The Pittsburgh Press (March 2, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
PASO ROBLES, Calif. – While we’re driving southward toward the land of sunshine and contentment, we’ll pause to throw in a few scraps from the scrap
heap.
Such as the fact that I happened to be in Salinas, Calif., on the week-end of registration for the draft, so that’s where I gave myself to my country.
There wasn’t anybody else in the place when I went in, and the two men and one woman in charge were very pleasant and chatty. For some reason I had figured they’d be grave and even nasty, like a judge sentencing you to the penitentiary. But they weren’t.
When I gave my full name (my middle name is Taylor) the man said, “Why, that’s my last name.”
When I left, they called after me, “Next time you want to register just come around.”
Now if the Army will just be as pleasant with me as the registration people…
I had another experience in Salinas. That was my first sugar rationing in America.
Sugar for one cup only
In the hotel coffee shop, I was given three cubes of sugar for my coffee, which of course is plenty. But when the waitress brought a second cup, she brought no sugar with it.
I asked her for sugar, but she said the manager had rationed customers to sugar for only one cup. I asked her what she brought the second cup for, then. She said because I asked for it. So I handed her the cup back, and we dropped the subject.
It seems to me that manager is taking things a bit into his own hands. The nation isn’t on sugar rationing yet. The government will tell us – and how – when to cut our sugar down. Then we’ll all do it. The way it is now, in Salinas, I just eat at another restaurant.
There are a couple of cute stories in San Francisco about sailors giving away information. One is a “loose-talk” story, the other a “tight-mouth” story. The loose-talk one happened to a close friend of mine.
He was riding on a street car. A sailor sat down beside him and they started talking. My friend said, “I see there are some new ships in the harbor this morning.”
And the sailor said. “Yeah, and the (one of America’s biggest battleships) is in, too. I just got off of her!”
The other story goes like this:
An elderly lady was strolling in one of the city’s hilltop parks and stopped to look down over the bay, where a battleship rode at anchor.
A sailor walked past, stopped nearby, and the lady said to him:
“Young man, what is the name of that ship out there?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” the sailor said politely.
“And what ship are you from?” the lady asked.
“That one,” the sailor said.
War disrupts Hoosier life
The war is beginning to hit close, now, to many of us. My Aunt Mary unites that all is chaos around our farm community at Dana, Ind.
Construction of the great new munitions plant has started. Farmers are moving from life-long residences on two weeks’ notices; engineers and Army officers are moving into the better-type farm houses; others are being torn down.
Little old Dana is throbbing. A stranger can hardly get a meal, or a place to sleep. A hotel is going up on the corner where Ben Lang’s grocery used to be. Doc Meyers has staked off his pasture, put in gravel streets and lights, and made a trailer city out of it.
New railroad spurs have been built out from Dana, to carry the avalanche of material that is flowing in. New workers have arrived to unload the endless flow of cars bringing steel piping, lumber, machinery.
The town loafers have never had such a three-ring circus to watch. They gather every afternoon into a new railbird regiment, to watch the materials of war being unloaded.
Even my father, who never before could qualify as a town loafer, now drives three miles to town every day after lunch, and sits there all afternoon watching them unload the freight cars.
The last time my Aunt Mary wrote she said it was a rainy, foggy day, and that Dad was fretting for fear it was too bad for him to get to town that afternoon to watch.