of print books and collections related to Pyle as well.

Janice took us over to the Pyle home for a tour, and this provided a striking contrast to the WWII theme of the Quonset huts. The house is small and the upstairs is closed off. The rooms are decorated in the style of the early 1900s and evoke the rural Indiana world in which Pyle was born and reared.

There are four rooms on the first floor visitors can see. They are a kitchen, a bedroom, a parlor, and a dining room. Pyle was born in the front room set up as a bedroom. There are also four items in the house that belonged to the family: a clock that belonged to Pyle’s Aunt Mary, a checkerboard, an egg basket and the black rocker in the parlor.

Two items of particular interest include the portrait of Pyle’s parents over the fireplace and a quilt from the 1920s bearing names of local people.

This quilt is from a church in the nearby town of St. Bernice. People paid twenty-five cents apiece to add a section to the quilt with a name, then the quilt was raffled off. It’s an attractive and interesting piece of local Americana.

There are a number of photographs in the home of Pyle: Pyle with his goddaughter Vondra Bush; Pyle as a grown man alongside his father; Pyle as a child on a rocking horse.

One item I found of particular interest was a picture of Dana from the 1940s. The main street of town is lined with cars and the impression is of a small but vibrant rural community. It reminded me of my mother’s hometown of Richland, Missouri. Dana and Richland, like a lot of small rural towns, can seem like ghost towns, quiet places where memories of busy Saturday afternoons when farm families came into town are mostly the inheritance of older residents. Dana suffered a serious fire in 2006 that caused serious damage to its small downtown.

A noteworthy feature of Dana is the remnant of the Ernie Pyle mural on the building opposite the museum and home. This is from mural painted in 1984, but the building has been deteriorating. The current owner has been working to stabilize the building, which is more than 140 years old, but he has had to replace much of the brickwork and is repainting the side of the building and wants to have the mural redone. The small remaining section of the mural was badly faded. A new mural seems like it could be a great project for local art students or a regional arts organization.

The other people on the tour left before I did, and I spent some time talking with Janice about the museum and Dana. She told me that the local bank was about to close and that she and her husband had to drive about twelve miles just to get to a grocery store. In a follow up phone call for this post, she confirmed that the bank did close. She acknowledged that the town has seen some hard times like a lot of smaller American towns. The current nature of agribusiness has had an impact. “Now you might have one farmer working an area that was once worked by two or three farmers,” she said. Despite the challenges, she said that people in town work to keep the community going, and cited in particular the work of the Dana Boosters, a local civic organization.

Attendance at the site varies, said Mrs. Duncan, noting that on some days there might be four or five people or upwards of fifteen to twenty. But despite the Museum’s location off the beaten track location and the loss of state support, the Friends of Ernie Pyle are a determined organization. I spoke with Steve Key, president of the Friends of Ernie Pyle, in a follow-up phone call to my site visit. Key, who is also the Executive Director and General Counsel for the Hoosier State Press Association, an organization that represents Indiana’s paid circulation newspapers, speaks highly of the board members, docents and other volunteers who work to keep the site going. “The people who live there (in Dana) are the heart and soul of the organization,” he noted. The group definitely feels a sense of urgency. “If we don’t work to preserve his (Pyle’s) legacy, he’s going to fade into history”, said Mr. Key. The site is currently funded by donations, memberships, and proceeds from the gift shop.

As of this writing—summer of 2018—the legacy of Ernie Pyle has received a much-needed boost. Rodney Strong, state commander of the Indiana American Legion, is working with his organization to raise $30,000 to cover part of the $90,000 needed for replacement siding on the Ernie Pyle birthplace home. In 2018 his birthday—August 3—has been designated National Ernie Pyle Day not only in Indiana but throughout the United States, thanks to the efforts of Indiana state legislators, U.S. senators and especially the Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation, which was the organization pushing for the recognition. The Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation is devoted to educating journalists, students and the broader public about Ernie Pyle’s contributions to American culture. To name one of their other accomplishments, they recently helped establish a Ernie Pyle Journalism Scholarship at the University of New Mexico.

The goal of reaching the broader public is also important to the Friends of Ernie Pyle. Because “we want to promote the legacy of Ernie Pyle, we have to do outreach beyond the building and museum,” said Mr. Key. “If we want to preserve the house and museum and make it better as we go along, then we have to reach out to future generations.” He said one way of doing that is by reaching students. “We would like to create an educational unit that focuses on his writing style.”

He added that Pyle’s clear and accessible prose could be a model for students as they develop their writing skills and also serve as a way for them “to learn about Ernie Pyle and the relationship between those on the front lines and those on the home front. His connection with readers was so powerful.” Pyle influenced other journalists, he added, one of the best known being the legendary travel reporter Charles Kuralt.

For those who want to donate to the Friends of Ernie Pyle, you can access information about the organization by clicking on the link in the Resources section at the end of this article. You can also send your donation to Friends of Ernie Pyle, Box 345, Dana, Indiana, 47847. The group’s Federal Tax ID is 35-1866228. You can become one of the Friends with a $100 donation; however, anyone who makes a donation to the group under that amount will still receive the group’s newsletter. Any amount is welcome.

Those who want to visit the site should be aware that it is open on a seasonal basis. As always, check their website and call if needed to verify that the site is open before visiting.

When I spoke with Steve Key, he repeatedly mentioned the importance not only of Ernie Pyle, but of the generation who survived the Great Depression and fought the war. When the war came, these everyday citizens faced the burden. “This was a job that needed to be done,” he said.

They did the job. Ernie Pyle had a job to do too, and he was determined to stay at his post until the end of the war. He easily could have stayed out as the fighting wound down in Europe, but he couldn’t back out–not with another theater of the war still active. He always wanted the people back home to know what it was like for their boys overseas. Walt Whitman once wrote of the Civil War that “the real war will never get in the books.” Ernie Pyle understood that. He knew that there are things about war that are unexplainable, that can only be known to those who experience it. There were things that he wouldn’t or couldn’t say, but in the best of his writing–such as his piece on Captain Waskow–he helped readers then and helps readers now to understand how high the price was to fight and win this war.

In a quiet, out-of-the-way place in Indiana, there’s an old farmhouse and two Quonset huts that tell the story of a mighty generation and one of their greatest chroniclers. It’s a story of democracy, of the courage and endurance displayed by everyday men and women and a singular and extraordinary writer who emerged from the humblest of origins. It’s a story that’s authentic and valuable and deep in the American grain.

If you’re in the area, be sure to visit the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum. It will be time well spent.

Patrick Kerin

Resources:

Site visit to the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum on Sunday, June 4, 2017.

Follow-up phone call with Janice Duncan on July 23, 2018.

Phone call with Steve Key on July 24, 2018.

Ernie Pyle World War II Museum website:

https://www.erniepyle.org/

Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness To World War II by James Tobin. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1997. Originally published by the Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster.

An Ernie Pyle Album: Indiana to Ie Shima by Lee G. Miller. William Sloane Associates, New York, 1946.

Destination Indiana: Travels Through Hoosier History by Ray E. Boomhower. Photography by Darryl Jones. Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, 2000.

At Home With Ernie Pyle by Ernie Pyle, Edited and with an Introduction by Owen V. Johnson. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2016.

Dictionary of Midwestern Literature: Volume One–The Authors. Philip A. Greasley, General Editor. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2001.

A Death In San Pietro: The Untold Story of Ernie Pyle, John Huston, and the Fight for Purple Heart Valley by Tim Brady. Da Capo Press, Boston, 2013.

Archived online articles regarding the state of Indiana closing the site in 2009.