Ernie Pyle once drove around the Southwestern
United States, talking to people and seeing the sights. He filed six 1,000-word
stories a week for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain.
Six 1,000-word stories
a week is a lot of copy, if you don't know. It takes time to type it, let alone
go there, see people, write it. Edit it.
Pyle later became a correspondent
for Stars and Stripes. He reported on the war from the GI's point of view.
Where they went, he went. He ate with them, slept with them, marched, got shot
at.
He was killed by a sniper in the closing days of World War II. On Ie
Shima, off Okinawa. Balder blew Taps at his grave, which the Marines maintain, when
he was stationed on Okinawa.
Ernest Hemingway liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris.
He drank with the officers. There was never a shortage of whiskey and beautiful
women. Haute cuisine. No C rations for Ernest Hemingway. No P-38 can opener.
Hemingway called himself Ernie Hemorrhoid, the Poor Man's Pyle.
He
might have been a better novelist, but as a war correspondent, he wasn't fit to carry
Pyle's jock.
Old Folks couldn't wait to go ten rounds with Hemingway, but
Hemingway was dodging him.
Hemingway wouldn't give him a shot at the title.
Nor would any of the newspaper chains serialize what he wrote, except for the lowly
L. A. (Lower Alabama) Free Press, you had to give it away. A goddamn
mullet-wrapper.
Old Folks wrote 6,000 words a week week in and week out.
Of course it wasn't literature or journalism but some weird amalgam of the two.
Daily typewriting.