Archivist, Historian Takes Us Along on Trip to Ernie Pyle’s Past

EDITORS NOTE: Andy Chandler is a presidential historian and a museum archivist at Candles Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute and the Ernie Pyle Museum in Dana Ind. Raised in Taiwan and Haiti as the son of missionaries, Andy graduated from Ball State University with a Masters in classical languages. He now resides in Parke County where he enjoys archery, travel and photography. In March, he became the first person to visit all forty presidential gravesites when he got as close as the public was allowed to Jimmy Carter’s grave in Plains, Ga. This is the first of what will be two parts.

“Think About Something Specific”

“You’ve got to think of a context . . . you don’t just think about their faces, you got to think about something specific, something you’ve done together.” Captain Miller stated, to Private Ryan in a scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan.  
 
Ernie Pyle had many different sides, and here in Indiana, he’s known as that hard-working writer who was the son of a farmer, worked hard at IU at the student paper and eventually went onto fame and became a national saint when his life was prematurely ended in the Pacific. Often, that’s where the narrative ends.  

I recently found myself in Albuquerque, N.M. for the double reason of not just visiting the archives where many of his and his wife’s papers are found, but also to get context.  

Something specific.  

The location for the city of Albuquerque is in the middle of the Rio Grande Rift Valley. Over time, the valley filled with sediment and became farming country flanked by the Sandia Knolls to the east and Western Highlands to the west.  

It was here in the fall of 1940, Ernie and his wife Geraldine “Jerry” decided to settle down. In Ernie’s words, “[s]o at last we decided to acquire a base . . . A sort of home plate, that we could run to on occasion, and then run away from again.” 

They already had friends there. The editor of the Albuquerque Tribune, Ed “Shafe” Shaffer and his wife, Liz, lived there. Ernie would trust Shafe to execute many of his personal dealings, and in 1943, while Ernie was in Africa, Ed was the proxy when Ernie and his wife remarried after a temporary divorce.  

Their neighbors would eventually become good friends. Earl Mount, and his daughter Shirley Mount-Hufstedler, became regulars at the Pyle home out on the outskirts of town. Ernie took Shirley under his wing like a protege. Eventually, Shirley went on to become an attorney, federal judge and the first Secretary of Education for the Carter Administration.  

Sadly, Pyle didn’t live long enough to see much of the home base he and his wife had. He left to cover the war in England and Africa from 1942-1943. After a brief furlough in the winter of 1943, in 1944 he left to cover the war in Italy and France, only to come back for a few months in the fall of 1944. In December of that year, war weary, but still facing subtle pressure from readers and even in a letter from Eleanor Roosevelt herself, he decided to make one last trip to the Pacific where he was killed by a Japanese machine gunner during the Okinawa Campaign. 

Sadly, Jerry never recovered from Ernie’s death, and she passed away seven months later from what was then stated as a stomach ulcer. However, her nurse, Mrs. Streger, who we know so much about the Pyle’s life in Albuquerque from, hinted it was a broken heart. The local papers at the time, mentioned how she finally got her wish to spend Christmas and the Holidays with Ernie, in heaven. 

Nearly 80 years to the month of Jerry’s passing, I arrived in Albuquerque, not just as a tourist, but as a representative, researcher and archivist for the Ernie Pyle Birthplace and WWII Museum in Dana, IN. In archives and research, it’s important to network, see collections and fill in missing gaps in the narrative. I hoped, that by walking in his footsteps, seeing the places he saw, visiting the places he visited and holding the mail he received, I would take Captain Miller’s advice and think of a context, something specific.