Ernie Pyle

The great war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed by gunfire on the island of Ie Shima 65 years ago today. This is often regarded his best column.

The Death of Captain Waskow

AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944 – In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.

Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

“After my own father, he came next,” a sergeant told me.

“He always looked after us,” a soldier said. “He’d go to bat for us every time.”

“I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair,” another one said.

I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.

Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself, and ask others to help.

The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road.

I don’t know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions.

We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.

Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We talked soldier talk for an hour or more. The dead man lay all alone outside in the shadow of the low stone wall.

Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there, in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting. “This one is Captain Waskow,” one of them said quietly.

Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, “God damn it.” That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, “God damn it to hell anyway.” He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: “I’m sorry, old man.”

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

“I sure am sorry, sir.”

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

And finally he put the hand down, and then 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.

After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

The midnight riders of April 18th

Late on the night of April 18, 1775, Boston patriot Joseph Warren learned of a British military operation planned for the next day. To warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were across the Charles River in Lexington, Warren dispatched two riders, Paul Revere and William Dawes. Revere took the shorter route “by sea,” while Dawes went “by land” over the isthmus from Boston to Roxbury, then crossing the Charles River over a bridge in Cambridge. Revere’s ride has been celebrated in poems and textbooks, but Dawes’ role was at least as important.

One By Land
William Dawes rode by land past the guard at the gate of the strip of land that connected Boston to Roxbury. Dawes had befriended a number of guards in the preceding weeks, and was lucky to find a friendly face on duty that night. He slipped through the gate after some Redcoats. Continuing west to Brookline, over the Charles at a bridge in Cambridge, he sped his horse through Menotomy (today called Arlington) to Lexington.

One By Sea
Paul Revere took the more direct sea route. After he was rowed quietly across the Charles, within sight of the British warships, Revere obtained a horse at Lechmere and rode through Cambridge toward Adams and Hancock in Lexington. Stopped by British officers en route, Revere made a quick escape and chose an indirect path to Lexington, through Medford.

The Alarm is Sounded
Both riders arrived in Lexington just after midnight and delivered their news of the British plans. The two messengers also decided to warn the militia in Concord that their military supplies would be targeted. They were joined on this leg by Dr. Samuel Prescott, a Concord resident who had been visiting a Lexington friend. Prescott proved invaluable when the riders were surprised by more British soldiers. Revere was captured and Dawes lost his horse, but Prescott took the back trails he knew to reach Concord and sound the alarm.

Excerpted from American Experience | Patriots Day

April 18th

Today is the birthday

. . . of Pollyanna. Hayley Mills is 64.

. . . of two-time Oscar nominee James Woods. He’s 63.

. . . of Rick Moranis, 57.

. . . of Daphne Moon. Jane Leeves of “Frasier” is 49.

. . . of Conan O’Brien. He’s 47.

. . . of America Ferrera; anything but ugly, she’s 26.

Lawyer and author Clarence Darrow was born on this date in 1857.

Darrow became famous for defending some of the most unpopular people of his time. In the 1925 Monkey Trial, he defended high school teacher John Scopes for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in a Tennessee school. In “The Crime of the Century,” in 1924, he successfully defended two confessed teenage murderers, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, from receiving the death penalty.
. . .

He once said: “I never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

The San Francisco earthquake was on April 18, 1906. It was magnitude 8.3; 3,000 people are estimated to have died.

The first game was played at Yankee Stadium on this date in 1923.

War correspondent, and Albuquerquean, Ernie Pyle was killed by Japanese gunfire on the Pacific island of Ie Shima, off Okinawa, on this date in 1945.

Albert Einstein died at age 76 on this date in 1955.

And it was on this date in 1775 that Paul Revere and others began their ride to warn their countryman that British troops were mobilizing.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Continue reading Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Best line of the day

“I heard a joke the other day about a pious soul who dies, goes to heaven, and gains an audience with the Virgin Mary. The visitor asks Mary why, for all her blessings, she always appears in paintings as a bit sad, a bit wistful: Is everything O.K.?

“Mary reassures her visitor: ‘Oh, everything’s great. No problems. It’s just … it’s just that we had always wanted a daughter.’ ”

Nicholas Kristof opening a very fine column.

Best lines of the day

“When you deliberately withhold adverse material information from customers, that is fraud.  When you do this on a grand scale, the full weight of the law will come down on you and the people who supposedly supervised you.  And if the weight of that law is no longer sufficient to deal with – and to prevent going forward – the latest forms of very old and reprehensible crimes, then it is again time to change the law.”

Simon Johnson, The Baseline Scenario writing about Goldman Sachs (and others).

Pulitzer winning photo

This photo by Mary Chind of The Des Moines Register won her the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. The photo, published July 1, 2009, shows a construction worker rescuing a woman from Des Moines River. The Des Moines Fire Department had been unable to save the woman. A man with her was drowned.

April 17th

Today we celebrate the birthday

. . . of Emily, official younger daughter of NewMexiKen. Happy Birthday, Emily! And don’t fret. Byron will get back from Britain eventually and you won’t have to coach his flag-football team for more than a few weeks tops.

. . . of Olivia Hussey. Sixteen when she played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, she’s 59 today.

. . . of Nick Hornby. He’s 53.

The book was called Fever Pitch (1992), and it came out at a time when football fans were generally looked down upon by the British upper class. But the book became something of a phenomenon in Great Britain, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, making it one of the best-selling books about sport ever published in the English language. Part of what made the book so popular was that it captured the way people can rely on a sports team to give their lives drama and meaning. Hornby wrote, “The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.”

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

. . . of Liz Phair. She’s 43.

. . . of Jennifer Garner. She’s 38.

J. P. Morgan was born on this date in 1837.

[Morgan] began his career in 1857 as an accountant, and worked for several New York banking firms until he became a partner in Drexel, Morgan and Company in 1871, which was reorganized as J.P. Morgan and Company in 1895. Described as a coldly rational man, Morgan began reorganizing railroads in 1885, becoming a board member and gaining control of large amounts of stock of many of the rail companies he helped restructure. In 1896, Morgan embarked on consolidations in the electric, steel (creating U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation, in 1901), and agricultural equipment manufacturing industries. By the early 1900s, Morgan was the main force behind the Trusts, controlling virtually all the basic American industries. He then looked to the financial and insurance industries, in which his banking firm also achieved a concentration of control.

The American Experience

Karen Dinesen was born on this date in 1885. We know her as Isak Dinesen.

[S]o she decided to write about her experiences in Africa. Instead of writing an ordinary memoir, she wrote about her time in Africa as though it was a half-remembered dream in her book Out of Africa (1937).

She wrote, “Looking back on a sojourn in the African high-lands, you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air.”

And, “[I watched] elephants … pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world … [and I once saw a] lion … crossing the grey plain on his way home from the kill, drawing a dark wake in the silvery grass, his face still red up to the ears.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media (2008)

Nikita Khrushchev was born on this date in in 1894. Khrushchev was Soviet Premier from 1954-1964. The New York Times has posted its lengthy obituary from 1971. One of the more infamous moments at the United Nations took place when Khrushchev visited there in 1960 and reportedly banged his shoe on the desk in a protest. Or maybe he didn’t. Read what NewMexiKen posted about this incident in 2004.

Thornton Wilder was born on this date in 1897.

Wilder’s breakthrough novel was The Bridge Of San Luis Rey (1927), an examination of the fate of five travelers who fall to their deaths from a bridge in 18th-century Peru. Seeking to discover meaning in the lives lost, a scholarly monk named Brother Juniper explores the lives of the five victims, an endeavor that leads to his own death at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. The book earned Wilder his first Pulitzer Prize. . . .

While living in Chicago, Wilder became close friends with fellow lecturer Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas. In fact, Stein’s novel The Making of Americans (1925) is said to have inspired Wilder’s Our Town (1938). Tracing the childhood, courtship, marriage, and death of Emily Webb and George Gibbs, the play finds universal meaning in the ordinary lives lived in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. (The fictional town was based on Peterborough, New Hampshire, where Wilder spent summers at the MacDowell Colony.) A huge success on Broadway, Our Town earned Wilder his second Pulitzer, making him the only American author to win Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and drama.

Masterpiece Theatre

William Holden was born on this date in 1918. Holden was nominated three times for the Best Actor Oscar, winning for Stalag 17 in 1954. His other nominations were for Sunset Blvd. and Network. Holden is probably as well known for his portrayal of Hal Carter opposite Kim Novak in Picnic and as the leader of the demolition team intent on destroying Alec Guiness’ Bridge on the River Kwai.

Every Mode but Silly Walks

Tanya mentioned the $5,100 cab fare in a comment. The New York times has the story. The report begins:

LONDON — For the man who worked at the Ministry of Silly Walks, travel chaos across the Continent was only a modest hurdle.

John Cleese, who starred in the high-stepping sketch for Monty Python, was stranded in Oslo on Friday after appearing on a television talk show. With flights grounded by the volcanic ash over northern Europe, Mr. Cleese found another way home to London: He caught a cab.

There may be hope yet

Jill has yet another new post at Dinner without Crayons. She begins:

Sometimes I worry about my kids’ taste in music. I’ve introduced them to all the classics – and by classics I don’t mean Tchaikovsky but rather The Beatles, Elvis, Fleetwood Mac, Motown.

But despite my attempts to steer them towards quality tunes, they have an unrelenting tendency to embrace the trashiest current music they can find.

Benjamin Franklin

. . . died on this date in 1790. He was 84.

In his twenties Franklin had written an epitaph for himself:

The body of
B. Franklin, Printer;
(Like the cover of an old book,
Its contents worn out,
and stripped of its lettering and gilding)
Lies here, food for worms.
But the work shall not be lost:
For it will, (as he believed) appear once more,
In a new and more elegant edition,
Revised and corrected
By the Author.

By the age of 84 he wished for something simpler. The marble over his grave simply reads: Benjamin and Deborah Franklin.

Information from Walter Isaacson’s superb biography of Franklin.

Best line of the day

“The play was written by Leonard Madrid, a native New Mexican, and is set on the front porch of a home in Portales, NM. (funny, there in the theater, they didn’t capture that certain ‘wind off the feed lot’ that I always associate with Portales.)”

Karen

Your line about the sopapillas almost made “best line” too, Karen, but I hoped people would follow the link and read it for themselves.

But he has to

Byron, official co-son-in-law of NewMexiKen expected to return to Virginia from the U.K. today. Oops.

And now they’ve just cancelled his Sunday flight.

Don’t they know he has a flag football game to coach?

This reminded me of a true story involving a colleague while he was director of a government records center. A federal judge called and demanded a particular document, which Jim had no authority to release (not without the proper red tape).

The judge insisted. Not without trepidation, Jim stood his ground.

The judge said, “I’m sending a U.S. marshal by helicopter to bring either the document or you to my court.” (The judge was in Los Angeles; we were about 50 miles away.)

Soon enough the marshal arrived. Jim remained adamant. (He was right.)

The marshal said, let’s go tell the judge.

Jim said, “I can’t go.” The marshal asked why. Jim said, “I’ve got a little league game to ump.”

The marshal laughed, called the judge, and somehow his honor relented.

Jim umped the game.

But I wouldn’t have wanted to argue balls and strikes with him that afternoon.

Taggers

Pasó por aqui, el adelantado Don Juan de Oñate del descubrimiento de la mar del sur a 16 de Abril de 1605.

It was on this date in 1605 that European vandals first started tagging the rock face at what is now El Morro National Monument.

In English: “Passed by here, the adelantado Don Juan de Oñate from the discovery of the sea of the south the 16th of April of 1605.”

1605, before Jamestown and before the Pilgrims had even migrated to Holland on their way to Massachusetts.

Idle Thought

I was thinking maybe the Catholic Church could update its image some if the next pope were to take a more modern name.

You know, like Pope Elvis, Pope Usher, Pope Ronaldo — something like that.

April 16th

Today we celebrate (or at least acknowledge) the birthday

. . . of Pope Benedict XVI, infallible at 83.

. . . of Bobby Vinton, his roses are still red my love at 75.

. . . of Queen Margrethe II, the Queen of Denmark. Sorry Queen, I wanted to come to your party, but with the Iceland volcano and airports closed and all.

. . . of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 63.

. . . of Bill Belichick, 58.

. . . of Ellen Barkin, 56.

. . . of Peter Billingsley. Ralphie is 38.

Wilbur Wright was born on this date in 1867. He died of typhoid fever in 1912. Wilbur, four years older than Orville, was the more mechanical of the two and took the lead in developing their flyer. (Orville outlived his brother by 36 years.)

Charlie Chaplin was born on this date in 1889.

In a 1995 worldwide survey of film critics, Chaplin was voted the greatest actor in movie history. He was the first, and to date the last, person to control every aspect of the filmmaking process — founding his own studio, United Artists, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, and producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring and editing the movies he starred in. In the first decades of the 20th century, when weekly moviegoing was a national habit, Chaplin more or less invented global recognizability and helped turn an industry into an art. In 1916, his third year in films, his salary of $10,000 a week made him the highest-paid actor — possibly the highest paid person — in the world.

TIME 100

Henry Mancini was born Enrico Nicola Mancini on this date in 1924. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1994.

Mancini won four Oscars and twenty Grammys, the all-time record for a pop artist. For 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s alone, Mancini won five Grammys and two Oscars. Breakfast at Tiffany’s includes the classic “Moon River” (lyrics by Johnny Mercer), arguably one of the finest pop songs of the last 50 years. At last count, there were over 1,000 recordings of it. His other notable songs include “Dear Heart,” “Days of Wine and Roses” (one Oscar, two Grammys), and “Charade,” the last two with lyrics by Mercer. He also had a number one record and won a Grammy for Nino Rota’s “Love Theme From Romeo and Juliet.” Among his other notable film scores are The Pink Panther (three Grammys), Hatari! (one Grammy), Victor/Victoria (an Oscar), Two for the Road, Wait Until Dark, and 10. His television themes include “Peter Gunn” (two Grammys, recorded by many rock artists), “Mr. Lucky” (two Grammys), “Newhart,” “Remington Steele,” and The Thorn Birds television mini-series.

allmusic

Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien was born on this date in 1939. We know her as Dusty Springfield. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 1999, just 13 days after she died of breast cancer.

One of the finest pop-soul vocalists ever, Dusty Springfield was blessed with a powerful, smoky voice that ran the emotional gamut from cool sophistication to simmering passion. Over the course of a long, episodic career, she tackled adult pop, Memphis R&B and Motown-style soul, traditional folk and country, and contemporary dance music. She’s been called “one of the five mighty pop divas of the Sixties”-the others being Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross and Martha Reeves-and no less an authority than Berry Gordy credits her for helping the Motown sound take root in the U.K. Moreover, Springfield forcefully asserted herself as an artist and personality at a time when women were generally not given much leeway in the music industry. In 1964, she became Britain’s most popular female vocalist, and her popularity proved durable, as she enjoyed hits in four successive decades.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The most important dessert of the day

At Dinner without Crayons, Jill writes about breakfast dessert and other assorted adventures with the Gruesome Threesome. A brief excerpt:

The children, smelling my vulnerability like a dog smells fear, will then gleefully band together to try to break me. I think they must theorize that if they put me into a mental hospital, and their daddy is still off “working,” they will have free reign over the house and can skip school and watch Cartoon Network and rated R movies all day.