Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Allied HQ, Algiers, Algeria – (by wireless)
Fredric March and his camp-show crew came into town the other day on the last leg of an exhausting three-month grind through the Persian Gulf area entertaining our troops.
March has one man and two girls with him. The man is Sammy Walsh, a veteran café entertainer who professes to call himself a saloon worker. He carries off the light end of the show. This is his fourth tour for the USO.
The two girls are Jeanne Darrell, a singer, and Evelyn Hamilton, who plays the accordion. Both these girls know plenty about war. Jeanne’s husband is Lt. Maries of New Zealand. Evelyn has already done one tour of 11 months in the Aleutians, she has had malaria in the Near East, and her fiancé, a paratrooper, was killed in Sicily.
Usually, these camp shows are very light. Fredric March brings the first serious role to soldiers’ entertainment I’ve run onto. It’s a pretty touchy business, but he gets it over. He reads a stirring part of a Roosevelt speech of a couple of years ago, then he does some of Tom Paine’s patriotic pronouncements, then he gives a little talk of his own.
Since he has played mostly to non-combat troops in isolated areas, he does some morale building by telling them their jobs are as necessary and contributory as anybody else’s.
Tennis and prayer rugs
March played tennis with the King of Iran and proudly shows off a magnificent silken prayer rug the King gave him. He wears a blue camp-show uniform and a leather, fleece-lined jacket of the Air Force.
He keeps a framed photo of his wife and two children on the desk wherever he goes. His brother is in Italy and he hopes to see him before leaving this theater.
My telephone rang. The man on the other end said he was from Albuquerque. When he arrived, he turned out to be a sailor. His name is Hoyt Tomlinson and his mother and sister live at 510 W Roma. Hoyt has been in the Navy for two years and is on his ninth roundtrip across the Atlantic, with a couple of invasions thrown in.
He’s a cook, first class, and likes it.
Tomlinson loves to see people from Albuquerque. One time while on liberty in New York, he was sitting in a doughnut place on Broadway when he recognized a man’s back among the sidewalk crowd. He dashed out and chased the man down the street, knocking people over as he went. The man was a Mr. Baccachi of the Sunny State Liquor Company, Albuquerque.
Sailor Tomlinson says he was so homesick at the time he started to cry. And he was so delighted at seeing somebody from home he kept Mr. Baccachi up until 3:00 a.m.
Chicken: Pro and con
Tomlinson is clean-cut and big-hearted, and he insisted on going back to his ship and bringing me stuff like a baking chicken, canned ham and so on. But since I was just leaving for the front and already overloaded, I had to forego his Western hospitality. In a few days, I’d probably give a week’s pay for half a baked chicken.
The Special Service Branch of the Army recently had an artists’ competition in the North African Theater to give art-inclined soldiers something to do. The contest brought in 500 pictures painted by 127 artists or aspiring artists, 30 of them British soldiers.
The pictures have recently been exhibited, with 1,500 people a day visiting the show. The Army got a committee of professional judges and gave a $50 War Bond for first prize, and $25 bonds for second and third. Then all through the show, they furnished ballots for soldiers and sailors in the audience to vote their choices for prizes.
The most interesting thing to me about the show was that the first three chosen by the judges weren’t even in the running on the servicemen’s list. The judges weighed intellectually while the soldiers chose on the basis of I-don’t-know-anything-about-art-but-I-know-what-I-like.
My favorite picture was a sketch of President Roosevelt which looked no more like him than I do. I think the guy who drew it ought to be given $25 just for trying.
