Dana Boy Makes Good

Ernie Pyle, most widely read (11,500,000) and most endearing of U.S. war correspondents, last week made good in his own home town.

A new weekly condensation of Pyle's columns went to the weekly News of Dana, Ind. (circ. 600), as to several hundred other small U.S. weeklies. Appropriately, Ernie Pyle signalized the week by a bit of gossip about his Dana neighbors.

From a tank-destroyer unit's invasion base in England, he reported a conversation with Sergeant Dick Showalter, a gun-crew commander from Muncie, Ind. Wrote Correspondent Pyle:

"While I was talking to a group of soldiers, he came up and introduced himself and said, 'I married a girl from your home town ... I married Edna Kuhns.'

" 'Why,' I said, 'I was raised with the Kuhns kids. They lived just across the fence from our farm. I've known them all my life.'

". . . And then we left the crowd and sat on the grass, leaning against a rock, and talked about Dana, Ind., and Muncie and things."

For the Home Folks. Dana (pop. 859) is a dozen miles from the banks of the Wabash, close to the Illinois border, 30 miles north of Terre Haute. Dana's red bricked Main Street is two blocks long. The rest of the town is mostly tree-shaded front-yards and frame houses. Dana's news-center is Mrs. Hazel Shepard's house. She is Dana's telephone operator, and the switchboard is in her parlor.

Some of the people Ernie Pyle grew up with dropped in there last week to talk about Ernie. They found the News's 31-year-old Owner-Editor Luther B. Mathes telling how he had suggested a Pyle column for weeklies, how his idea has finally been taken up. The column was costing Editor Mathes about $1 a week, but he could reckon it a dollar well spent as he listened to his neighbors:

>> Gerald P. Guyer, the druggist: "Ernie sure gets the news back. The other boys don't seem to get hold of the news like Ernie does."

>> Karl G. Dicken, Vermillion County's treasurer: "Tell you why I like him . . . he's so common."

>> Homer Thomas, junk dealer: "He comes as near writing like a man talking as anybody I've ever read. Ernie's not afraid to get over there and dig this stuff up."

For the Visitors. Outside Dana, in a farm home behind a long lawn, lives Ernie's father, William Clyde Pyle. He is 76, partly deaf, on the mend after a hip-fracturing fall. With him lives Ernie's 78-year-old Aunt Mary Bales, sister of his late mother. Editor Mathes looked in last week to see what they thought of the weekly column. Father Pyle's verdict: "Fine, I reckon the visitors can clip it." He referred to the fact that motorists are always dropping in to say how they enjoy Ernest (he is never "Ernie" at his old home). Father Pyle keeps a scrapbook of the daily columns from the Danville, Ill. Commercial-News; Aunt Mary clips hers from the Indianapolis Times.

Last fall Ernie came home for a brief visit and Aunt Mary asked him how it felt to be a celebrity. Reported Aunt Mary: "He said it didn't make him feel any different, and I said, 'Well, don't you feel some above the rest of us now?' Ernest said, 'Why should I? You're all dear to me.' "

For Almost Everybody. Western Newspaper Union (it has some 10,000 small-newspaper customers) bought the weekly Pyle syndicate rights from Scripps-Howard's United Feature Syndicate. W.N.U., limited to territories where there is no conflict with Pyle-carrying dailies, expects that Pyle will soon be printed by at least 2,000 U.S. weeklies. That would add about 4,000,000 circulation to Ernie's daily count.

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