No one comes by accident to Dana, a dot of a place that takes up less than half a square mile of Indiana’s cornfield sprawl. It has a bank, a tavern, a beauty parlor, a post office, an empty lot where the last grocery burned down, and 500 residents, maybe. Those who find themselves here have cause.
The usual reason anyone not from Dana comes to Dana is to visit the Ernie Pyle museum. But if you have no memories of World War II, you may not recognize the Pyle name, which is a problem for Dana and too bad for you. Ernie Pyle, once a peerless war correspondent — the bard of the grunt — deserves your notice.
Two years ago, the state of Indiana cut the Ernie Pyle site loose from the government fold to save a little money; the attendance was too low and the site too remote, it said. But even before announcing its decision, the state very quietly relieved Dana of Pyle’s typewriter, passport and other choice artifacts, without so much as a courtesy call to the local group dedicated to honoring a neighborhood boy who made good.
That local group, the Friends of Ernie Pyle, is now counting on donations and gift shop revenue to operate the site, which still has a lot to offer. If you’re lucky, one of Ernie’s friends — a farmer named Phil, maybe, or a beautician named Cynthia — will tell you the story of a native son once so beloved that Hollywood made a movie about him, as well as the hard-luck follow-up of the hometown museum that bears his name.
“You can’t buy a newspaper or a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas here anymore,” said the farmer, Phillip Hess, who is 61 and an Army veteran. “It’s Ernie Pyle. That’s the only identity, really.”
Dana is learning the familiar lesson that the famous are not forever so; names slip from collective memory, to be replaced by other names also destined for the tip of our tongues, and then gone. Who remembers, say, Wheeler and Woolsey, the wacky comedy team of the 1930s; or Irvin S. Cobb, a cigar-chomping humorist as well known as Will Rogers in his day; or the Dionne quintuplets, international sensations.
But Ernie Pyle was not just famous; he mattered.
Pyle was a slight man of uncommon empathy who gained some fame as a roving national columnist for the Scripps Howard news service. His popularity then skyrocketed during World War II, thanks to plainly worded dispatches from overseas that put readers in the mud beside exhausted, homesick G.I.’s, bracing for the next burst of combat.
His most famous column, from Italy, described the bodies of soldiers being carried down a mountain by mule, including that of a beloved young captain named Henry T. Waskow. As Pyle watched in silence (“You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions”), Captain Waskow’s comrades took turns saying goodbye.
The last of them held the dead man’s hand. Then, Pyle wrote, he “reached up and gently straightened the points of the Captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.”
Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize, had tea at the White House, appeared in various advertisements, and was played by Burgess Meredith in “The Story of G. I. Joe,” a movie based on his dispatches. But in April 1945, shortly before the movie’s release, Pyle was killed by gunfire on a remote Japanese island; he was 44. President Harry S. Truman issued a statement that read like a hero’s eulogy.
Some 30 years later, the farmhouse in which Pyle was born was moved to downtown Dana from the countryside and declared a state historic site; they threw a parade. Before long, so many Pyle artifacts had been amassed by Evelyn Hobson, its live-in curator at the time, that the state and the Friends of Ernie Pyle began planning an expansion.
The contribution of two Quonset huts from the Navy and $280,000 from the Scripps Howard Foundation led, eventually, to the grand opening of an interactive visitor center in 1998. Visitors to Dana left the museum feeling as if they’d just been with Ernie, over there.
Within a few years, though, Indiana found itself struggling with a budget crisis and made cuts to the staff and hours at the Pyle site, which was about the only thing separating Dana from obscurity. These cuts either led to or were justified by the site’s low attendance of fewer than 1,800 visitors a year.
Then, in September 2009, state officials removed many central artifacts from the Pyle center without telling Ernie’s local friends; all the items were state property, but still. They took, among other things, Pyle’s typewriter, passport, jacket, press certificate, khaki cap, cigarette lighter (etched with “E.P.”) and a personal letter from Eleanor Roosevelt.
We are not going to apologize for the movement of our own property,” said Bruce Beesley, a vice president for state historic sites at the Indiana State Museum. He added that the items were overdue for curatorial rest, but that this was delayed because of the grief “we knew we were going to catch” in Dana.
That December, three months after the selective housecleaning, Mr. Beesley and his boss, Kathleen McLary, came to the Pyle center to inform the Friends of Ernie Pyle that the museum would no longer be a state historic site. And if the county or some other entity did not step up to take over the center, the state would auction off the house.
“I just sort of come loose on her,” recalled the beautician, Cynthia Myers, who is 54. “If you shut the doors, people don’t come.” After the meeting, she added, “I went home and cried.”
In private meetings and at a public hearing in Indianapolis, the Friends of Ernie Pyle argued that the site cost the state less than $10,000 a year (the state’s estimate was closer to $40,000 a year), and that many artifacts had been donated with the understanding that they would be displayed in Dana.
“I certainly can’t say that we’re going to have 70,000 people ever come to Dana in probably five years,” Mr. Hess, the farmer, said at the hearing. “But the people who come, come on purpose, and the experience they get is rich and rewarding. Half the people leave in tears.”
Joining in the objection was the Scripps Howard Foundation, which had given the state that $280,000 gift for the Dana site just 15 years earlier. “We were extremely disappointed,” Mike Philipps, the foundation’s president and chief executive, said last week. “Unfortunately, we made the gift and the gift is what it is.”
The state won, of course. It now has a much-enhanced Ernie Pyle display at the state museum in Indianapolis that features some of the items removed from the exhibits in Dana, including Pyle’s typewriter and lighter.
Mr. Beesley said Pyle’s story receives more exposure at the state museum, which attracts about 200,000 visitors a year. “How many years at Dana would it take to reach that same number of people?” he asked.
This time of year, admission to the Ernie Pyle museum is by appointment only, though it will be open Friday, on Veterans Day. Phil, Cynthia and other volunteers will be glad to provide a tour of the artifacts that the state did not take and the reproductions of those it did.
If you are driving the 74 miles from Indianapolis, take U.S. Route 36 west, then turn right onto State Road 71. It’ll take less than two hours, which gives you plenty of time to imagine what Ernie would have made of all this.
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