The Pittsburgh Press (March 24, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – On the way out from Los Angeles I picked up a couple of soldier hitchhikers and brought them in to Riverside with me.
They turned out to be Midwestern boys, university graduates, who had enlisted before the draft could get them. They had been to Los Angeles on overnight leave. They went hoping they could find a nice place to dance, but they never did, and were disappointed.
“We weren’t looking for society girls, nor the other kind, either,” one of them said. “We just like to dance, and thought maybe could meet a couple of nice girls who work in stores or are secretaries.”
But they didn’t. They tried two or three taxi-dance places, but didn’t like the types of girls. They finally wound up by going into a place which said, “Reduced rates for men in uniform.” It led up a dark stairs to a sad little bar in a gloomy room. It was the kind of place they had feared it would be. They said one lone sailor was sitting at the bar, half asleep, and looking very lonesome among the girls of the place. So the boys gave up and started back to camp.
They told me a couple of things about the public that I hadn’t heard before. One was that in Los Angeles men in uniform are constantly being stopped by nice old ladies who are grateful to them for helping save the country. The old ladies don’t want anything except just to express their appreciation. The boys seemed quite touched by it.
‘Superiors’ browbeat them
The other was that panhandlers continually play the soldiers for handouts. This burned the boys up. Making $21 a month, and then getting hit twice a block by panhandlers.
One of my soldiers, who has a mind of his own, said he stopped and gave one panhandler a nice little lecture on ethics. But it didn’t faze the panhandler. He gave our soldier a good cussing.
These two boys are probably typical of thousands of American youngsters in the Army now. They are well educated, obviously from good families, and intelligent. And they find Army life tough for boys like themselves, from the mental standpoint.
They’re cussed and ordered around by “superiors” with an I.Q. corresponding to that of a horse. Some of the old-timers seem to take special delight in brow-beating anybody who has been to college. The boys can take it – but it dulls the keen edge of their enthusiasm for giving all they’ve got to the war. They don’t see why recruits can’t be trained on a basis of man-to-man decency.
And yet, almost in contradiction to that feeling, they think America is in the mess it’s in now because we had got too soft. Nobody wants to work hard, everybody’s looking out for himself, nobody wants to give up his comforts. And one of the boys said:
“And another thing, people think too much about sex in this country. That’s what caused France to fall. We’re just as bad as they are.”
Tourist trade will suffer
Among its other worries, Southern California is gravely concerned over a possible dearth of tourists on account of the war. There is now in progress a small campaign to convince America that California is a safe place.
Along this line, a folder has just been issued entitled “Los Angeles County Is Bigger and Safer Than You Think.”
It is designed, apparently, to show that you could run out into the desert or hills and hide, but could still consider yourself technically in Los Angeles. If that’s the way they want to look at it, Los Angeles County sure is plenty big enough.
It’s so big you could put New York in one corner of it, and Philadelphia in the other, and they’d still be their present distance apart.
It’s so big you could run the English Channel through the middle of it, and the county would still slop over as far as London. It’s so big that if you superimpose Manhattan Island on a map of the county, you can hardly find Manhattan Island.
It is true that many people have left California because of fear. But certainly not enough to hurt anything, and California is better off without that kind of people anyhow.
No matter how much it strains, California simply cannot expect a big tourist flood from now on. There will be some, of course, but the great rush is over for the duration. And the reason, as I figure it, is not so much fear as two other things – tires and taxes.