The state of Indiana has made a bad mistake. It let Ernie Pyle's boyhood home get torn down. This is how not to save the taxpayers money.
True, private donors might have come to the rescue, but they didn't realize in time. So another national treasure is gone. Underline treasure. This would have paid off in the most solid terms, tourist dollars and cents. But the cultural loss is worse.
Pyle was the most famous World War II correspondent, the daily chronicler of "G.I. Joe" from in or very near the actual fighting. A sniper's bullet killed him in April 1945 within a few months of the war's end.
He was the son of tenant farmers near the village of Dana some 20 miles north of Terre Haute. The house was a cipher architecturally: a one-and-a-half story frame, about 1,400 square feet. But it's where the boy Ernie lived from age 2 to 18, did chores, walked to school. And later wrote about it and American life generally as Scripps-Howard newspapers' "Roving Reporter" of the Depression 1930s.
His column appeared in the old Pittsburgh Press, where local readers surely smiled at his report on the "new" Pennsylvania Turnpike from Carlisle to Irwin. What will it profit a man, he wrote, to gain two hours through the mountains "if he loses his soul trying to get from Irwin to Pittsburgh?"
Before America entered the war in 1941, Pyle told of the "terrible beauty" of a night air raid: "London ringed and stabbed with fire." A week after D-Day his catalogue of the debris of French beaches, half-sunken ships, burnt vehicles and bomb craters evoked the hell that had passed there in a masterpiece of wartime prose.
Indiana hasn't completely neglected its typewriter-toting son. An Ernie Pyle State Historic Site at Dana draws 8,000 visitors a summer (notably at the Ernie Pyle Festival in August). The museum and gift shop in two genuine World War II quonset huts sell Ernie Pyle books and G.I. Joe dolls. And there's a fine Victorian house next door. But the Pyle farmhouse was a mile and a half out of town.
"We were quoted $40,000 a half-mile to move it, $120,000 in all," Charity Pollard, acting manager, told a telephone caller. It doesn't seem like much, but state budgeters pleaded poverty and the current property owner grew desperate over vandalism and potential liability, said the Associated Press. Hence, the bulldozers.
One enemy of common sense in this crisis was preservational purism. A building shifted off its original location loses place in the National Historic Registry. Still, nothing encapsulates U.S. life and history like the homes of presidents, the rich and famous, the acquisitive and the accomplished. Ernie Pyle's house deserved to make the cut. This was throwing away value, Indiana.
