ROADSIDE REST

Ernie Pyle's Tales of WWII Eclipsed His Days as a 'Tramp with an Expense Account'

One would have to be at least 60 years of age to have read Ernie Pyle daily in the original. That would exclude about three-fourths of today's Americans. Yet books continue to appear of the times and works of the slender Indiana farm boy felled in combat near Okinawa on April 18, 1945. The latest biography, sympathetic, insightful, and readable, is Ernie Pyle's War, by James Tobin. The author correctly focuses on the unexampled Pyle phenomenon: the one mainstream American writer of ordinary beginnings who with no more than a battered portable typewriter managed to make World War II meaningful to the home front.shared his sadness and exhilarations, his daydreams and funny stories, his ornery moods and nonsensical musings, his settled prejudices and deepest meditations. In 1935 Pyle was merely a skilled newspaperman. By 1942 he had become the consummate craftsman of short prose. Simultaneously, he shaped a mythic role for himself: an American Everyman ready for war."

This is not a criticism, but because he seemed to appear the very instant that wartime wives, children, and parents desperately needed him, Ernie's seven-year stint as a syndicated vagabond columnist during the 1930s goes little noticed. Tobin sums it up: "A tramp with an expense account, he explored cities, towns and crossroads villages in 48 states, Alaska, Canada, Hawaii, and Central and South America. He got out of his Dodge convertible coupe to talk with thousands of people soda jerks, millionaires, death-row inmates, movie stars, cranks, cowboys, strippers, sheepherders, strikers, bosses, promoters, sculptors, mayors, hookers, teachers, prospectors, tramps and evangelists."

"The actual Ernie remained a bundle of contradictions and anxieties, pressured by deadlines and perpetually worried. But 'Ernie Pyle' came to life as a figure of warmth and reassurance, a sensitive and selfdeprecating, self-revealing, compassionate friend who It happened that these words were fresh from an evening's reading when recently I flew down Interstate 8 some 50 miles east of Yuma and chanced to glance leftward into the desert. And right there, I thought I saw the faint ruin of "The Snake Farm." Ernie feared snakes to the brink of phobia. Yet one day in 1937 he sought out Mr. and Mrs. Rudy Hale, whose business was harvesting rattlers. At that time, the Hales estimated for Pyle that since their semiretirement to run a little roadside service station near Tacna, along Interstate 8, they had caught 20,000 rattlesnakes. Generally they got 50 cents a snake, but once made $7 on a rare Black Mountain specimen. In a cold sweat, Pyle listened to the Hales relate their creepy anecdotes. Then he retreated to the nearest telegraph office to file his report: "Hale had caught rattlers as big around as his leg. He had caught them so big that they would overpower him and pull his arms together, and he'd have to throw them away from him and pick them up and try again.

"Both Hale and his wife would let rattlers crawl all over them. She even carried them around in her pockets. Neither of them had ever been bitten, but her brother had. He was bitten five times, quick as a flash, by a nest of sidewinders. "Hale said you mustn't be thinking about anything else when you're picking up a sidewinder. Lots of times when they saw a rattler coiled they would just ease up and slide a hand through the sand under it, and lift it right in the palm of the hand, still coiled.

"Rudy had only one sidewinder on hand the day I was there. It was in a roofless concrete tank behind the house. He took me out for a look after dark and turned on a dim little electric light. He took a stick with a nail in it and got the sidewinder hooked over the nail, and had lifted it almost to the top of the tank.

"Just then his little red dog stuck its cold nose up my pants leg. I let out a yell and landed somewhere way over the other side of Gila Bend, and never did go back after the car."

Probably Ernie was remiss in not adding a disclaimer: Amateurs should not attempt to pick up and handle rattlesnakes, whose venom is potentially lethal. If the sage of Indiana were still writing, he might interview an ecologist on the admirable role of the rattlesnake in the natural world.

Ernie got lost in Boston. He inspected a tropical leper colony. He counted the buckets of concrete that went into Hoover Dam. He roamed the withered Dust Bowl, and he hiked to the top of the Rockies. He fell passionately in love with Albuquerque (where today his tiny home is a branch library). He crawled onto the Golden Gate and asked windy questions of the bridge builders. He did 19 columns in a row about "the wild vastness" of mountain and desert where the boundaries of Arizona, ColColorado, New Mexico, and Utah converge to form a cross on the map.

And then when his ordinary American readers left their ordinary homes to accomplish extraordinary deeds in foreign lands, he went along to explain it all in human terms. Of course people still want to do books about him.