Rambling Reporter, Ernie Pyle (1941-42)

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 4, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

TIMBERLINE LODGE, Ore. – My first day of skiing is over and, just as soon as I get rested up a little, I’m going on the warpath after the man who invented this outlandish mode of transportation. Give me an oxcart, instead, any day.

I know, from this first day, that I’ll never be a skier. All my instincts, my sentiments, my muscles and my ligaments cry out tonight, “Nuts to skiing!” If I had my way, I’d never so much as look at a ski again.

But a man with a determination can’t have his own way. I came up here to ski for a week, and if I gave up after only one day of trying, I could never again hold up my head in public.

Consequently, tomorrow at 10, barring famine or flood, I’ll be out there falling down as usual. Maybe, in one week, I can at least learn to fall with grace and precision.

Olaf Rodegard was our instructor today. Olaf is from Norway, but he’s been in this country 12 years, and his English is perfect. His voice is very soft, and he is kind and calm.

You can get ski instruction either in classes or privately up here. The classes run from 10 to 12 in the morning, from 2 to 4 in the afternoon. It costs $2 for a full day. I took the class, and it was almost the same as private, for there were just two girls and myself. We were all beginners.

Olaf strapped on my skis just outside the Lodge, and we had to walk (with the skis on) across the snow and ice about 300 yards to where we were going to practice.

Walking hard work

Taking the first step gave me one of the most ghastly moments of my life. Those skis felt like they were 100 yards long. I had a wild, caged-like sensation, and thought, if I could only snatch them off, my, how I could leap and slide and cavort!

But somehow I wobbled safely to the skiing grounds. Walking on skis is hard work. Even the experts look clumsy, just walking. Every 50 feet or so the muscles in my legs would give out, and I’d have to stop and rest. The girls didn’t seem to have any muscle trouble, and that made me feel badly.

Finally we got to our place – a gentle little slope, hidden behind nice fir trees. At least not many people could see our shameful clumsiness.

The first thing Olaf did was show us how to stop. Skiing is just like driving an auto in that respect – you’d better find out how to stop before you start.

You stop by pushing your legs apart, thus bringing the front points of your skis together, making a “V.” At least that’s the theory. But my leg muscles were so weak I couldn’t hold the skis in a “V” long enough. So I usually did what most ski novices do in an emergency – just fall over sideways into the snow, on purpose. That stops you.

The next thing Olaf gave us was the “stem turn.” That’s the first simple maneuver of skiing, but everything else is based on it. So we spent all day at it. All day? Ha! Those girls and I will need a year and a day before we can “stem turn.”

Olaf did the turn several times to show us, then called for one of us to start. I was just dying to lead off, but being a perfect gentleman at all altitudes, I waited and let the girls go ahead. I thought maybe, while they were sliding around, I could sneak away behind the trees and somehow get back to the lodge. But Olaf kept his eye on me.

Olaf says he’ll learn

Finally Olaf said to me, “All right, go ahead.” I just seemed to faint all over inside. My eyesight disappeared. I was numb. I tried to shout, “No, dammit, I won’t go!” But no sound came out. I gave a shove with my ski-poles and, Heaven help me, I was off.

I don’t know what happened, but somehow I made a perfect turn, “Did you say you’d never been on skis before?” Olaf asked, as though doubting my honesty.

“Never in my life, I said, naturally a little proud at his inference.

“Well, you’re all right,” he said. “You’ll make a good skier.”

That’s the way I am about everything. Just backwards. Always best at the beginning, I knew it would be like that. For that first turn was the only passable one I made all day.

On the second attempt I fell clear down. Other times I’d get to turning in the wrong direction and have to go that way. Once I forgot either how to turn or to stop, and ran right astraddle of a little fir tree, and skinned my legs all up.

During the day, I suppose the two girls and I skied down that little hill 50 times. I fell down at least 15 or 20 times, and so did they. We just couldn’t seem to learn.

This evening I asked Olaf, “Don’t you get sick of teaching dumb awkward clucks like me the same thing day after day?”

And Olaf, in his soft voice, said, “No, not when people really try to learn, as you all did today. But we get some people who think it’s romantic or something just to dress up in ski clothes, and they won’t even try to learn. That burns me up.”

“Well anyway,” I said. “I’m disgusted. I’ll never be able to ski.”

Olaf laughed. He said beginners are always disgusted. He said he’s seen people break up their brand new skis at the end of the first day, just as golfers break up their clubs.

“It’ll come to you all of a sudden,” he said. “You’re doing fine. Why, you made it over there and back twice today. The average person can’t do that on his first day.”

And thus soothed, flattered, oiled and pomaded by Olaf’s gentle compliments, I went glowingly in to eat, knowing damn well I’d never be able to ski, but elated nevertheless, I suppose that’s what it is about skiing – it’s insidious.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 5, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

TIMBERLINE LODGE, Ore. – The second day of skiing is what takes willpower for a man whose muscles are as soft as mine.

When I woke this morning, I tried to think where I might have been yesterday. My first impression was that I had been lynched. I felt exactly as if I had been beaten to death with sticks, stones and blunt instruments.

If I’d had sense, I would simply have built a big fire in the fireplace in my room, put on house-slippers, and settled my sobbing tendons deep into a couple of pillows for a good forenoon’s groaning.

But no! I’ve taken this stuff to heart about France going soft, and England becoming decadent, and Americans getting so mechanically dependent that a fellow can’t tie his own shoe.

So I have to gird up my reluctant sinews and charge out there to the hillside again and plug around on those damn clapboards, just to help restore the old tradition that America is peopled by stalwart and hardy men.

This second day, I had decided, I wouldn’t go to the instruction class, but would seek out some hidden glade behind the fir trees, and practice in solitude what the instructor had tried to teach me the day before.

However, I never did get to my private glade. That was due largely to timidity. For, when I got out among the trees, I found I was afraid to strike out on any new trails, and I finally just followed the one I already knew.

Naturally that brought me right back to the same slope we were on yesterday, and there were Olaf and the two girls again.

Highlights of day’s skiing

There’s no use going into detail about the day’s skiing. It was more or less a bad imitation of yesterday’s awkwardness. The highlights can be told briefly, as follows:

• I got my ski-pole caught in the snow, ran my left leg into it, took off about three square inches of skin, and soon the blood was soaking through my pants.

• To avoid running into a woman, I sat down real quick and twisted my left ankle so badly it made me feel sick and I had to sit there awhile.

• Another time, and for no purpose I’ve been able to figure out, I suddenly sat down with great force and determination right on the back end of my ski. A ski is not soft like snow. The exact point of my anatomy which came into contact with the ski is not usually mentioned in polite society. But, whatever you wish to call it, it was destroyed all to pieces, as the Japs say. I’m sure it’s much worse than Mr. Henderson’s leg. He can at least limp.

Outside of that, nothing happened. Not even any noticeably adequate “stem-turns.” Olaf paid me no compliments today. It was almost dark when I got back to the Lodge. When I leaned over to unlace my boots, it felt like somebody had kicked me behind. But nobody had.

Despite these temporary setbacks, I am learning a great deal about skiing. Not learning how to do anything, of course, but learning a lot of little facts you could put in an encyclopedia, For instance:

Falling down is nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody falls down.

Falling in the snow is usually soft. You don’t get as many bruises as when you fall on ice, but you get more twists and sprains if your skis are crossed and your legs get mixed up.

Skis are awkwardest things

Skis are the awkwardest things. Mine are 6½ feet long, and I’m convinced five feet of them are superfluous and an impediment to the usual fine grace of my movements.

Friends had assured me that, after three days, I would be skiing moderately well down gentle slopes from 100 to 200 yards. These friends over-estimated me. So far I can’t ski more than 50 feet down a slope, and then I always tumble at the bottom.

The main trouble with trying to learn to ski when you’ve reached my palsied status in life is that you just can’t relax and throw yourself around. I’m as rigid as a bar of steel when I start down a slope. The way to ski is to float like a flag in the wind.

What balls me up worst is that in skiing you must balance yourself just the reverse of what instinct tells you. You must lean toward the outside of a turn, instead of toward the inside, as on skates or a bicycle.

I’ve been trying to tell Olaf this is all wrong, but he’s stubborn, and I can’t seem to teach him anything.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 6, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

TIMBERLINE LODGE, Ore. – Human memories are short. And also – although I am, of course, loath to admit it – not everybody in America reads this column.

So perhaps it would be wise to tell you just what Timberline Lodge really is, and why I am here instead of somewhere else to do my skiing (I insist on calling it skiing).

Two and a half years ago I did tell about Timberline in this column, but of course two and a years is 30 months, and a lot of memory goes over the dam in 30 months like these last 30.

Timberline Lodge is a beautiful mountain hotel built and still owned by the U.S. government. It was built by Oregon’s people on WPA. It cost a million dollars and has been open just four years.

After it was finished it was turned over to the U.S. Forest Service, which supervises it. It isn’t, however, run by the Forest Service. It is leased to a private company – a special company formed by Portland business men just to operate this Lodge.

Timberline Lodge is named that because it stands exactly at Timberline, half-way up 11,000-foot Mt. Hood. Below the Lodge, all is thick, green timber. Above it, all is empty, vast sweep of meadow and rock, clear to the jagged top. The Lodge is 65 miles from Portland.

I have been in most of the mountain resorts similar to this one. To me, Timberline is the loveliest thing of its kind in America. You can’t come here and not be impressed by the gigantic naturalness of the place. It seems to have grown here, like the trees.

Unbelievably immense crowds come here. Right now, through the week, there is only a handful of guests at the Lodge. That’s perfect for me, because it gives me more tumbling room on the snowy slopes.

Lodge crowded on weekends

But every weekend the population skyrockets to the fantastic figure of 2500 or 3000 skiers, up from Portland. The Lodge is overrun, in fact overwhelmed. It sometimes seems that the shouting, dripping, wind-bitten skiers flowing around the lodge could just lift the whole thing up and toss it down the mountain side.

I came here to do my skiing, first, because I have loved the place ever since my previous visit, and, second, because ever since when they have been badgering me to come back in winter and ski with them. I finally floored them by accepting.

The place somehow has mesmerized me. There is possibly better skiing in America than at Timberline – I wouldn’t know. But there are few places with finer views, greater wealth of taste, more comfort, more winter-woodsy atmosphere.

Timberline Lodge is the result of the imagination of a remarkable man, E. J. Griffith, director of WPA for Oregon. The Lodge is his idea; the spot is his idea; the design is his idea; the good taste in it is his. If ever a man had a right to be proud of something he has wrought, E. J. Griffith is entitled to his pride.

Mr. Griffith is a tall, slender, dignifiedly-handsome man of early middle age. There is calmness and culture in his voice. He knows the skiing slopes and the universities of Europe and he knows also the red-taped corridors of Washington, D.C.

But he knows best, and loves best, these mountains of Oregon. He is an executive, but a woodsman, too. He skied these mountain sides long before this Lodge was ever built.

Ten years ago he was lost all night in dead of winter on this very slope; had to keep moving all night to keep from freezing to death. They say now that he is the only man, traveling alone, whoever survived a night on the mountain in wintertime.

Mr. Griffith these days is so busy he doesn’t get to come up very often. He got up only once last year to ski. He has not even skied this winter. But he is coming up on my last day here, to ski with me. I must practice hard, for it would be base indeed to fall and scramble about in the snow in the presence of the man who created all this.

World’s longest ski-lift

When we were here, two and a half years ago, the ski-lift was just being built. Now it is finished and running. It is the longest ski-lift in the world (one mile).

You start near the Lodge, and ride the mile upward in 11 minutes. That simple, easy ride is what makes skiing tolerable. If you walked up it would take you hours, and you’d be too exhausted to ski back down. The downhill ski-trail is called “The Magic Mile.”

Today I rode up and back on the ski-lift. It is an odd sensation. The towers are high, and just as you start you’re whisked clear above the tops of the fir trees. Farther up, where there is nothing except snow beneath, the sensation is almost one of flying.

When they have the big weekend crowds, people stand in line all day to get onto the ski-lift. They say it isn’t unusual for the more rabid skiers to make 20 round trips in a day. The record, they say, is 30 trips in one day. It would take the finest of champion skiers, racing down from dawn to dark, to do that.

I asked if anybody ever had fallen out of his chair on the ski-lift. (You’re strapped in, but could loosen the belt). They said no, but one woman did jump out. She was slightly oiled at the time. She fell 22 feet, but she lived.

They have taken up one-legged men and old folks and babies. Even if you don’t ski at all, no one should come to Timberline without riding the ski-lift up and down. You get a view, and a sensation, that could come otherwise only from an airplane.

In fact it’s better than a plane, for you’re out in the open, and everything is so silent, and the whole big world lies out there beneath you just as if for the moment it was your private property.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 7, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

TIMBERLINE LODGE, Ore. – It would be hard to visualize, to a Floridan for instance, how deep the snow is up here. It’s even hard to believe it yourself.

For when we ski out through the trees to our practice slope, the snow is hard on top and you imagine it’s just a few inches deep, since it follows the contour of the ground.

Yet this snow we daily cross is more than six feet deep. And that’s shallower than the average depth. Usually it is 10 feet or more.

You stand beside what apparently is a small bush, not as high as your waist, and actually it is a tree much higher than your head. Most of it is down under the snow.

Often the second-story windows of the Lodge are covered up. Even now, the snow has to be pushed back from the dining room windows. And a great, heavy-beamed shed forms a tunnel from the parking grounds to the Lodge’s entrance door.

They keep the Lodge well heated. In fact when you come in from an afternoon’s skiing you are already so warm that the room usually seems too hot, and you open a window for a little while.

It gets down to zero up here. But during my visit it has been only a little below freezing. The sun has been bright and the far-off mountain panorama magnificent although you wouldn’t dare mention that in print on the day it happened, because of censorship.

Beginner tries it – once

If there are a few warmish days to melt the snow, and then cold nights to refreeze it, an ice sheet forms on top, and this spoils skiing. That’s when you get your bad falls; your skis get to sliding on the ice and you just can’t stop.

It was that way when I first went out, but being a novice it was one and the same to me. I didn’t even know skiing conditions were bad; I thought it was just bad Pyle technique.

I have a green-eyed jealousy of the people who are capable of going up on the ski lift and skiing back down. That would be an accomplishment. But it’s something that will not happen to me this trip. I can’t even grapple with our little 50-foot practice slope. And it’s actually about two miles down the Magic Mile.

They tell about a novice skier who showed up last year. The first thing he did was take the lift to the top and start back down on his skis. He got about a third of the way down and then, going like lightning, whizzed over the edge of an abyss, flew through the air for about 30 feet, struck a rest-house and smashed to the ground. He lay there all day till they found him late that afternoon. He died two months later.

Instructors ski for fun

On weekends they keep a doctor up here, and the Ski Patrol is on the prowl constantly. With 2500 people skiing all over the place, a good portion of them novices, somebody is bound to get hurt. And somebody always does. The Ski Patrol brings them in on stretchers.

I hadn’t been out an hour until here came a guy dragging himself across the snow with a broken ankle.

But perhaps I’m scaring you. I would feel practically criminal if I deterred anybody from this exhilarating sport. You may rest easy. If it’s safe enough for me, it’s safe enough for Grandpa. So get him a pair of boards and send him on up.

Skiing is indeed insidious the way it gets into people’s blood. Practically everybody who works around this great Lodge either can ski or is learning. They’re not all young, either.

The hotel manager skis, the bus driver skis, the waitresses ski, the bus-boys ski, the clerks in the ski-shop ski, the Forest Rangers ski. Even Jack Farrell, who is in charge at the top of the ski-lift, skis all the way down from work every evening, instead of riding the chairs down. And the instructors actually ski for fun in their off-hours.

The Lodge ran out of guest stationery this evening, so I went around the public writing desks trying to gather up a few scraps to write on.

At one desk I found two sheets, on which some young man had been trying to start a letter home. He apparently just gave up and left his efforts there. Here is what he left:

“Dear Folks, Dear Mom, Pop… Rah! Benson! … Mt. Hood National For… Dear Folks… Drdez… Dear Popin Folks, Po… Popin… I sure am stove in, in answering you I really… Dear Folks… There’ll always be an Eng…”

Apparently he just collapsed at that point, from being so stove in. I know just how he felt. I’m stove in too, Dear Folks. Dear England. Dear Timberline. Dear Popin. Dear Me.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 9, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

TIMBERLINE LODGE, Ore. – Skiing is hard work. The altitude is high and the exercise violent. You use a great many muscles you never knew you had. Long-unused muscles get mighty sore.

Skiing consists about as much in being in good physical condition as it does in skill. My skill at the present writing is hidden under some obscure bushel. And my physical perfection would undoubtedly take the booby prize of Oregon. Why, if I happen to walk swiftly across the room after a cigarette, I have lumbago the next day.

So you can imagine what a pitiful, broken thing all this violent skiing exercise has made of me. Even standing real still in the lobby the first few days was a bodily agony.

But fortunately I kept right at it, and didn’t let my tortured muscles get “set.” I kept them working. And now at last I’m beginning to get conditioned. Finally the aches have begun to abate; my wobbly ankles have strength in them now; I throb with such new inner energy that I stand before a mirror and twitch my arms, admiring myself.

A soft fellow really does begin to feel strong after a few days of this. Skiing would add years to the health of any office-sitter. I’m aware again that I’ve got something in my Wrists and shoulders besides soup. Even my shiny scalp feels muscular.

I believe today I could knock the average woman down with ease.

He earns his ski clothes

It’s funny how your feeling about yourself changes as you progress with your skiing.

Most people stay in their ski-clothes all day; eat in them and sit around the lounge in them. But I was so self-conscious about mine I’d go change before coming back to eat.

I felt this way – here’s a guy who falls down while standing perfectly still on skis, so isn’t he a fine spectacle parading around the hotel in ski clothes?

But on the third day I thought to myself, “Well, now I’ve been out there trying and working as hard as anybody, and not falling down any more than some others I could mention. I guess I’ve earned my ski clothes now, so I’ll just wear them all the time, too.” So I’m doing it, and I feel as nonchalant as a man lighting a Murad.

You see some of the oddest skiing outfits up here. As in golf, the snazziest outfits usually don’t belong to the best skiers. You can ski in almost anything.

This morning I saw one boy (a good one, too) skiing around bareheaded and in a grotesquely long overcoat. And a girl skiing in shorts, her legs bare.

I rented my ski-pants from the Lodge’s ski-shop, in the hip pocket I found the slip made out to the fellow who had them before. His name was Dick Rathbun.

St. Bernards just ornaments

The slip didn’t say what success Dick had in the struggle to remain perpendicular. When I turn in my clothes I’m leaving a note in the hip pocket, warning the next innocent renter to demand a different pair of pants. It’s impossible to stand up in these.

Practically everybody who skis wears dark glasses or goggles, or a cap with a dark isinglass shield suspended from the bill – for the glare of the sun on the snow is often blinding.

Also, friends had warned me to put on lots of sunburn lotion, for the reflection of the sun on the snow is a treacherous thing, and people actually get so badly sunburned in one day they have to go to a doctor.

But I was anxious to get sunburned, for I’ve lost all my good New Mexico cowboy color. So I skied with my sock-cap pushed way back on my head, in order to get lots of sun. And so far I haven’t burned even faintly. I still look like a hothouse flower.

I’ve been hoping I might get lost in the snow, so they’d have to send a St. Bernard after me, with a keg of rum strapped under his neck.

The Lodge has two St. Bernards, named Bruhl and Lady. They are the most stupendous dogs I ever saw. Somebody gave them to the Lodge when they were pups, about four years ago.

But even if I did get lost, the St. Bernards probably wouldn’t come after me. For they are merely ornaments. They love to be fed and petted. They just lie around all day. The ski instructors say they’re so lazy they wouldn’t get up out of the snow themselves. I’d sure like to have one, though.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 10, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

TIMBERLINE LODGE, Ore. – These last few days, while dwelling on other things, we’ve sort of neglected my personal skiing. I mean neglected it in the column. But I’ve been right out there every day, laboring conscientiously.

The days are building up now, and it’ll soon be time to leave. And so far I haven’t learned how to do a thing. We’re still out on that same little slope, still trying to find out how to make “stem turns.”

I still can’t force myself to lean out on a turn – and when I do accomplish that violation of scientific balance I always fall on over in that direction.

I still get the tips of my skis crossed, which is comparable to having no legs at all. I still find my ankles so weak I can’t hold the skis out in a turn. I still get to going in the wrong direction and have to sit down quick to keep from running into somebody.

Maybe I could learn some day. I’m not sure. Certainly I can’t be accused of not persevering. I’m known around here as the guy who’s always down but never out.

One of the girls in our threesome class disappeared, leaving only one girl and myself. We are both tenacious students. We always show up at classtime, to plague Olaf with our ineptitudes, and we even stay out and practice after he’s gone.

He meets fellow student

For days I didn’t know this girl’s name, or where she was from, or anything about her. Finally it occurred to me that maybe I should get her identified, just in case of accident or something.

So after rolling down the same hill together for several days, we at last met in the Lodge, shook hands and introduced ourselves. Her name was Maureen Jackman. Mine was Ernst Otto Sve-- oh to hell with that, you know my name.

Maureen is from Spokane. She’s just a kid. She went one year to college, and then got a job as telephone operator in Spokane last summer. She loves to telephone-operate.

She got a week’s vacation after six months. She didn’t know what to do with it, so she went to the local travel agent, and wound up at Timberline on a four-day “tour.” She made the trip by bus. She has her own skis, and is determined to learn.

Maureen says she’s sore from head to foot from her falling-down bruises. But being young, her muscles don’t bother her a bit. It’s the opposite with me. My hide is wrinkled and tough and I don’t bruise easily. But oh those tendons of mine. Ouch!

Army uses good skiers

Maureen has never before been away from home on a big trip. She doesn’t know beans about traveling, so that gives me a chance to show off and help her out with little things – such as telling her how much to tip, and that there are Yellow Cabs in other cities besides Spokane, and that New Mexico is in the United States. I don’t think she believed it, though, when I said I’d been in England.

In a way, I feel badly about Maureen’s vacation. It has always been my assumption that girls who spend their hard-earned money for a lake cruise or a Hollywood trip, or a jaunt to the ski-bowls, did it in a kind of romantic hopefulness. But there are no detached young men at Timberline just now. In fact the paucity of Greek gods is so extreme that Naureen has had to wind up her first big worldly vacation with an old goat like me as her only social companion. I can’t dance, sing, swim, ski, skate, carry on a conversation or tolerate moonlight. I’m not even rich. I don’t see how Maureen can bear it.

Yet she seems happy as a lark, intrigued with everything that happens, profoundly serious about her skiing, and wonderfully glad she came.

The other instructor took us on for a while this afternoon, to give poor Olaf a little respite from his ordeal. This other one is named Martin Poff. He is Swiss, and he’s a noted racing skier. He and Olaf both speak perfect English and are very nice people.

Both Olaf and Martin are small men. They say short people make the best skiers. Olaf has already been in the Army, but was let out because he was over 28. He’s expecting his recall any day now. He’ll be in the ski troops when he re-enters.

A great many Oregon skiers have gone into the Ski Troops. Practically any good skier can get into the outfit, they tell me. If you’re of draft age and not bad on skis, the way to go about it is to have your local ski club write to the National Ski Patrol in New York City, recommending you. The Army has given the Ski Patrol the job of attesting to the ability of ski volunteers.

Tomorrow is my last day here. I’ve decided to practice all night tonight. It simply must not get about that the great Ernst couldn’t make one turn in a whole week. Tomorrow I’ll either make that turn or break up my skis, poles, legs and arms in a final rage of frustration. In case I do make it, I think I’ll join the ski troops.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 11, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

TIMBERLINE LODGE, Ore. – There is one trouble with learning to ski, as far as writing about it is concerned. That’s the fact that your mood changes so often.

When I came up here I thought I’d just clown through the whole thing, make only a halfhearted attempt at skiing, and try to be funny about it in the column.

But gee, when you get out there and are face to face with it, grappling for your balance, it isn’t funny at all. You get very serious about it, and all of a sudden.

After that you go through a whole cycle of determination, elation and disgust. After you’ve been doing fairly well for a couple of days, the beginner usually has a bad relapse. Everything goes wrong. You’re worse than the first day. Also, you hurt all over.

Right there’s the critical time. A great gloomy disinterest in skiing comes over you. You get cynical. Most people of my character quit right there.

That’s where I was this morning. It was my last day here. When I awakened I was in pain from head to foot. The bruised end of my spine had kept me awake half the night. I couldn’t get my shoes on for about five minutes. And it was storming outside.

“I’ve had enough,” I said. “I can’t learn to ski anyway, so why torture myself this last day? I’ll just lounge around.”

Olaf says it’s O.K.

And so I didn’t even put on my ski clothes. When my friends arrived from Portland at noon, they found me sitting before the fireplace. Sitting on one side too, I might add.

“How do you like skiing?” they shouted.

“I think it is asinine,” I said. “You go ahead and ski, and I’ll be packed and ready when you come in.”

“Oh no,” they said, “you’re going up the ski lift with us and ski down the Magic Mile.”

“Me ski down the Magic Mile?” I said. “Don’t be insane. It would be suicide. I couldn’t ski down the Magic Mile if I practiced for two years.”

But they went out and asked Olaf, and he said it would be all right. Then they had me. I couldn’t refuse without being a plain coward.

When I saw there was no way out, I hunted up my novice skiing companion, Maureen Jackman, and asked her to go along. I needed company in my misery. She was a little startled too, but said if I was going to be a fool she guessed she would too.

The four of us rode the lift to the top. It was storming again. We clop-clopped up the little slope back of the shelter house, and stood for a minute before starting the awful descent. The wind blew and the hard snow bit into our faces.

One of our friends took off. Then the other. Then my new girl friend. That left me all alone. Again came that terrible panicky feeling. But I gave a shove. My last bridge was burned.

I guess that first straight run must have been 50 yards, and at the bottom you either had to turn or smack into a hillside. So do you know what I did? I turned! And me a guy who can’t make turns.

I found my friends waiting for me over the brow of the next slope. I skied down to them. “You look fine,” they said. “You’re doing dandy.” I began to feel a sort of pride.

We worked down the mountain slowly. A racing skier can make the Magic Mile in a minute and a half. But we took an hour, and probably covered three miles.

Finally hits his stride

We stopped frequently, for our legs got tired holding on the brakes. Then our two more experienced friends would show us what they knew about certain turns, and we’d practice a little on some gentle slope. The afternoon fled by, and living became fun again.

The snow was so thick we could see only a hundred feet ahead. We were covered with snow, The day was miserable, but we were not cold, rather we were warm and elated. Even my muscles forgot to hurt.

Suddenly we looked at our watches, and saw it was almost time to leave for Portland. The veteran of our party said it was still half a mile to the bottom.

“Let’s be off,” he said.

And with that he dug in his ski-poles, gave himself a push, and shot straight down the mountain. We had to follow to keep him in sight.

It was that last half mile which finally made a rabid, raving ski enthusiast cut of me. For I personally skied that last half mile without stopping and without falling down; skied all the turns, and made them with passable grace; hurdled small ice ridges without losing my balance; finally felt the magnificent rush and rhythm of the thing.

When we wound up with a snow-swirling flourish at the bottom, I felt an elation I hadn’t known in years. I had done something that was impossible for me to do, and done it fairly well.

The wind and the speed and the rhythm of the skis had finally got into my blood. For the first time in years I loved being out in the snow. I wanted to ski forever.

We dashed up to your rooms to change clothes. My friends finished dressing and waited for me in the lounge. I didn’t appear and finally they came to my room.

They found me on the floor, fainted dead away. In my hand was clutched a folder which I’d picked up while dressing. It described the various ski runs at Timberline. And under the heading “Magic Mile” was the following message:

“A 20 per cent grade. For intermediate and expert skiers only!”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 12, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

PORTLAND, Ore. – The skiing is over, and I’m sorry. For now I’m nuts about it. The whole “feeling” of the thing came all of a sudden, just as they said it would.

You stumble along for days, getting more and more discouraged, and sensing no harmony whatever with those encumbering boards on your feet. And then all n at once, like a flash, comes that marvelous feeling of release.

The skis, instead of being shackles, suddenly become something to help you and speed you along. As Olaf said, “It’s a wonderful sensation when you finally can make them do what you want them to.”

I think this week has taught me a few things more than just how to stand up on skis.

I’ve discovered, for one thing, what a completely exerciseless life I ordinarily lead. Why, after the agonies, of sore muscles had finally worn off, I felt better than I’d felt in years. I even gained weight up there at Timberline.

I learned also that you can do things when you’re face to face with the necessity for doing them. For instance, the instructors said I undoubtedly learned more about skiing in that one try down the mountain yesterday than I would have in two months of practicing on our safe little one. That’s because you can do things when you have to.

Theory might not work

But I’m not sure that should be set up as a standard theory of life. Here I go again, always thinking up exceptions to the perfect rules. For instance, if you couldn’t play the piano, yet had to sit down and play the piano in order to save your life, could you do it! Of course you couldn’t. Well, it was a good theory while it lasted, anyway.

But most important of all the things I learned is something which I suppose better sportsmen than myself know by instinct – and that is that a person works hardest, fights best, plays more gaily, even is braver, when he has companionship.

In the last two years – due to the urgencies of war living and the illness of That Girl and some other things – I have learned what it is to be alone. I have at last come to know the terror of being afraid by yourself – either in the vain little torture of embarrassment, or in the gigantic fright of thinking you are about to die.

Today, at last, I know that no man except a freak is able to stand absolutely alone. I know that if I am to be bombed to death, I want somebody with me. If I am by events placed in a dramatic position, it comes to nothing unless there is someone I love on hand to appreciate it. If I am rollicking in the snow, it is no fun at all unless some friend is beside me, to fall down with me grotesquely so that the two of us can laugh together.

Old friends save the day

And it was thus that my odd skiing interlude was saved in the end. It was saved by the arrival of two people I knew and could be natural with – E. J. Griffith, who is administrator of WPA for Oregon, and Mrs. Dexter Keezer, whom I have known for half my lifetime.

I must tell you about Anne Keezer, for she is quite a fellow. Her husband is president of Reed College out here and has just been given an important job in Washington. Her stepfather is Lowell Mellett, of Mr. Roosevelt’s “inner circle.” And she herself is the mother of two lovely and incorrigible little girls.

Annie Keezer is a whirlwind of animation, exaggeration and headlongism. She sews and knits and skates and skis and rides and reads and entertains and takes charge of things all over the place, because she has to let her spirit out into something. She boils and effervesces and gesticulates. She is probably the most enthusiastic conversationalist I’ve ever heard. The best yarn that ever happened isn’t half as good as when Anne finishes telling it.

All of which is just a build-up to what happened on our final afternoon of skiing. We were plunging down Timberline’s famous “Magic Mile.” Anne was skiing ahead of us, turning and exploring the white mist of falling snow.

And suddenly Annie disappeared. This second she was here, the next second she was gone. It was as though a magician had gone “poof” – and she vanished into thin air.

What happened was that Annie had simply skied right over a 20-foot precipice. She flew a vast distance through the air, lit on her head, and wasn’t hurt at all. She said she had no sensation of falling, and when she got her head out of the snowdrift she couldn’t think where she was.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 13, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

PORTLAND, Oregon – Since the WPA always has captivated me as a phenomenon, a social force, a doer of good deeds, and a possible haven for myself in some future private storm, I dropped around today to see what the WPA was doing for its country now.

Or more specifically, to see what the Art Project under WPA was doing, I have been curious about how sculpture and handweaving and murals could help save America from the Japs.

Well, they’re helping all right. The Art Project of Oregon’s WPA is hard at work on defense. In fact it’s doing nothing else. It isn’t making shells or planes – but it’s making the men happy who shoot the shells and pilot the planes.

The Art Project, you might say, has gone into the business of making life bearable for some of our armed forces. At the moment it is head over heels furnishing and decorating the new Tongue Point Naval Air Station.

That’s all said in a few words, and yet it’s a colossal job. The Art Project has made the furniture (and boy you should see it!) for all the public and many of the private rooms – 280 pieces, chairs, tables, beds, lamps, ash trays, even a crap table.

It has made all the drapes. It has furnished the pictures and murals and the pretty pottery that sits around on tables – 76 separate pieces, from oil paintings to huge glass mosaics.

You know, if you’ve ever been around one, how nicely the quarters at a Naval Air Station are fixed up. Well, I imagine Tongue Point will be the envy of the whole Navy.

$20,000 job done for $7000

You might ask why the Navy, in a time of urgency like this, has to help keep WPA going by having it do this work. Why not just go to a store and buy the stuff?

The answer is simple – the Oregon Art Projects can do this job more artistically, and far more cheaply, than it could be done any other way right now. Why, for $7000 the Government is getting at Tongue Point what would cost $20,000 anywhere else. That’s the answer.

Oregon’s Art Project is unique. No other state has put its art craftsmanship to such practical use. They’ve really created a renaissance out here.

The Art Project didn’t just sew a little and hold water-color classes and model a few urns for exhibits around the country. For at least five years it has been actually creating things – unusual, tasteful and practical things – for people to use.

The Art Project fished out carpenters from the WPA rolls, and made delicate cabinetmakers out of them. It took foundry workers and trained them into ironwork-Cellinis. It took guys like me whose fingers were all thumbs, and made fine upholsterers of them. It took ordinary housewives and set them to weaving unusual drapes and upholstering material.

Then with all this newly developed talent fit started making things that were both useful and beautiful. What it did was the opposite of leaf-raking.

Decorated medical school

It built and furnished Timberline Lodge. It decorated the University of Oregon’s medical school. It furnished – in Oregon’s native myrtlewood – the lodge at Siver Creek Falls state park. It did the Bend County courthouse, and dozens of libraries and schools.

It furnished and decorated the quarters of an Army Engineers outfit here in Portland, and did some decorative work at the Air Base. It is just winding up a beautiful job of refurnishing the governor’s mansion at Juneau, Alaska.

Yes, what it has done is practical, and it has made a name for itself. Five years ago it had to beg for projects. Today it is so flooded with requests that it has a hard time choosing which to do, for it can do only a few.

For now, it’s getting shorthanded, and of course that’s the way it should be. The majority of the skilled workers have left to take jobs in defense industry.

The number of people employed on the Art Project has dropped by one-third – and the two-thirds remaining are not the same people who were working a year ago, but are green hands pulled off the regular WPA rolls and trained to this specialized work.

If the war goes long enough, the Project visualizes the day when it will fold up altogether because there’ll no longer be anybody to do the work – everybody will be in actual defense work. That would be a fitting climax to a job spectacularly well done.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 14, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

GOLD HILL, Oregon – For several years travelers have been writing me that the next time I passed through southern Oregon I must stop and see the “House of Mystery,” in which everything leans to the north.

So this time I did. I explored it, I sniffed, peeked, measured, balanced and sighted – and everything does lean to the north, including people.

This “House of Mystery” is about half-way between Grant’s Pass and Medford, and four miles off U.S. Highway 99. It is operated as a tourist attraction. They charge 30 cents a person.

Trappers and prospectors have known for a long time there was something screwballish about this little patch of ground. But nobody ever did much about it until 12 years ago when John Litster, a chemical engineer, advertising writer and what not, retired because of ill health, moved up here and devoted his talents to getting this spooky phenomenon in shape for public presentation.

Litster now lives a few miles farther up the creek. He keeps a guide and caretaker here beside the House of Mystery – in an unmysterious cabin of his own – to guide tourists.

The House of Mystery is an old frame building that was once an assay office. Some 30 years ago it sort of leaned over and slid part way down the hillside.

The building sits in the center of a 125-foot circle, and anywhere within this circle everything acts funny. Trees lean north, bubble-levels won’t work, plum-lines don’t hang straight, people’s heights aren’t the same. It’s enough to drive a man nuts.

Not done by mirrors either

They never did get it over to me exactly what causes it all. You’d assume there was a body of ore directly underneath that exerted a strong magnetic pull; but they say that isn’t it. So I’ll have to skip the scientific part, and just tell you what you see.

Our young guide, named Charles Taylor, started us out by putting my friend and me on opposite ends of a level concrete slab. My friend was considerably shorter than I, and my eye level rested just on top of his hat.

Then the guide had us change places – and I’m telling you my friend was about six inches taller than he was before, and my eye-level was on his chin. He said I looked shorter.

It was the same every time we tried it. When facing north, you seem about six inches taller than when facing south. Undoubtedly this is an optical illusion, yet you can’t photograph an illusion, and this can be photographed. We certainly got off to a spooky start.

After that the guide took us up the hill a little way. He stopped to talk a moment, and I realized he was leaning way over, although quite relaxed. I looked at my friend, and he was leaning over, too. There was also a mighty silly look on his face.

The guide said I was leaning just as they were. It seemed to me I was standing naturally. So the guide had me face one direction, then look down at my shoes. I could see the tips sticking about two inches beyond the edge of my overcoat. Then I turned in the other direction, relaxed, looked down, and couldn’t see my shoes at all. I WAS leaning.

Then we went into the Mystery House itself. The floor is very slanting. Of course that gives you a sense of unbalance. But furthermore, you get the sensation that the whole place is moving. Tourists actually get seasick standing perfectly still in there.

Further, you can stand on boards sloping sharply either to the north or south, and no matter which slope you stand on, you lean to the north when you’re balanced.

There was a heavy weight suspended from the ceiling on a chain. The guide had us push it back and forth. It takes more strength to push it one direction than the other, although the weight is swinging free. I’m so confused by now I forget which direction was hardest.

Everything leans 7½ degrees

Then our guide took an old broom, and kept balancing it until it finally stood there all by itself. And do you think that freely balanced broom was standing straight up and down? It was not. It was leaning over at an angle! Everything in the circle leans at 7½ degrees.

Outside again, our guide took some golf balls out of his pocket and threw one up in the air, slightly away from him. Instead of going on away in the natural arc of its descent, the ball came right back toward him.

“Let me have that ball,” I said, figuring he was giving it the old English or something. But it came right back to me, too. And I sure don’t know any tricks.

The guide says lots of scientists come here for a look. He says big scientists are easy to deal with, and are grave about it. He says it’s usually high-school science teachers who are so smart and yell it’s all done with mirrors.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 16, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN FRANCISCO – Well, what do you know about this! Here we are in San Francisco again. If I’m not careful I’ll get to calling San Francisco home instead of Albuquerque or Indiana or Washington, D.C. Maybe I just better ask for bids.

In addition to torrents of rain and the keys to the city, I was welcomed here by a large batch of mail. On the whole the mail was nice and the writers wished me much health, happiness and wealth. I go for that wealth stuff.

However, there were a few letters which made me feel bad. It seems some people are being wracked by an indignant concern over the apparent disintegration of this noted author’s moral fiber. So perhaps a futile explanation is due them.

You know that cooking column I wrote from Albuquerque a few months ago. The one in which we took up a collection from the guests to buy flowers for the delivery boy who broke his leg (although there wasn’t any delivery boy and he didn’t break his leg). And I said that instead of buying flowers I took the money and bought whisky with it.

Well, that seems to have upset several people. That I could be such a rat as to buy whisky with that money! One woman even consigned me not too gently to Purgatory.

What astounds me is that people apparently have taken to believing everything they see in this column. Why, I’ve been writing fantasies like that for seven years, and nobody ever got so serious about it before. Older readers know quite well that occasionally I get my tongue caught in my cheek and can’t get it out.

Humor backfires in wartime

So I’ll draw those disgruntled readers a picture of that nasty whisky-buying episode. No such incident ever happened. I made it all up. I thought everybody would know that when they read it.

No collection was ever taken to buy flowers for the delivery boy who didn’t exist. And I did not buy whisky with the money that wasn’t collected. All the world knows that I don’t buy whisky. What I actually bought was a trainload of burros, all named Pete.

Now, everybody happy?

It does seem to me, as a man with his finger on the nation’s pulse as they say, that there has been an altering of public reception to humor-attempts since the war started.

Take me. I’m a humorist, as everybody knows. I’ve been laughing hysterically at my own stuff for years. I have no proof that anybody else ever did. but at least my occasional efforts at wit never brought the firing squad to my door.

Yet since Pearl Harbor it seems to me that some folks have deliberately set out to misunderstand what they read. I’ve actually had the recent experience of being raised by one reader to the status of a traitor because of a line I thought was harmlessly funny. Light-heartedness is ticklish business these days.

The New Yorker magazine recently had a little essay on this subject. They are worried, too. They likened wit to the hand grenades of the last war, where you pulled the fuse, counted four, and let fly at the enemy.

Gloom will live for a day

A dozen little things could happen to cause you to blow yourself to smithereens, instead of your audience, the Germans. That’s what is happening now to humorists and cartoonists. The New Yorker says:

It is too tough a job for the average humorist to determine which of his writings are likely to bolster the national morale and which are likely to give comfort to the enemy (and, I might add, discomfort to himself).

The old-fashioned idea that laughter is always a healthy catharsis is too firmly imbedded in him, and his estimate of the public’s ability to disentangle irony is, generally speaking, much too optimistic.”

So, as far as I am concerned, a gay touch isn’t worth the struggle any longer. Down with humor for the duration, I say. Long live gloom, if that’s the way it has to be. Hereafter when something funny pops into my head. I’ll just lock the door and laugh traitorously to myself.

Maybe I’ll change my mind tomorrow, though.

I have a friend here who went to enlist in the Air Corps. He passed the physical and mental tests easily, but they wouldn’t take him – because he bit his nails! Guess they figured it indicated he was too nervous.

However, they did say that if he’d come back in a week with unbitten nails, they’d take him. So my friend summoned up all his will power, went for a week without biting a nail, returned to the recruiting office, and was accepted.

Gleefully he rushed back to the office where the worked, and started telling the boys that he had been taken. The boys gathered around and congratulated him, and then one of them said: “But what’s the matter with your fingernails?”

Everybody looked, including my friend. And discovered that he had bitten all his nails clear down to the quick on his way back from the recruiting office!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 17, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN FRANCISCO – Except for our little side trip to the House of Mystery, I drove straight through from Portland to San Francisco – two and a half days.

On this trip I had a traveling companion, and a very pleasant one. There’s a slight difference in our ages, but he’s one of the best friends I have. A few of you with elephant-like memories may remember a column I wrote about him one summer from Alaska.

His name is Johnnie Palm. He has lived in Alaska for 45 years. For most of that time he has carried the mails – by dog team, by nurse sled, on snowshoes, on skis, and by truck. He has lived the toughest, hardest life of anyone in my acquaintance.

Yet today he is so tiny, and so timid and so courteous, and the dresses so meticulously and conducts himself so quietly, that you’d never know he’d ever seen a malamute dog in his life. He is 76.

During most of his years in Alaska he seldom came “outside,” as Alaskans say of coming to the U.S. But three or four years ago he came out to get a set of teeth, and he liked it so well he’s been coming out every winter since.

He and Mrs. Palm are spending the winter at a hotel in Seattle. I ran onto them there, and coaxed Johnnie into riding down with me. He came to Portland by bus, and we started out.

Johnnie is the perfect traveling companion. He talks just enough to break the monotony, but doesn’t keep you talking. He enjoys a moderate speed, as I do. He likes to stop early, as I do. And in two and a half days he can remember an awful lot of good Alaskan stories to tell.

At 76, his health is perfect

Johnnie was up every morning at 5. He’d just sit around in the hotel lobby waiting till I showed up around 7 (which practically killed me). In those two hours he had found out from the night clerk, in his quiet way, everything about the town.

We had a lot of fun. One morning Johnnie was in such a hurry to get down to the lobby to sit that he shaved only one side of his face.

Johnnie is really a phenomenon. Although he is 76, he doesn’t look or act much older than I do. His health is perfect. He has no aches nor pains. He doesn’t wear glasses. He is young in mind and big in soul.

Like most Alaskans, Johnnie was practically raised on the bottle – the whisky bottle, I mean. In all those years behind the dog teams he never went on trail without a quart of whisky on his sled. A quart a day, that’s what he used. Of course he can’t go that strong nowadays, but. as he says, he sure keeps trying.

Seattle is filled with Alaskans down for the winter. Hundreds of oldtime sourdoughs, just loafing the winter away. They have nothing to do all day but slap each other on the back and have a drink for old times’ sake.

And since Johnnie knows everybody in Alaska, that makes it tough. Mrs. Palm laughs and says, “It’s just ‘Johnnie, here have a drink,’ ‘Johnnie, come have a drink,’ from morning till night.” Johnnie just grins when she tells about it.

Johnnie’s home in Fairbanks is rented out for the winter. He was already in the States when Pearl Harbor happened, and he’s been fretting ever since about getting back to see about his business.

Planes substitute for dogs

He runs a small trucking line, and holds several mail contracts. Things are pretty modem now in Alaska. Hardly anybody ever takes a long winter trip by dog team any more. They go by airplane. Most of the winter mail is now carried by air.

Johnnie made his last winter mail trip six years ago – and he was 70 then. It was a run of 180 miles, and his schedule was six days – 30 miles a day.

Johnnie has had a lot of close shaves in his 45 years in the Arctic, but he had his closest one that winter. He was breaking trail and somehow he got himself caught. He worked all day through the snow; finally was so weak he could barely keep going; when at last he reached a trailside cabin they said he could not have lasted another 15 minutes. As it was his hands were frozen and he lost his finger nails. But his hands are all right now.

Johnnie doesn’t like to travel away from the West Coast, because he considers himself so “green” in city ways. He eats nothing but meat and potatoes.

Ordinarily you would visualize an old sourdough who ran behind dog teams for 30 years, who drank a quart of whisky a day, who at 76 can still do a day’s work and drink a day’s share, as a pretty hard egg.

If there has ever been a kinder, nicer-minded man than Johnnie Palm, I have never met him. I admire him so much that I almost have a notion to get me a team of huskies and a quart of whisky for developing my own character. (Note to belligerent readers: Now, don’t write me dirty letters about that. You know I’m joking. Why, what would I do with a team of huskies?)

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 18, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN FRANCISCO – To many people it may seem almost sacrilegious to write grievedly about the death of a dog, when humans are dying violently all over the face of the earth.

If it does seem so I can only say that I am sorry, but I can’t help it. For our dog Piper is dead.

Piper was the Great Dane. He was the dog that came to be a member of our family only two months ago. Immense and ungainly and lovable, he was still really a child when he died. He was nine months old.

Piper stood as high as my waist and weighed more than 100 pounds, even though he was not fully grown. His companionship was perfect, from the very start. Thru the grotesque folds of his old-mannish face you could sense his joy at being with us.

His understanding of things was almost uncanny. He had not had a minute of training when he came to us. He had never lived in a house. Yet his instincts were so sensitive that he never even had to be housebroken.

The first day we had him I said to him, “Piper, lie down.” Then I lay down on the floor to show him what I meant. That single lesson was all it took. From that moment on, I could have told him to lie down in the traffic of Central Ave. in Albuquerque, and he would have done it.

When we walked across the mesa, he always walked close beside me, pushing against my leg. When I took off the leash, he wouldn’t go away. When I ran, he ran. When I stopped, he stopped. He wanted only to please us.

When I was home, little Cheetah the Fox slept on my bed, and Piper, because he was too big to get on a bed, slept on a blanket on the floor.

At bedtime I would get both dogs settled, then turn out the light. But Piper, even though I had known him only a week, would always get up in the dark, nose his huge funny face into mine to make sure I was still there, and then he would go to sleep.

The dog loved us

I can never forget one night, less than a week after we had him. The people who raised him came to see us, to make sure that everything was getting along air right. They are good people and their dogs have only affection for them.

When they came that night, Piper sniffed until recognition dawned on him. Then he went to each one, as if to welcome them to the hospitality of our home. And then he came directly to me, shoved his head way down between my legs, like a child hiding its face, and that’s the way he stayed. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. He was saying that he was ours. The damn dog loved us.

The dogs really came to our house to be the dogs of That Girl. And that’s what they became. Both to her, and to them. I haven’t seen her, but I know she could tell a million little incidents of affection like the few I remember so fondly. When he died, Piper was all her dog.

Piper’s illness was a strange and sudden one. It was an illness of paralytic-like seizures, and he suddenly grew terribly thin, and his jaws would not open for him to eat.

The illness grew worse with a shocking violence. For days and nights on end, both That Girl and the doctor were with him constantly. We had the good fortune to have a young doctor who truly loves animals. He doctored as devotedly as if he had been trying to save a son.

All hope abandoned

The illness was diagnosed as a brain infection. They don’t know what caused it. The doctor abandoned all hope three days before he died. And then there suddenly came a rally. After 24 hours under opiates, Piper struggled to his feet. He tried to walk around the south lot where he always played, leaning his huge gaunt body against the fence for support. It was a sad night. But it was no use. They had to go help him back.

For the last 24 hours they gave him frequent injections of glucose and saline solution, and rubbed his throat and legs to ease the rigors of each new seizure. They would have put him to sleep for good, but even the doctor could not bring himself to do it. Piper did not suffer pain, only a great weakness.

All this came to me in a letter from That Girl. In it she said:

“I wish I could spare you the shock and sorrow this will be to you… you loved him so, and were so proud of him.

“There was nothing really outstanding about him that words can identify; but there was a feeling of complete accord between us. He seemed to understand, without teaching, everything I said to him.

“On the last morning, about 5 a.m., I tried to get him to some milk… he tried to raise his head, but he couldn’t make it… I held his head and rubbed his legs… I was still rubbing him when he sighed a great sigh, and was gone.”

And so ends in tragedy the short life and history of our Piper.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 19, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN FRANCISCO – I know of a man who had a rather odd experience the other day.

He was driving from Portland to Seattle, and on the way he picked up a tramp. The fellow was not one of your modern hitchhikers, but a plain, old-fashioned tramp.

However, he was pleasant and courteous, and thanked the driver when he got out. As he left the car he said mysteriously, “You’ll be carrying a corpse before you get to Seattle.”

And sure enough, a little farther on the fellow came upon an ambulance stalled by the roadside, so he took the sick passenger into his car and sped on toward Seattle with him. And the man died on the way.

But the main point of this strange occurrence is another prediction made by this authenticated seer. He stated flatly to this same motorist that the war would be over by July.

Well, he may be a mystic, and maybe he can predict corpses, but about the war I’ll betcha.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hey, Ernie, you fell for something. This story about the corpse and the end of the war was circulating around Pittsburgh several weeks ago. It was reported to us at that time with the request that we print it, but nobody who told the story could actually identify the auto driver. Now it’s worked its way clear cut to the Pacific Coast.

I love to pick out odd signs as I drive along.

In Seattle the other day I saw one on a bank which said “Burglar, Fire and Mob-Proof Vaults.’’ The “mob-proof” was what struck me as funny.

And going into Portland, I noticed a small restaurant run by “Yonson & Yackson””

The girls in the coffee shop here at the Hotel Californian had read about me paying $1.94 for bacon and eggs in Tacoma, so they organized a joke to play on me when I came back to San Francisco.

All the girls know what I eat for breakfast, for I never vary. So whoever got me on my first morning back was going to make out my bill for $3 or more.

Well, I got wind of it, so I was all set. I was just going to look at the check, never crack a smile, sign the manager’s name to it, and walk out.

But the girls spoiled the whole thing by forgetting to do it.

My four-year-old god-daughter, Vondre Bush, who is so beautiful I get palpitations every time I look at her, was dining with me in considerable state at the Ritz French restaurant here the other day.

She was having filet of sole, and I had some kind of salad with maraschino cherries on top of it. Vondre studied my meal for quite a while, and then said, quite casually as though she were discussing the weather, “I eat cherries all the time!”

So you know where my cherries went. And quite willingly, too, we are raising Vondre to be very subtle and we like to reward all such delicate little about-the-bushs that.

In a restaurant up in northern California the other day I heard a fellow telling about having a small auto accident out in the country, which necessitated his hitchhiking to the nearest town to get repairs.

And when he got back to his car, some patriotic citizen had stolen the tires right off his wheels. I’m broadminded about murder and mayhem, but I’m not so sure I don’t favor capital punishment for tire thieves for the duration.

Here is a new war peril we must ail guard our children against.

A letter from an Albuquerque friend says her young son is staying home from school with a sore throat, which he attributes to the fact that his sergeant in high school military drill the day before wouldn’t let him spit!

I have another friend – quite a girl, too – who has just written me of a lifelong ambition, in case she ever gets rich. It’s to wear nothing but red shoes (oh, clothes, of course, but only shoes that are red) and have a boy follow her around constantly with a tray full of fresh celery, so she can nibble all day.

I’ve been trying to think what I’d like if I were rich. And all I’ve been able to think of is that I’d like to be the boy who carries the celery tray.

You remember when I was up at Timberline skiing, I told about my friend Annie Keezer skiing off the edge of a precipice and landing on her head in the snow.

Well, here’s a later report on the case, just received by letter. Two days afterward she got to having violent headaches, finally went to a doctor, and found she had concussion of the brain! Moral – never trust a snowbank.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 20, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN FRANCISCO – The other day a shipyard worker wrote and asked if I’d come out and have dinner at his house, so he could tell me a few things about the business from the workers’ standpoint.

So I went, stayed four hours, and had a very nice time (along with an excellent meal prepared by the man himself – I hate to admit it, but he’s a better cook than I am).

He had invited another shipyard worker, to round out the chat. Neither of them had anything very bad to say, but just the same I’m not using their names, for you know how it is these days.

Both these men had been white-collar men all their lives, but they also had had some experience with tools, so they dropped into the new work easily. They have now been in the shipyards long enough to know their way about extremely well.

The two things out of our whole conversation that struck me most were:

1. These two men feel that ships could be built a lot faster than they are. They say you can’t put your finger on it, but things just don’t seem to move as fast as they ought to.

2. Shipyard workers are popularly supposed to be in the big money and the minute word gets around that you work in the shipyards, apartment rent goes up $10 a month and the butcher starts weighing his hand along with the meat.

Actually, both my friends make less than $50 a week when they work full time, and there is seldom a week they aren’t laid off some by rain. In fact, they say 75 per cent of the men in San Francisco shipyards make less than $50.

Escaping the draft

Another thing that struck me was their assertion that hundreds of young men are running to the shipyards to get “essential” jobs in order to escape the draft.

Both these men are middle-aged, and they say there is practically none of the work on a ship that can’t be done by older men. They don’t think shipyard work should be classed as “essential.” They said they didn’t know of anyone who had quit a better job to go into the shipyards except those who had an eye on the draft.

These men work an eight-hour day, yet they have to devote at least 12 and sometimes more to it. They have to be there early an hour ahead of time, and because of transportation bottlenecks they have to start from home far ahead of time.

On the whole, building ships isn’t the pleasantest work in the world if it rains hard enough the work stops, but you can get wet and chilled with just a little rain. One of my friends is getting a little deaf from the din of riveting. There are many minor accidents, and they say the workmen are careless.

The other day one of my friends was grazed by a 200-pound toolbox that came hurtling down from above. He was showered and bruised by wrenches and other tools. What made him so mad was that the worker responsible wasn’t a bit concerned over whether my friend had been hurt or not; he was just worried for fear he’d lost some of his tools.

Tough in blackout

At this writing there haven’t been any blackouts in San Francisco since the first week of the war, but the workers said it was tough then. They really expected bombing of the yards to start any minute, and they were worried about their families at home. One night they had to walk four miles home in the dark.

One of their strongest complaints is about the “No Smoking” rule. Scores of men at a time leave the job and congregate around the toilets for a “drag.” They say there’s no reason, as far as danger is concerned, for not smoking on the ship. The rule slows up work.

Both my friends are strong union men, and had only praise for the union. They had some little faults to find with the company, mostly based on their feeling that work could and should go faster. But they were no more critical of the company than of many their fellow-workmen, who they felt weren’t stretching themselves to get ships out in a hurry.

Neither of these men was the roughneck type you sometimes picture as the typical shipyard worker. Both have families, and a pleasant home life. They are what you would call good, conscientious Americans, simple in their honesty, willing to work hard, but still interested in their homes and their pay and their families. And more aware of their country’s peril than a lot of people are.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 21, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN FRANCISCO – Quentin Reynolds, the great war correspondent of Collier’s Magazine, was in San Francisco recently on a lecture tour.

Since we had been in London together for a short while, I phoned and asked him to have dinner with me the evening of his lecture. When he came, there were two other guests in my room, Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence P. Brown, close friends of mine.

Quent arrived in a rush, and announced he had to change his socks. Seems he was in a tuxedo for the first time in a year, and forgot to buy black socks until on the way over.

Newspapermen as a class are probably the most natural people in the world. They are little burdened by prissy fastidiousness. I’m not a bad example myself. Only two nights before this I had received in my hotel room a couple I’d never met before. Since I was only partly dressed when they came, I finished putting on my shirt, and then my socks and shoes, right in front of them. It didn’t occur to me until the next day that I could as easily have gone in the bathroom to do it.

And so with Quent. He sat down, lit a cigarette, and proceeded to change his socks in the midst of strange company, all the while telling us about the British in Libya.

But as I say, that seems normal to me, so that isn’t why I’m telling the story. This message is really to the San Franciscans who heard Quent’s lecture that night. It’s to let them in on the secret that all the time they were sitting there listening, Correspondent Reynolds’ other socks were snugly reposing in the left-hand pocket of his tuxedo.

Girls take over elevators

Reynolds made a remark that night which I think is interesting.

As we ate dinner in a small restaurant he’d never heard of, he said, “You know, it’s almost impossible to get a bad meal in San Francisco, and almost impossible to get a good one in Los Angeles.”

Now, I’m merely quoting, mind you. As long as food isn’t spoiled, it all tastes the same to me. But Reynolds weighs 220 pounds and eats with a tremendous joy, so he ought to know.

The Hotel Californian where I stay has a new wartime set of elevator operators. They are all Chinese girls, and pretty ones, too.

The draft was getting the elevator boys fast, so the Californian decided to make the elevator situation both stable and enticing by hiring Chinese girls in their cute little Oriental pants and jackets.

It has worked fine. The manager says the service is not only more attractive than it was, but actually more efficient. And nobody has yet taken them for Japanese, either.

Normandie rumor untrue

I think Art Caylor, of The San Francisco News, writes the most readable, and most editorially important, daily piece of any local columnist I know of in any city. (And I don’t owe him a dime, either.)

The other night I was having dinner with Dr. Alanson Weeks and some of his doctor friends. Dr. Weeks is one of San Francisco’s most prominent (and also most profane) physicians. He was a front-line doctor throughout the last war.

Recently he applied for Army service in this war, but was turned down because of his age. “How old are you?” I asked, for he doesn’t seem old to me.

But before he could answer, another guest who is quite a wit – Larry Harris – solved it by saying:

“Why, he’s so old he was driving a stage coach between San Francisco and Oakland before they put the Bay in!”

War item-- It seems that expectant mothers had the highest priority for passage home among the early ships and planes bringing evacuees in from Hawaii.

One ship had so many pregnant women aboard that they called it the “Stork Ship.” And a Clipper captain reported that on one trip he had 17 about-to-be-mothers on his plane. They were all sick all the way across, and he says it’s the worst trip he ever had.

Here is a perfect example of how rumors turn out not to be true.

The day I returned to San Francisco, a friend told me that the liner Normandie had arrived here a couple of days previously, loaded 10,000 troops in just a few hours, and put right out to sea again.

I believed it, because my friend is a trustworthy fellow. I didn’t repeat it, not because I’m any tighter-mouthed than anybody else, but simply because I forgot it.

And then two days later came word that the Normandie had burned and turned over in New York. So she never could have been here at all.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 23, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN FRANCISCO – Tom Mooney has ceased to be a headliner. Even the average San Franciscan probably doesn’t know what has become of him.

So I thought I’d look up this man who spent 23 years in prison for the 1916 Preparedness Day bombing. He was pardoned three years ago.

Of his three years of freedom, all but six months has been within hospital walls. I found him in St. Luke’s Hospital here. He has a small private room, nicely furnished.

When I went in, he was reading “Ambassador Dodd’s Diary.” He smiled and said, “Hello there, Ernie,” and took my hand in both of his.

Tom has been here for two solid years. He has not set foot on the floor for 16 months. The doctor sees him every day. He has a special nurse in the daytime. He’s a very sick man.

Yet he does not look ill, except for one thing – a startling yellowness. He’s as yellow as a pumpkin. Even his eyeballs are yellow. The stomach ulcers which almost killed him are not his trouble now. His liver is the culprit this time. It is jaundice. The doctors watch his temperature like a hawk. Now and then it gets a start on them, and Tom has to go under an oxygen tent. It may be that he will never leave St. Luke’s.

But Tom Mooney is no beaten man. I haven’t a tenth of his zest for life. He is eager and intense and talkative, even though he no longer has a “cause,” His interest now is the war.

Reads newspapers, periodicals

He reads newspapers and a dozen or more left-wing and labor periodicals. He has a radio at his bedside, and hears all the war news.

Tom Mooney is a smart man. His long illness has not enfeebled his mentality. He puts events together as though he were a factory, and out of it comes a product – his opinion. He has one on any subject you can mention.

Mooney says the Japs will have the South Pacific wiped up in a few months. After that, they will not try for Pearl Harbor or Panama or California. A few nuisance raids, maybe, but nothing more. Here is what he says will happen:

“After the Indies and Australia, the Japs will move into India. That’s their big objective. Hitler will try to move across Africa to Suez, and then on eastward. The Japanese and Germans will meet in India, and that side of the world will be girdled.

“And then, if Hitler is still hanging on against Russia, Japan will open an eastern front against Russia, to help out Hitler. That is the plan, undoubtedly.

“Russia is the key point. Why, if we would give her the stuff, Russia would have the Germans licked this summer. They’ve got the greatest fighting spirit of anybody in the war.”

Tom is very proud of Russia. He feels that all his beliefs and arguments have at last been justified. Russia has proved what Tom always said of her.

“Who will win in the end?” I asked.

Tom was lying back with his eyes nearly closed. He looked like a prophet of old when he spoke, slowly and softly. “The Allies will win,” he said.

Tom still has visions against the capitalists. For instance, he says there is a national conspiracy among American newspapers now to bury news of Russian successes, because they don’t want the people to get the idea Russia is too wonderful.

Mooney eats vegetables, fruit

Outside of his yellowness, Mooney looks good. He seems no older than when I saw him last, in jail, four years ago. He has lost weight, but is not cadaverous by any means.

He can eat nothing but vegetables and fruit. Most of his vegetables are raw. He alternately reads and rests throughout the bay. He never sits up.

He doesn’t get lonesome. A good many people want to see him, but he sorts them out and sees only a few. He has a phone at his bedside, and the hospital lets certain people talk to him.

But on the whole, his old friends have dropped away. The most faithful of all is his former secretary – Sarah Eliasser. She has another job now, but she comes once a week and takes Tom’s letters, and sometimes reads to him.

His once vast correspondence has dwindled now to letters asking for money to pay his hospital bills. It takes about $50 a week to support him. It comes from a few friends, and from countless little organizations you never heard of.

George Davis, the young lawyer who finally freed Mooney, goes to see him about once a month. Davis says that not once in the three years of freedom has Tom mentioned “the case” – meaning the long legal fight for his release.

My real curiosity was about Tom Mooney’s spirit. Now, with his importance gone, I expected to find him a disillusioned, resentful, complaining man. But I didn’t find him thus at all. His once colossal egotism is dead but his spirit burns on. He exists on his vivid interest in the whole world.

In fact, I found Tom Mooney today more interesting and more likable (and he is a likable fellow) than when he was a world figure in prison. He is greater than we credited him with being.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 24, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

MENLO PARK, California – If there’s a family in America more thoroughly war-prepared than the Terramorses of Menlo Park, I’d hate to live with them.

The Terramorses are ready for fire, famine, dive bombers or tire thieves. They’ve got everything from water tanks on the roof to a new 30-30 rifle in the bedroom. It’s all wonderful and I admire it, so I’ll have to tell you about it.

Frank and Grace Terramorse live in a many-angled, highly comfortable one-story house they built with their own hands. It sits in one of these big California lots sometimes described as a “ranch,” behind a high hedge. It is a likable place.

Frank Terramorse is a traveling man. He covers all northern California in his car, selling heavy machinery to factories. I suppose the family is in what you would call the “middle income group,” though I’ve never known exactly what that was.

They have two cars, a 12-year-old son named Drew, and every comfort from a real fireplace to antique copper kettles on the shelf, but they are not flossy people. They still like to get up and have breakfast around the cookstove in the kitchen.

Frank Terramorse is “different” from other people. He is full of beans. He’s always thinking up something crazy. He says he’s the only salesman who has nerve enough to go around a mining camp in a derby hat. He gets a few laughs and plenty of orders.

And so we come up to the night after Pearl Harbor, when Salesman Frank Terramorse got to feeling “different” again. He was somewhere in northern California, listening to the radio about the blackouts and the expected Jap bombers, and he got worried about his family.

Begins work in a hurry

He stood it through Tuesday, and there were blackouts that night, too. On Wednesday morning he said, “To hell with the job. I’m going home.” And so he did.

Within two seconds after he stopped the car at home, the fur began to fly. In less than half a day he had bought plyboard and sawed it to fit every window in the house for blackout.

Next he built two ladders up the side of the house to the slanting shingle roof. From there he built stairsteps up the roof to the ridge, so you can walk right up.

Then he straddled the entire roofpeak – some 115 feet – with a catwalk about a foot and a half wide.

Then he got two 50-gallon oil drams, put one on each end of the roof, and filled them with water. On each one hangs a brand-new galvanized bucket. At three points on the catwalk stand large buckets of sand.

He solves attic problem

At each of two points there is tied a rope. If you follow this rope to the ground, you’ll find it attached to coils of hose, already screwed to faucets. Furthermore, a portable ladder is ready up there, to be hooked to the catwalk and let down over any part of the roof. Also, there’s a straight-bladed hoe for scraping off fire “leaflets,” if the Japs drop any.

But that isn’t all – oh, my, no. Mr. Terramorse’s greatest concern us that an incendiary will go through the roof and stop in the semi-attic, where it’d be harder to fight.

So – from the attic roof-pole hangs a 30-gallon drum of water. A special ladder leads to the attic. And in a few days the entire attic floor will be covered with an inch and a half of sand. And scattered all around will be tubs of sand, for throwing the bomb into.

Also, he has equipped two old chairs with asbestos shields, and put them on wheels. One of them will be up there in the attic, so that you can wheel right up to your incendiary behind this asbestos shield and deal it a death blow. In the shield he has inserted a glass plate out of an arc welder’s helmet, for seeing.

That still isn’t all. Outside the front door are huge sandbags, for throwing on bombs. And by the fireplace stand a new pick and ax. Tape is ready for taping the windows as soon as raiding becomes a probable thing.

Another 50-gallon drum of water stands on the garage roof. There is hose all over the place. There are three pumps in the house, in addition to the city water pressure. On tables lie booklets of bomb instruction, and boy, the folks have had to read them, too.

Mr. Terramorse did all this stuff so he could again set out on the road with some feeling of peace about his family. He has equipped Mrs. Terramorse and Drew with every known vehicle, device, precaution and arrangement the human mind could devise, and trained them to use it. So now if they don’t protect themselves probably disinherit them in disgust.

But did you think this was all? Why, we haven’t even got started yet. It’ll take all day tomorrow to tell the rest. My conclusion about Mr. Terramorse is that we should have had him at Pearl Harbor the last couple of years.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 25, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

MENLO PARK, California – Frank Terramorse is a foresighted man. He is ready for the World War to descend in person on his doorstep at any moment. Let it come, he is ready.

I told you in the preceding column how he had his roof fixed up with catwalks and tanks of water and sand and axes and everything. Well, today we’ll finish it.

In the Terramorse living room the piano has been moved from its usual place to the opposite wall, to bulwark that wall against concussion. And where the piano used to stand now reposes in weighty grandeur a mighty table, wide and high, with legs made of six-by-sixes.

This is for Mrs. Terramorse and their son Drew to sleep under when the raiding starts. They’ve had their instructions from Mr. Terramorse, and no violation will be tolerated. Furthermore, they must take to bed with them every night the pick and ax which stand by the fireplace, and the new 30-30 rifle. (Drew proudly brought the rifle out for me, and Mrs. Terramorse shuddered and said, “I sure hope I never have to shoot it.”)

In the Terramorse dining room stands a weird-looking vehicle on rubber wheels. Mr. Terramorse made it himself. It is really a low, movable platform. On it are the following things:

All the blackout plyboards for the whole house; a complete first-aid kit, big as a suitcase; two large fire extinguishers; two hard hats, the kind soldiers wear; two gas masks; two kerosene lanterns; a coil of rope, a bucket of sand, and various other tools of defense too numerous to mention, as the cliche goes. The only thing I missed was a machine gun.

He can laugh at shortages

All that is for defense against bombing, and has been done since the war started.

But as I said, Mr. Terramorse is a foresighted man, so listen to what he did before the war. Most of what follows was done nearly a year ago.

He traded in both cars on new ones last spring. He has extra sets of radiator and heater tubing, and extra fan belts. He has figured the entire Terramorse motoring situation down to the last kilometer. He intends to be still a traveling salesman, and by auto, when the war ends.

“Of course,” he says, “if they decide I’d be more good putting rivets into an airplane, well that’s all right, too.”

Unless the science of mathematics is a fake, Mr. Terramorse can’t lose on transportation. He’s got it all figured out by miles, gallons, thickness of tread and ratio of octane, for years ahead. The war can’t possibly last as long as Mr. Terramorse is prepared for.

He figures that by using his wife’s ration of gasoline, recapping his tires three times and turning corners more slowly, their present cars will last until he is 72 years old and will give 180,000 miles, or until he’s 92 and is getting 30,000 miles to the gallon – oh forget it, I’m all mixed up. But anyhow, Frank Terramorse isn’t going to be caught.

Stocks away food, clothing

Furthermore, three new bicycles stand in the garage, and the whole family cycles now Instead of driving around town on errands. Mrs. Terramorse’s car is seldom out of the garage. And his car does not move an inch from Friday evening until he hits the road again on Monday.

Also last spring Mr. Terramorse got everything new for the house – new refrigerator, new stove, new washer, extra parts for everything, even some new furniture. He saw all this coming.

They are beautifully stocked up on food. too. Mr. Terramorse says he is not a hoarder, for he is not hiding anything. If the Government should want it, it’s theirs. And further, he bought it all long before there was a scare about any shortages at all.

Mr. Terramorse’s hobby is cooking. He likes to make exotic Latin dishes, which require lots of pure olive oil. He has gallons of that stacked away. They have canned goods, too, and more soap than you ever saw outside a grocery.

Every clothes closet in the house is stacked full of stuff. On shelves and behind curtains you will find it – in the kitchen, the bedroom, the pantry, the shed, the garage.

Preparation has become a hobby with Mr. Terramorse. He even does it for other people. For example, he has a friend who rolls his own cigarettes, with a certain kind of brown straw paper. This paper is getting scarce. So Mr. Terramorse said he’d keep his eye open.

Mr. Terramorse did. He covered half his territory, and came home with 90,000 cigarette papers.

Mr. Terramorse is not apologetic about his preparedness idiosyncrasy. He is proud of it, and wishes other people would copy him. Nobody in his own neighborhood has.

“All they do is laugh at us,” he says. “But I don’t care. I’ve always been different anyhow. It doesn’t worry me any.”

As I drove away, the Terramorses stood and shouted for me to drop in and see them again the next time I passed. I said all right, I would, in case they hadn’t been bombed out, burned or starved to death.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 26, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SALINAS, California – International affairs are slightly out of my line, but it’s my assumption that henceforth when we send American ships to the East Indies for rubber the Japs will say, “So sorry. Scat, please.”

If that is right, then it would appear that we must make other arrangements, and very soon. There has been talk, but I don’t recall having seen any new rubber factories or plantations on my recent travels.

And since I happen to be here in what some day may be the “rubber capital of America,” I thought I’d write me some pieces about rubber.

The U.S. Rubber Commission last September made a thorough survey of our rubber possibilities, and by curling up for 10 minutes with the commission’s report I have become a rubber expert. Out of all my new wisdom on the subject I can draw only one conclusion – we’re in a mess.

There are three ways to get rubber:

1. From trees, most of which are in the Far East. Now gone, or rapidly going.

2. Synthetically, from coal, limestone, oil, etc. Very expensive, and not real rubber.

3. From the guayule bush, which can be grown in this country, and is real rubber.

Now, in the same order as above, what are the potentialities? They are as follows:

1. It takes a rubber tree seven years to mature, so if we were to splatter Central and South America right now with millions of trees the rubber from them, consistent with Allied policy, would arrive “too late.”

2. We could eventually make huge quantities of synthetic rubber, quite good enough to serve our purpose. However, it requires terrific plant facilities. The Tariff Commission reports that because of the difficulty in obtaining steel and chemical equipment, it appears that from three to five years would be required to construct and equip a sufficient number of plants to supply the rubber requirements of the U.S.” Again – too late.

3. The guayule bush. It could eventually supply our total rubber demands, but like the others, it takes time. There is not enough seed in existence to start right off with a bang. The most hopeful estimate of matching our present rubber consumption from guayule is 1946. Once more – too late.

However, slow or not, guayule is going to become a very prominent bush within the next few years. Farmers all through the Southwest will be raising it. So I will tell you something about it. Incidentally, it is pronounced “y-oo-ly,” with the accent on the “oo.”

Guayule is a gray-bluish bush about as high as your knees. It takes it around seven years to get that high, and then it doesn’t get any bigger, though it will live 50 years or more.

It is a desert bush, and needs a little rain in the winter but none in the summer. Like all wise desert plants, it stores up stuff inside to live on in some future drought. In the guayule this stuff happens to be rubber – pure rubber, not an imitation.

So far as is known, the bush is native only to northern Mexico and southern Texas. It grows wild, but there isn’t enough wild growth to keep us going, for you don’t tap a guayule bush for its sap year after year. You cut it down and grind the whole bush up.

However, guayule can be cultivated as a crop like corn or beans or wheat, and that’s what will soon be done.

They’ve been experimenting with guayule since the first of the century, first in Mexico and then in California. It costs slightly more than East India rubber, but wouldn’t if produced on a large scale.

All the experimentation has been done by one private company – the Intercontinental Rubber Co. And it’s funny about this company. It has spent its own millions on guayule, has upped the yield, scouted out the best soils and climates, developed special machinery, and proved that guayule is feasible. Yet it has deliberately held back production.

Why is that? Well, they say it’s because the company is owned by the world’s great rubber-producing companies (mainly Dutch) with vast rubber holdings in the Far East. Naturally they didn’t want to cut their own throats by setting up competition with themselves.

Practically all that is known, or physically held, in the guayule world is the property of this company. Congress has recently passed a bill to buy them out for $2,000,000. Even critics of the company admit they’ve spent that much or more on experimentation.

Undoubtedly the sale will go through, and then we can take off the brakes and get going on at least one of the methods of making ourselves rubber-independent.