1-25-02, Bill Stokes
Dan Leonard--Ernie Pyle on stage (Photo by Bill Stokes)
The Words of War--Unembellished
By Bill Stokes
IPS Features
Eerily, as you
watch in a darkened intimate theatre space, he seems to become the real Ernie
Pyle as he recreates the persona of the World War II correspondent/journalist
ever familiar to all veterans of that, and more recent conflicts.
"He"
is Dan Leonard, a Lake Worth, FL, resident and professional actor who has
written the play in which he stars - actually, he's the only actor -bringing to
life the times and trials of noted war correspondent Ernest Taylor Pyle, warmly
remembered as the reporter who humanized the conflict through the eyes of his
favorite comrades - the infantry solider.
Leonard, a
20-year veteran of theater and films, gained his military know-how during the
Viet Nam era and was struck by the drama in a book of Ernie Pyle's wartime
columns entitled Here Is Your War. Pyle's reports inspired Leonard to write his
play, Here Is My War." Drama was my first great interest in life. I became
involved at Lincoln High School, Bloomington, Minnesota and have stayed with
theatre since," he declares. He earned his Degree in Acting/Directing at
Moorhead State University in 1979.
"We began
over a year before to produce a Renaissance Fair on campus the following May.
Spring came, but when I walked across campus and saw an inch of snow on the
portable stage, I thought 'how far south can I go to attend graduate
school?'"
The answer
turned out to be at the University of Florida, Gainesville, where he found
himself auditioning the following week. This was in 1979, following his
honorable discharge from the Army.
Leonard earned
his Master of Fine arts Degree at UF, and it was during this time he started
writing plays, including his Ernie Pyle production as his master's thesis.
"I thought
the one man show was a good idea as Lee Miller's biography of Ernie Pyle made
his character appeal deeply to me. The thing I clearly remember reading was the
phrase 'You feel small in the presence of dead men and you don't ask silly
questions.'"
As he immersed
himself deeper into Pyle's life, Leonard discovered what he calls "serious
coincidences": Ernie had attached himself to the 4th Infantry Division, the
outfit Leonard was assigned to during his active service decades later. His
father also had served overseas in the 4th Infantry. Still another incident
involved the Air Force accidentally bombing American troops after the Normandy
invasion. Leonard's uncle, Dean Leonard, was in the Air Force, and participated
in the flight that bombed his own brother's unit. To this day, neither Leonard's
father nor uncle have ever discussed the incident.
Shortly after
Leonard earned his Master's degree, he got his Equity card at Hippodrome State
Theatre, Gainesville, and then spent virtually 10 years touring and acting with
educational theatre. Then be became associated with Louis Tyrrell as Tyrrell was
in the process of organizing Florida Stage. (The two had toured together at the
Hippodrome).
"At his
request," Leonard continues," I toured the one-act version of 'Ernie
Pyle' to Palm Beach County's middle and high schools. The kids were skeptical of
the play at first, a little wary, but when they realize you're talking to them
and not down to them, they go with it.
Leonard has been
most active with Florida Stage through the years, but often leaves the market to
audition at different venues for parts in new plays as well as more familiar
productions. He was recently nominated for a Carbonnel Award for his role in a
musical.
In addition to
performing more than 100 roles, Leonard has had eleven of his own plays
produced, two of which were filmed by PBS.
The
Scripps-Howard Foundation, an organization of the 200+ newspapers Ernie Pyle
wartime columns ran, today supports efforts of aspiring journalists by awarding
scholarships, and annually honors those who write in the Pyle tradition.
Ernest Taylor
Pyle was born near Dana, Indiana, and left the Journalism curriculum at the
University of Indiana in his third year for a job at the LaPorte (IN) Herald.
Pyle was reporter, aviation writer and editor between 1923 and 1932 (he drew the
attention of aviatrix Amelia Earhart, who gave him the watch he was wearing when
he died in 1945). Pyle then became managing editor of the Washington Daily News,
and in 1935 began writing a column syndicated through 200 newspapers owned by
the Scripps-Howard organization, owner of Fifty-Plus Lifestyles.
Pyle spent many
years afterward traveling the country, writing about the lives, accomplishments
and hopes of unassuming Americans. His wife, Jerry, sometimes went with him, but
as time passed and she became more a prisoner of depression and substance abuse,
Ernie took to the road alone. He would write and file stories wherever he
happened to stop for the night.
He then became a
war correspondent covering the European theater, easily adapting to the solitary
life of an infantry soldier as a familiar one. During World War II, Pyle
accompanied troops into battle, hunkered down in self-dug foxholes to report
first hand the imagery of fear, filth and fatalities experienced by his adopted
brothers, the infantry. Many other correspondents, however, would wait out the
battles safe behind the lines, collaring exhausted returning soldiers and
quizzing them for news items about the latest action at the front.
Pyle wasn't in
it for the glory: he wrote about the war as he had written about uncomplicated
American people he had met while traveling the country. The only difference was,
this time his GI buddies were in a situation they felt they had no control over,
and realized they might well be dead in the morning.
Pyle
personalized the war for the folks back home. He interviewed soldiers, published
their names, home towns and the jobs they had held while coaxing out their
innermost fears and feelings for his readers.
Writing words
that translated into typewritten snapshots, Pyle's columns earned respect
because they were simple, descriptive and true. He erased the war's
abstractions, reducing it to basics: heat, cold, wet, mud, sweat, terror,
thirst, hunger, despair and maybe death. While other correspondents snapped the
broad picture, Pyle focused on close-ups.
Simply put,
Ernie Pyle made the drama and tragedy of the war's front lines come alive for
millions of readers around the world.
His 'truth in
journalism' writing style earned Pyle a Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished
Correspondence in 1944 (some sources say 1943). It also brought down the wrath
of government and military brass more than once, because Pyle angered them by
quoting soldiers' profanity and hitting sensitive nerves by writing about
"our boys who were shell-shocked." The authorities much preferred
their way to Pyle's reporting the reality of daily encounters with an enemy who
was actually trying to murder their sons, brothers, and husbands. Pyle mildly
responded, "The American people need to know."
Some of Pyle's
early columns were censored, which infuriated him; however, the practice came to
a screeching halt when he threatened to stop covering the war altogether.
After writing
his way through battles across North Africa, Sicily, Italy and France - always
from his chosen front-line point, an exhausted Pyle returned to the U.S. to
accept the first-ever Doctor of Human Letters degree bestowed by the University
of Indiana. Later, he left his institutionalized Jerry and returned to the
conflict, this time covering the South Pacific Okinawa campaign. Ernie Pyle was
killed by a Japanese sniper on the island of Io Shime on April 18, 1945.
Pyle put the
truth of war into words with his typewriter as brilliantly as Bill Mauldin
portrayed war with pen and brush in his magnificent "Willie and Joe"
cartoons which appeared concurrently in "Stars and Stripes."
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