Rambling Reporter, Ernie Pyle (1941-42)

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 27, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SALINAS, California – Congress, the last time I looked, was about to pass a revised bill for getting us started immediately on rubber production from the guayule bush.

The bill calls for buying out the Intercontinental Rubber Co., which knows all that is known about guayule, and for planting 75,000 acres of it anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.

A good portion of this planting will be in the United States, and it will set farmers to raising guayule – probably under government contract – all the way from California to Georgia.

However, there is only enough seed in America for planting about 45,000 acres the first year.

There are two ways to grow guayule – one is long and roundabout, and one is quick.

The roundabout method is normally the most efficient, so it is the only one that Intercontinental has experimented with. This consists of sowing the guayule seed in seedbeds, tending it carefully for a year, then transplanting it to the fields, and then letting it grow from four to seven years before harvesting.

The other method is a yearly harvest, just like wheat. Some scientists say this is the only way to handle it in an emergency such as the present. Of course, the rubber yield is smaller per acre this way, but if you plant enough acres you get your rubber.

There’s catch to both methods

Under the long-term method, they get as high as 2850 pounds of rubber per acre. By the one-year method, they can get up to 1000 pounds per acre.

The catch to both methods right now, however, is that there is only enough seed to plant 45,000 acres, which is only a drop in the bucket to what we must have. Years must pass before we can create enough seed for colossal, wholesale growing of guayule.

If you can stomach a few figures, I’ll try to show you what our guayule rubber outlook is.

If we planted all our available seed this year and harvested it next year, we’d get only 1500 tons of rubber (and our annual consumption is 650,000 tons!).

If we planted this year and waited till 1946 to harvest, we’d let about 21,300 tons of rubber from it (and our annual needs would still be 650,000 tons!).

However, we could create new seed very fast, and by 1944 we’d have enough seed to plant 4,500,000 acres of guayule. Theoretically, this vast acreage could yield 150,000 tons of rubber if harvested in 1945, or 540,000 tons in 1946, or 2,130,000 tons in 1947.

But something tells me the war will be nearly over by 1947.

Thrives on poorer lands

Monterey County here has been found to be the best place in the United States, considering soil and climate, for raising guayule. Salinas is called the “lettuce capital of America.” Its good black soil has brought vegetable renown to California, and here the migrant Okies and the Jap farmers have helped make fame both good and bad for the state.

But guayule doesn’t grow well in this good black vegetable soil. It’s too hardy a plant for that. It grows best on the poorer lands. Monterey County has those, too. They say that about 50,000 acres are available in this county for growing guayule.

So you see that the Salinas vicinity, despite its A-1 rating for guayule growing, can’t handle the whole thing if we really go into it. Guayule must be raised in Arizona and New Mexico and Texas and other southern states as well.

Mills will have to be built all over the country. Farmers will have to be taught how to tend their new strange crop, which looks like a field of brush.

And should we ever get up to an acreage of 4,500,000 – which would finally supply all our own rubber – do you have any idea how much acreage that is? Well, it’s just half the acres that are planted to cotton each year in Texas alone!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 28, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SALINAS, California – If America should find in the end that the little old shriveled up guayule plant has pulled us out of the rubber dilemma we’re in now, the hero of the episode will probably get little credit for it.

He is Fred McCargar of the Salinas Chamber of Commerce, one of these much-laughed-at sunshine boosters, you know. But McCargar has been ranting and raving and plugging and spending his own time and money on guayule for more than 15 years.

Most of those years he has fought a stone wall of government apathy, sometimes open hostility from the guayule company itself (because it didn’t want guayule promoted), and the natural disinclination of fanners to change from a proved crop to an unproved one.

At one time McCargar was so badly in the doghouse that he had to continue the campaign from his home, instead of at the Chamber of Commerce office. But he believes in guayule, and has never given up. Now at last things seem to be coming his way. He says he doesn’t care whether they grow it in the Salinas Valley or not, so long as they grow it.

The whole McCargar family is guayule crazy. McCargar’s son Jack, now a private in the Army and somewhere at sea en route to some unknown destination, is almost worse than his dad.

On his way east Pvt. McCargar stopped in Chicago, went to the newspapers, and got a guayule story into print. When he was in camp in South Carolina he went to the local Chamber of Commerce and got them hopped up about guayule.

Secret germinating process

One of the things the government will get when it buys out the Intercontinental Co. is its secret germinating process. You or I could take a handful of guayule seed, carefully plant it, and it wouldn’t even come up. It has to be treated with a certain acid first.

This same company has had considerable production in Mexico. It started early in the century, and has three producing plants there.

Here in Salinas, the first experimental plantings were in 1912. The first commercial plantings were in 1923, and the mill was built in 1932. It is the only guayule mill in America.

Only once have the farmers themselves tried to grow guayule on a big scale. That was more than 10 years ago. You could call it either success or failure, as you wished.

In 1927 and 1928 Salinas Valley farmers put out about 8000 acres of guayule, when rubber was worth 40 cents a pound. They let it grow under the four-year system, and by 1932, when they were ready for harvest, the Intercontinental Co. had its new mill built.

And just then the price of rubber suddenly dropped to 3 cents a pound, which left the farmers hanging high and dry. Many of them, in disgust, plowed out their plants and burned them. But others held on until rubber got back up to 11 cents, and made good money. And they say it improved the soil immensely.

Rubber in the Far East, under the coolie wage system, is produced at from 4 to 10 cents a pound. To produce guayule rubber here right now costs from 15 to 19 cents a pound. This would be brought far down with big-scale production. Even so, it isn’t likely that guayule farmers could compete with East Indies rubber plantations after the war.

But – this isn’t after the war; this is in the war.

Extraction process is explained

The process of getting rubber out of the guayule comes nearer to that of processing sugar beets than anything I can think of. They simply plow up the plants, let them lie on the ground a few days (they put in a lot of rubber during those few days on the ground), then take them to the mill and chop them into small pieces.

These pieces are then run through a ball mill and crushed into fiber. This fiber then goes through a chemical process, involving the flotation method. The fiber sinks to the bottom. The rubber particles cling together in what are called “worms,” and float to the top.

One trouble with guayule – and this runs the cost up – is that it contains from 16 to 20 per cent resin (tree rubber has only 4 per cent), and this has to be taken out. But machinery already has been devised for doing this.

I’ve got just one more rubber fact for you, and then you can go bouncing on your way. That’s how much the whole thing is going to cost. The Tariff Commission figured it this way:

Synthetic rubber – the cost of plants for producing 100,000 tons of rubber annually would be between 75 and 100 million dollars.

Guayule rubber – capital investment for every 100,000 tons, about 20 million dollars.

That’s all. Now go take a look and see if somebody has stolen your tires while you’ve been reading this. If so, sue me in 1947.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 2, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

PASO ROBLES, Calif. – While we’re driving southward toward the land of sunshine and contentment, we’ll pause to throw in a few scraps from the scrap
heap.

Such as the fact that I happened to be in Salinas, Calif., on the week-end of registration for the draft, so that’s where I gave myself to my country.

There wasn’t anybody else in the place when I went in, and the two men and one woman in charge were very pleasant and chatty. For some reason I had figured they’d be grave and even nasty, like a judge sentencing you to the penitentiary. But they weren’t.

When I gave my full name (my middle name is Taylor) the man said, “Why, that’s my last name.”

When I left, they called after me, “Next time you want to register just come around.”

Now if the Army will just be as pleasant with me as the registration people…

I had another experience in Salinas. That was my first sugar rationing in America.

Sugar for one cup only

In the hotel coffee shop, I was given three cubes of sugar for my coffee, which of course is plenty. But when the waitress brought a second cup, she brought no sugar with it.

I asked her for sugar, but she said the manager had rationed customers to sugar for only one cup. I asked her what she brought the second cup for, then. She said because I asked for it. So I handed her the cup back, and we dropped the subject.

It seems to me that manager is taking things a bit into his own hands. The nation isn’t on sugar rationing yet. The government will tell us – and how – when to cut our sugar down. Then we’ll all do it. The way it is now, in Salinas, I just eat at another restaurant.

There are a couple of cute stories in San Francisco about sailors giving away information. One is a “loose-talk” story, the other a “tight-mouth” story. The loose-talk one happened to a close friend of mine.

He was riding on a street car. A sailor sat down beside him and they started talking. My friend said, “I see there are some new ships in the harbor this morning.”

And the sailor said. “Yeah, and the (one of America’s biggest battleships) is in, too. I just got off of her!”

The other story goes like this:

An elderly lady was strolling in one of the city’s hilltop parks and stopped to look down over the bay, where a battleship rode at anchor.

A sailor walked past, stopped nearby, and the lady said to him:

“Young man, what is the name of that ship out there?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” the sailor said politely.

“And what ship are you from?” the lady asked.

“That one,” the sailor said.

War disrupts Hoosier life

The war is beginning to hit close, now, to many of us. My Aunt Mary unites that all is chaos around our farm community at Dana, Ind.

Construction of the great new munitions plant has started. Farmers are moving from life-long residences on two weeks’ notices; engineers and Army officers are moving into the better-type farm houses; others are being torn down.

Little old Dana is throbbing. A stranger can hardly get a meal, or a place to sleep. A hotel is going up on the corner where Ben Lang’s grocery used to be. Doc Meyers has staked off his pasture, put in gravel streets and lights, and made a trailer city out of it.

New railroad spurs have been built out from Dana, to carry the avalanche of material that is flowing in. New workers have arrived to unload the endless flow of cars bringing steel piping, lumber, machinery.

The town loafers have never had such a three-ring circus to watch. They gather every afternoon into a new railbird regiment, to watch the materials of war being unloaded.

Even my father, who never before could qualify as a town loafer, now drives three miles to town every day after lunch, and sits there all afternoon watching them unload the freight cars.

The last time my Aunt Mary wrote she said it was a rainy, foggy day, and that Dad was fretting for fear it was too bad for him to get to town that afternoon to watch.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 3, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – In North Hollywood there is a man who sits every night and reads the papers about the war in Malaya, the war in the Indies, the war in the Philippines – and then puts the papers down and dreams about how many lives might have been saved, and even how the results might have been different, if they had used dogs.

Yes, dogs.

For this man is one of America’s premier dog trainers, he is right now training a bunch of sentry dogs for the American Army, and he knows about war, too, for he spent four years in the last one – on the other side.

His name is Carl Spitz. He is 47, and he has been training dogs most of his life. He is one of the leading trainers for the movies. He owns a huge dog-trailing school that covers the better part of 10 acres. He has five other trainers on his staff – more than any other dog school in the country.

As far back as 1930 Spitz tried to get the Army to let him train dogs for war use. But nothing came of it. Finally last summer they took him up. in a limited way. Spitz agreed to furnish the Army 50 trained sentry dogs – at no cost!

He has delivered six, has 12 more under training, and already has spent $1500 of his own money in the process. He doesn’t mind that, but what he does mind is that the Army is so busy now thinking about other things, he can’t get anybody to think any further about dogs.

Dropped by parachute

Spitz says Germany had 50,000 dogs in the last war, and that 7000 were killed. He says they’re being used in this war, too, for he’s read about it.

The most startling story he has heard out of this war is about a messenger dog dropped by parachute to a Finnish scouting party behind the Russian lines. He says a message was attached to the dog’s throat, and it made the 14 miles back home in 20 minutes.

Spitz says the Japanese are using dogs. He feels that in Malaya thousands of lives could have been saved if the British had used dogs. He expresses his feelings picturesquely.

“The Japanese slithered through the jungles,” he says, “in water up to here. We white people couldn’t do that. We don’t fight that way. We aren’t sneaky enough.

“The British weren’t trained in jungle fighting. They were always getting caught. But if, they’d had dogs, the Japanese couldn’t have surprised them. Dogs would have given warning.”

Spitz feels that the American Army needs at least 15,000 trained dogs. He says that if a program were set up for it, he could develop a schooling nucleus that could train that many dogs in a year.

He says he personally could turn out 18 super-dog-trainers every three months. (Of course, there are many other fine dog-trainers in the country who could do the same.) These men could then go out and set up dog-training schools at Army camps, and start the ball rolling in a big way.

So far, the dogs trained by Spitz for the Army have cost around $250 apiece. But if done on a large scale, he says the cost could be brought down to $60, including the dog.

He feels there should be two sentry dogs for every mile of the West Coast, which would mean 3000 trained dogs. The same for the East Coast, and the Gulf. And then countless dogs for war factories and Army warehouses and other key points. In addition to that, dogs for actual use at the battlefront.

Four types of training

He would provide four types of training:

1. Sentry dogs, for guard duty.
2. Scouting dogs, for smelling out enemy troops at the battlefront.
3. Messenger dogs, for running front-line messages.
4. Red Cross dogs, for locating wounded soldiers and carrying first aid to them.

So far the Army’s dog program is infinitesimal, and very much confused. There have been stories about the big dog program, and calls for patriots to donate their dogs to the Army. But the truth is, as far as Spitz knows, that the only dogs being trained are a few down at Fort MacArthur near here, and the few he has under way. Some of his Army dogs were donated by the public, but he went out and bought most of them himself.

Spitz’s relatives have been in the United States for generations, and it was always his ambition to get here. He finally made it in 1926. He is a citizen, and has only one distant relative still in Germany. His two brothers were killed in the last war, and he had seven first cousins (Americans) fighting against him. But that’s all water over the dam now.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the fantastic training these Army dogs go through.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 4, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – The idea behind using sentry dogs for the Army is this: Supposing an Army camp has a huge warehouse, full of vital supplies. A saboteur naturally wouldn’t walk right past a guard to get in. He’d get in unseen, and hide until the time came to do his damage.

All right, the sentries might patrol their posts forever and not know this man was hiding in the building. But a dog would know it, for he doesn’t have to see, he smells.

These newly-trained Army dogs walk their posts alongside the regular sentry. Every now and then the sentry tells the dog to make a search bf the warehouse or grounds, or whatever they’re guarding. The dog does it, then comes back to walk his post.

But supposing he does find somebody? He barks a warning to the guard, and then goes after the intruder.

As long as the intruder stands perfectly still, the dog never lays a tooth into him. He just stands and polices him. But let that intruder start to run, or move a hand toward his picket, or come out with a gun – and the dog is on him in a flash.

He always goes for the arm (he’s trained to attack nowhere else), and if the enemy has a gun in either hand, he goes for that arm. He doesn’t tear the man up, he just holds him until help comes. A dozen men couldn’t tear him loose from that arm until his “owner” – the sentry – tells him to let go. Then he turns loose like a lamb.

Training takes 2½ months

Now, how is all this trained into a dog? It’s a tedious process, and takes two and a half months. Only a fourth of all dogs submitted are good enough to finish the course.

Every dog submitted goes thru a preliminary test, to show what his nerves and intelligence are. One of the tests is throwing a firecracker at him. Practically any dog will jump or cower if you do that. But a dog with steady nerves will be over it within five minutes. The nervous or cowardly dog will still be cowering 20 minutes later. That’s the dog they don’t want.

At Carl Spitz’s school – it’s called the Hollywood Dog Training School – the Army dogs are trained from 4 till 7 p.m. The school devotes the rest of the day to its regular private dog training.

First the rookie soldier dog is chained to a wall. On the chain is a heavy spring, so the dog won’t be hurt by charging against the chain.

Now starts the long process of making a gentle dog a warlike dog – but always under control. Controlled savagery, you might call it. For at the end, except for the one thing he’s trained to be tough about, the dog is as lovable and playful as at the beginning.

Now the trainer stands just out of the dog’s reach, holding a sack full of straw. He beats on this sack with a stick. He keeps sticking it toward the dog, beating it, getting the dog worked up, getting him angry, getting him “hot,” as the trainers say.

Finally he gets close enough for the dog to lunge and grab the sack. He is trained merely to grab and hold on hard, not to nip and chew at it. It takes vast patience.

Finally he is let off the chain, and the whole thing is repeated. Then the sack, in smaller form, is transferred to the trainer’s arm. The whole process is gone over again.

Limited to attacks on arms

First one arm, then the other. If the dog attacks anywhere except the arm, he is reprimanded firmly and quickly. There is no cruelty in this dog raining (I believe Spitz would kill a man who struck a dog), but there is unremitting firmness.

Finally the dog gets to the point of attacking the arm of a moving man without a sack on it. Then he is trained to watch for a gun, and attack that arm, even while the gun is being fired.

Slow, patient weeks have gone past by now. The dog is almost finished. Now it is transferred to the big front pasture of Spitz’s place. The dog walks up and down with his trainer, as though he were on sentry duty. Another trainer hides behind a bush. The dog is sent to scour the pasture for any intruder. He turns up the other trainer, and attacks him – if he moves.

At last, the dog is finished and Spitz delivers him to the Army. When he delivered the first three, he spent eight days at the post, training the soldiers. Spitz went in and said:

“Look, Pvt. Murphy, this is your dog. He doesn’t belong to the Army, he belongs to you. You are his master and he is your servant from now on. He belongs to nobody but you.”

And that’s the way it works in the Army. Each dog has one master, and one alternate master. Nobody else bothers him. Not even the commanding general is allowed to come within his sight in civilian clothes. He sees only Army uniforms from then on. He will not attack a man in uniform.

Every day, when the dog is taken from his kennel to go on duty, the sentry has a little secret ritual of commands he must go through with the dog. The dog will not go without it.

Further, the guards have secret words by which the dogs are given their various working commands. Only Spitz and the Army sentries and the dogs themselves know these words. And once a week the guards must repeat the dog’s whole course of training, from beginning to end.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 5, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – Carl Spitz, the dog man, is an amazing person in his relations with dogs. He handles dogs wholesale, hundreds of them a year, and yet he knows every individual dog as well as he’d know a man. There are more than 150 dogs in his kennels right now, left there by owners for boarding or training. Some have been there for months, some only a few days.

But there isn’t one of those 150 dogs that Spitz doesn’t know personally, by name and by some little trait he’ll tell you about. And there isn’t a dog that doesn’t know him and doesn’t come bounding to the wire gate to lick his hand.

I asked him if he’d ever seen a dog that didn’t like him immediately. “Let’s put it the other way around,” he said. “Have I ever seen a dog I didn’t like?”

He answered it himself: “Well, actually, yes. I don’t like some dogs on sight. But if I take a job training such a dog, I never let the dog know I don’t like it.”

Trains 300 dogs a year

Spitz trains around 300 dogs a year for private owners – just schooling them in good house manners, and obedience, and maybe a few little tricks. This is the bulk of his training work, and what he likes best.

Then in his movie work he trains anywhere from 5 to 50 dogs a year. He finds the movie work fluctuating and undependable.

Spitz’s kennels are around three sides of his house. He has a loud-speaker system, and you’d never guess what it’s for. It’s that if Spitz hears a disturbance in the kennels at night, he can stay right in bed and talk the dogs into quietness again!

Spitz recently built a nice new house for himself, about 50 yards from his old home. But he doesn’t live in it. Instead, he put his head trainer in it. When the time came for him to move, he just couldn’t go. He’d be too far away from his dogs!

There’s some more I want to tell about his training of Army dogs. The best breeds are Doberman, German shepherd and boxer, because they’re intelligent and fast on their feet.

He has had one Airedale, and wishes he could get more. Males predominate slightly in the sentry dogs under training. But female dogs make by far the best Red Cross dogs. I asked why, “The mother instinct, I guess,” Spitz said. “I don’t know what else.”

Spitz says the old-fashioned sheep collie would be wonderful guard work, but good ones are rare now. He says many a fine breed of dog has been spoiled by too little work. He says work – genuine, necessary work – is what keeps a breed of dogs high in character and intelligence.

Spitz is delighted with the way Army enlisted men handled the dogs he has already delivered. Of the 25 Army men assigned for him to train in handling the dogs, he says there were four he’d even pick as potential trainers for his own school.

Another thing about training Army dogs is the heartbreak when one of them fails at the last minute, after weeks of toil and training.

The best example of this is a lovable Doberman they have at the school now. It stood practically at the top of its class clear up to the last stages. And then at the end they found that once the dog attacked, he could not let loose at the command “Let loose.” You couldn’t pry his mouth open with a shotgun barrel. He was simply too tense.

Learns dog was drunkard once

And you’d never suspect why. It’s because the dog had been a drunkard! He came from a home where he’d been given a bottle of beer every day. It affected his nervous system.

Spitz won’t take any dog you bring to him for private training. There is many a “psychopathic” dog, he says, that simply can’t be trained any further by him than by its owner.

While I was there a man came with a black cocker spaniel, begging Spitz to take it on for a while. The dog was sweet and intelligent, but so jumpy it had to leap around five or six times after every command, before it would comply.

Spitz declined to take the dog. He told the fellow he couldn’t help enough to justify the expense. The man was disappointed. Later Spitz explained to me that the dog was a nervous type and could never be any different.

“Can you tell that quickly, just by looking at it?” I asked.

“Easily,” he said. “I always try not to hurt the owner’s feelings when I tell them.”

In addition to all the dogs he boards and trains for other people, Spitz has 25 dogs of his own. Some are his movie dogs, others are just pets. He has three great Danes. He doesn’t care much for wire-haireds. He loves the dog of his own name (the Spitz), his last one of which has just died. He’ll soon get another.

He owns several bird dogs, fully trained, but never gets time to hunt.

In the big back lot Spitz has all kinds of apparatus for training. An old broken-down auto is used for training dogs to go in auto doors. There are pools and bridges and hurdles and high jumps. There is even a playground slide.

“Is that for your children or the dogs?” I asked.

“Both,” said Spitz. “One of my Danes will climb up on that thing and slide down it belly-fashion by the hour.”

Oh to be a dog, now that spring is almost here.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 6, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LOS ANGELES – Since like the turtle I am slow but fairly sure, I will now report on that big “air raid” we had in Los Angeles. You know, the night we did all that shooting at we don’t know what. I happened to be in Los Angeles that night. I was in a high room in a downtown hotel, with no buildings obstructing the view, and it made a perfect grandstand seat.

At first I assumed it to be just another blackout in which nothing would happen. So after watching the lights go slowly out, I went back to bed. I was just going to sleep when there began those far-off rumbles, like Midwest thunder.

“My God!” I said to myself, and jumped out of bed again. For I knew that sound by heart. “Can this be happening in Los Angeles?”

It was happening. On the horizon – to the south, the east, the north – there were constant flashes of light, like sheet lightning low in the sky. The anti-aircraft guns were going. They seemed to fire much more rapidly than the ones I had known before.

But it was the searchlight display that fascinated me most, for that was something I had never seen before. The British had almost abandoned the use of searchlights when I got to England. They said it just outlined the city’s position.

But our Army – whatever they were following that night – certainly did a magnificently rhythmic job of it. There must have been at least two dozen searchlights pointed into the sky, all of them miles apart, covering a vast area in the southern suburbs of Los Angeles.

Converge into big spot in heavens

They all converged into a big blue spot in the heavens. And that spot moved very slowly but very definitely across the sky, with never a falter. Of all the many straight blue lines shooting upward to that one spot, not one ever wavered, or got lost, or had to “fish” or “feel” around for the target. They held it, and moved with it across the sky, like a leech that would not let go.

I could not see anything in that spot, for it was some 20 miles away. But I could see the anti-aircraft shells bursting around it. Now and then one seemed to burst right in the spot.

In London, the ack-ack bursts with a very white flash. Ours seemed to me much redder. In London, gunfire may be all around you during a raid, for they have guns in parks and on roofs, and portable guns on trucks that they run around. Sometimes they’ll come and shoot right under your window and shake the building and scare the pajamas off you.

But there was none of that here. There was no shooting from downtown Los Angeles at all. It was all from a great circle, surrounding the city. It was like distant lightning and thunder, and it gave you a feeling of horrible ominousness, rather than the more satisfying one of being excited to death in the midst of a din.

The blackout in downtown Los Angeles eventually was good, but it seemed very slow. Many lights were still burning after the guns started. My hotel pulled the main switch almost immediately.

With traffic stopped the city got very quiet, and I could hear the voices of wardens for blocks. I was amazed at how quickly they got out of bed and onto the job. They were out giving orders before the last of the street lights went off.

One refuses to douse lights

People in houses and apartments seemed to me careless the way they kept turning lights on just for a moment. There was one woman who insisted on keeping her light on even after the warden had warned her twice. (I could get all this from conversation in the street below.)

Finally an assistant warden, good and mad, started up after her again. And I heard the warden call to him, “Take it easy now. There are ways to deal with her afterward.”

The wardens used flashlights which seemed too bright to me.

Only authenticated traffic was allowed to move. No more than six cars passed my hotel in two hours.

In the downtown district, Los Angeles has lots of small sirens, placed on top of corner traffic-signal posts. They don’t sound so much like sirens as like whistles shooting off very rapidly. They were loud enough to awaken me – and I’m an old hand at sleeping through raids. But I was amazed at the number of people right in our hotel who never did wake up. I could hear them at breakfast next morning, absolutely unbelieving when told about it.

Although I spent a winter in England, I never did learn to tell the crack of gunfire from the burst of bombs, unless they were really close. And so it was that night in Los Angeles. Sometimes a distant explosion would be of a different timber, and I’d think, “That could be a bomb,” but was never sure. And, of course, as it turned out, there were no bombs.

I have been very frightened in London, but despite the terrific surprise of gunfire here on our own soil, I don’t recall being at a concerned here. And the thing that finally sent me back to bed was the fact that no fires ever appeared on the horizon. I couldn’t conceive of it being a real raid unless a few fires were started.

So I went to sleep, and three hours later was awakened by the all-clear. It was daylight. And as I looked out the window at Los Angeles, still whole, I had the same feeling I always had in looking upon damaged London after a raid. And that is, I couldn’t believe it was real. It all seemed like a prearranged show to me – even in London.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 7, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LOS ANGELES – Spring has come already in Southern California. There are buds on the trees, and newly seeded grass is green, and people are setting out their new flowers. And if you get away from the streets and the sidewalks you can smell the fresh earth, as you can smell it in Indiana a couple of months from now.

The sun beats down, and my tan is coming back. The heat of the day drives away little aches and pains, and your spirit takes heart anew, and you expand. It is good to be alive in the spring, when warmth comes again to the earth.

Maybe that’s what’s the matter with America. Maybe we’re all too pleased at just being alive. Maybe if it snowed all summer, we’d be more willing to die.

Speaking of dying, in my hotel coffee shop the other night there was a very noisy and jovial drunk. I gathered he was a high executive in some big defense factory.

He was telling his friends (everybody could overhear) that he had just one ambition – to live for two days after the war is over.

The first day he’d spend tooting a horn, he said. The second day he’d go and see his dogs, which he’s had to put in a kennel for the duration. After that, let death come.

Gets letter about St. Bernard

And speaking of dogs (my, how one thing leads to another), I’ve recently had a dog letter from Mildred Barrett, of Sherman Oaks, Calif. She says:

“I own a St. Bernard. This gargantuan pup is 11 months old and weighs 120 pounds. In one week she eats 12 pounds of meat, five pounds of kibbles, a box of dog biscuits, seven quarts of milk, a half-dozen eggs, two pounds of cottage cheese, and a large can of tomatoes, plus huge doses of calcium and cod-liver oil. So I too must keep my nose to the grindstone to feed a dog. But what a lovely big brute she is.”

Miss Barrett, it sounds to me as if you set a mighty nice table. Could I drop around some noon for a few kibbles? You can skip the cod-liver oil that day.

Gov. John E. Miles of New Mexico has recently been in a hospital here in Los Angeles, so I decided to go see him. We phoned and made all arrangements.

Then we got out the car, but before starting we unfolded the map of Los Angeles to find out how to get where we were going.

Los Angeles is so terrifically big that you almost have to be a trained explorer to find anything. But we finally located the hospital’s street on the map, marked it with a pencil, and then went through the same long process of finding our hotel, so we could then draw a line between the two and figure out the shortest way to get there.

And when we got all through with this complicated combination of geography and geometry, we discovered the hospital was in the next block, and I’d been looking at it out of my window for days! So we put the car back in the garage and walked over.

P.S. – The Governor was glad to see us.

Pension recalls smart elephant

A friend of mine who used to be with a circus got to talking the other day about Congress voting the pension, and then unvoting it after the public began to clamor. He said it reminded him of a smart elephant they used to have.

This elephant, when staked out, would wait till nobody was looking, then get her trunk around the stake and give it a quick little pull to loosen it, then quickly start eating or flecking bits of straw around with her trunk, as though she hadn’t done a thing.

Pretty soon she’d slyly give the stake another pull, and then quickly pretend to be eating again. Finally, after five or six surreptitious tugs at the stake, she’d have it completely loose and start giving it the final yank.

Whereupon her trainer, who knew all her tricks, without even turning his head would say “Put that back!” and before he got the sentence finished, she’d be jabbing the stake back in its hole, just as though the bad old stake had popped out by itself.

My circus friend says that Congress, in unvoting the pensions, acted just like the childish elephant He thinks Congress should have thrown the stake at somebody.

Recently I was talking with a fellow who works in a shipyard, and noticed he had a hammered copper band around his wrist, like a bracelet. I asked him about it.

He said that because of the dampness and chill in the shipyards he developed rheumatism. Somebody told him about this copper-band idea, so he dug up sane copper from the scrap heap and hammered himself out a bracelet

He says no doubt it’s pure superstition, but the truth is he hasn’t had rheumatism since starting to wear it. At first, he was embarrassed about it because he thought it looked feminine. But so many people have admired it that now he’s proud as punch, and never takes it off.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 9, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LOS ANGELES – As a man with an inborn instinct for riding a bicycle without even touching the handlebars, it seems fitting and proper that I should make an investigation of the bicycle situation.

That I have just done, and I wish to report to the nation that the bicycle situation is bad. In fact, so bad that there is almost no situation – or bicycle either.

My probings haven’t covered other parts of the country, but in Los Angeles it is almost impossible to buy a bicycle. Sears-Roebuck has a few left, which will doubtless be gone before this appears in print. If you’re lucky, you might just happen onto one at some small store. But as a general rule you can’t buy a new bike in Los Angeles today.

Shops that rebuild bicycles are running two weeks and longer behind on rebuilds, and they won’t even take your name and address in regard to a brand-new one.

I’ve just had a long bicycle gabfest with Mr. Charles Mullen, who runs the Atlas Cycle Co. here. Mr. Mullen has seen as many as 28 bicycles leave his shop in one day, and his yearly sales are more than 600.

In the first six weeks of this year he sold 116 bicycles, and could have sold dozens more. But he has even stopped taking orders now, for frankly he doesn’t know when he can get any more bicycles.

With this new wartime demand for bikes, you’d think being in the bicycle business would be a very nice little thing. And, indeed it would be, if you could just get the bicycles to sell. But since you can’t, it’s a very bad business to be in.

Victory bike ready in April

Bicycles are soon to go on a quota basis. Three of the nation’s 11 factories have already shut down completely. Others are curtailed. Even spare parts are hard to get now.

Before long production will start on the new “Victory” bicycle. All bike manufacturing will be limited to this one model, for the duration. I couldn’t find out whether it would be made in several factories, or turned over to just one factory while all the others were converted to direct war production of something else.

At any rate, the new Victory bicycle is due out in April. It will not have balloon tires. Its tires and wheels will be smaller than regulation. There will be no chain guards on the new Victory, no chrome plating, no kick-stands, no doo-dads whatever. Even the handlebar grips will be made of wood.

The price of the Victory hasn’t been set yet, but it may be around $40. There won’t be enough of these to supply the demand, for dealers are to be limited to 40 per cent of what they sold last year.

And that is what will cause many bicycle shops to go out of Business – for even a big shop like Mr. Mullen’s cannot exist on 40 per cent of last year’s business.

However, outside of the dealers themselves, the diminishment in bicycle shops probably won’t hurt anybody much. Because bicycle mechanics are such a super-breed (according to Mr. Mullen) that they can get new jobs immediately.

Mr. Mullen says a real bicycle mechanic has to know 10 times as much as an auto mechanic. He says that in 20 years in the business he has found only three really good mechanics – and two of them have now gone to defense jobs.

Bikers easily spot women drivers

Practically all of Mr. Mullen’s sales since the first of the year were to people who figured on laying up their cars and riding to work. He sold one to a dentist who has blocked up his auto and rides into the city every day from Whittier – some 15 miles. One-fifth of his sales were to women.

I have a friend on The Daily News here who has just managed to get hold of a bicycle, and has started riding to work. He has to come 11 miles, and not being very bicycle-wise he allowed himself two hours for the trip on the first morning. He made it in an hour, and arrived at work one hour early, long before daylight.

Another rider tells me that cycling has convinced him beyond doubt of one thing – and that is that women drivers don’t think as fast as men. He says that out on the highway he can pick every woman driver a quarter of a mile away, just by her reactions at meeting a bicycle. (My friend rides the left-hand side of the road, like a pedestrian.)

The new army of bicycle riders has created a new business in Los Angeles – the parking of bicycles. It’s on a minor scale so far, but is likely to grow fast. One downtown garage is parking bikes at $1 a month.

That’s all I know about bicycles. Anybody want to ride on my handlebars?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 10, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

HOLLYWOOD – There is only one actor in all Hollywood whom I can call by his first name (or last name either, for that matter), and I’ve never seen him on the screen.

This specific actor is Tim McCoy, and if you also have never seen him, it’s because you go to the wrong kind of movies. You should go to a few rootin’-tootin’, old-fashioned Westerns. You’d see him then.

I happen to know Tim because he’s a good old boy from Wyoming. We met last summer at the rodeo in Cheyenne, we had a good time together, he gave me his private Hollywood number, and he said, “Next time you’re out that way, call me up.” The old stuff, you know.

Except I did call him up, which was heresy in the first place. And Tim was glad to hear from me, which was untraditional in the second place. Hollywood is indeed a strange land.

It wound up that I went out to Tim’s apartment for dinner, and I must be degenerating into a very poor reporter. For, instead of pumping Tim all about the movies and himself, we spent the evening talking about the international situation. I already know all there is to know about the international situation, so I might as well have stayed home.

Tim came to Hollywood 20 years ago to herd a bunch of Wyoming Indians in a picture. The Hollywood big shots liked him so well they kept him. They even sent him and his Indians to England and France for a year.

Tim is an odd sort of fellow in that Hollywood has never got in his blood. His roots are in Wyoming. He has a ranch there. He goes back there between pictures.

He has never felt that he really was settled in Hollywood. The only property he owns in the world is in Wyoming. He has always just lived in an apartment out here – 16 years in the same one, in fact – yet he could pack up and clear out in one day.

Cavalryman in last war

Not that Tim is either a backwoodser or a Hollywood-hater. He likes being in the movies, it makes him an excellent living, and he moves with a gang of old-time movie people – such as Richard Barthelmess, Lewis Stone, Irvin S. Cobb, Lionel Barrymore and Ronald Colman.

In fact, he doesn’t even look like a cowboy off the screen. He doesn’t affect Wild West get-up, and he could pass for a lawyer or an aircraft executive. He doesn’t talk cowboy talk or use movie slang. He’s always discussing the international situation, damn him, and he knows practically as much about as I do.

Tim’s apartment is a sort of old-fashioned one of two rooms, plastered with pictures of his movie and Wyoming friends. He has a Chinese cook named Frank. We had fried chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner. Before he leaves, Frank pushes aside the dining-room table, pulls something down out of the wall, and there’s Tim’s bed.

Like all movie people, you couldn’t get Tim on the phone directly even if you knew his number. You have to leave your name, and then if it’s o.k. he’ll call you back. He always saves his apartment the back way, and scales a concrete wall where his car is parked.

Tim is what you might call middle-aged, but he’s ruddy and enthusiastic and as straight as a rod. His soldiering probably accounts for that. He spent many years in the cavalry, before and during the last war.

He has been a rancher, a soldier, an actor and a circus owner. If he doesn’t stop thinking about the international situation, he may wind up to be a statesman.

Tim is among the last of the old Tom Mix and Buck Jones generation of Western stars. He can’t croon. He makes eight pictures a year. I’ll have to go see one of them some time.

‘Judge Hardy’ commands state guard

After dinner, we got in Tim’s car and went over to see Lewis Stone, the “Judge Hardy” of the movies, you know. Stone is just as nice as I always thought he would be, although I didn’t talk to him long, for he’s head over heels in defense work.

He is in command of a regiment of the State Guard (corresponding to the Home Guard in England), and it keeps him busier than a bird-dog. His title is lieutenant colonel. They were having their weekly drill-meeting in the old Warner Brothers studio when I saw him.

The regiment is an evacuation outfit. Everybody in it, enlisted men and officers both, furnish his own station wagon and carries two stretchers. They’ll be the ones to evacuate old and crippled people and children from bombed areas, if and when bombing comes.

It isn’t a movie regiment at all, although there are about a dozen movie people in it. Cesar Romero and Robert Young are both lieutenants in the outfit.

They were there and I saw them, but didn’t touch them. If you’re disappointed, I’ll go back and touch them for you. To tell the truth, they looked like practically anybody else in their uniforms. Thus end my Hollywood experiences.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 11, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LOS ANGELES – Local people say they can’t notice it, but I will swear that auto traffic in Los Angeles is not quite as thick as it used to be. Surely some people have laid up their cars.

The laying-up process is likely to snowball rapidly from now on. Tires are wearing out. I have one friend who is almost frantic. His tires are just hanging on from day to day, and he has to drive a long way to work. He’s in defense work, too.

Apparently there is a little bootlegging of tires, but my friend hasn’t even been able to get in touch with a good “tire-legger.” He’s had two or three up-the-alley tips, but they all turned into nothing at the last minute.

One thing that worries me is whether any plans are being made for mass transportation when the private tires give their last pop. Out here it is especially bad, because in these sprawled-out Southern California areas many people are driving 40 and 50 miles each way to work.

Somebody had better be thinking of something mighty quick, for if these masses can’t move back and forth to the factories the planes won’t stream out the front doors.

And speaking of airplane factories, they apparently aren’t as wonderful to work in as you might believe. They’ve simply got so big they’re soulless, like institutions.

The main complaint seems to be that there’s too much straw-bossing and suspicion. I know one man who just couldn’t stomach it and quit. He says it was, “Don’t stand here! Don’t look there! Where you going now? What’s that bulge in your hip-pocket?” all day long. There was just too much “system” and too little humanity.

On the other hand, he wasn’t all praise for the workers. He says there’s an appalling amount of clock-watching and of standing-around-doing-nothing.

He says that, on the morning after Pearl Harbor, he thought when he went to work that people would be working a little faster or a little more grimly or something. But he says he could see no change at all in anybody’s attitude.

People seem same as ever

Despite sub-shellings and “air raids” and much defense work, I can’t sense that the war has changed the people themselves in this area. Los Angeles seems just the same as ever.

People talk about their own apathy, and don’t know what to ascribe it to, other than asking, “Well, what can I do to help?” In other words, there won’t be full-fledged war feeling until everybody has something pretty vital taken away from him, or is given something pretty vital to do.

Of course, that takes time. And also, government action may lag behind the people’s willingness. That was true in England. The people were way ahead of the British government in their desire, even eagerness, to cut down on food more sharply, to be assigned things to do, to get in there and pitch. The government was always afraid to go too far for fear people wouldn’t stand for it, when what the people wanted was for the government to move boldly.

How did I get off on this subject, anyway? I don’t know anything about running a war.

The other night I happened to stumble upon a lecture by Capt. Harold Sweet, who is just back from China on a vacation. Capt. Sweet is one of the Panair pilots who helped evacuate Hong Kong. He has been flying in China for five years, and is soon going back.

Japs attain big league status

Sweet is gravely worried about America’s inability to grasp the lightness of the spot we’re in. It’s supposed to be unpatriotic even to imagine that we could possibly lose this war, but Sweet intimates we’d be better off if more of us realized it IS possible.

He has had five years of experience with the Japanese, and his opinion of their character isn’t high. Somebody in the audience asked him how he thought the Japs were treating American prisoners. The details of his answer were interesting. He said:

“So far, I think they’re treating them exceptionally well. There are several reasons.

“First, Japan is proud and flattered to be at war with us. It puts her in the big leagues. Second, she’s as startled over her successes as we are. And third, she’s trying to act like a first-class nation, and part of that imitation is to treat prisoners decently.

“But, just let her get a few lickings, and the Japs will revert to type and start their torture, and then our prisoners will suffer.”

And then he went on to tell of the butchery he saw in Nanking, when the conquering Japs simply killed and tortured and maimed until they were exhausted, and left three-quarters of a million needlessly dead Chinese stacked up in the streets.

I wish everybody could hear Capt. Sweet talk. He’s a great flier, but I believe he could do more good in America with his tongue than in China with his airplane.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 12, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN DIEGO – As you tunafish eaters know, your delicacy is gone for the duration. Do you know exactly why?

Well, it’s partly because we aren’t trading with the Japanese right now (they used to catch lots of tuna on our side of the fence, and then sell it to us). And it’s further because the Navy has taken over a good part of our American tuna boat fleet.

Tuna fishing had grown into a whopper of an industry around San Diego. In fact, this is the only place in the United States where there was a tuna industry. In boats alone, the fishermen had an investment of $10,000,000.

The Navy already has taken more than half the total tonnage of the 110 boats in the tuna fleet. Those left are small ones which can’t go very far to sea.

So this year’s catch of tuna will be small, and every bit of it will go to the Army and Navy. It’s rather ironic – the government has contracts with the tuna canneries for a certain amount of tuna this year, but by taking away the boats they make it impossible for the canneries to fill the contracts. So, you see, there’ll be none left over for civilian palates.

The tuna-fishing industry is a relatively new one – about 15 years old on a big scale – and a thrilling one, too. Tomorrow I’ll tell you some weird fish stories.

From early in the century until 1925, the fishermen around here caught albacore, which is a very delicate-meated fish of the tuna variety. But the biggest yearly catch was around 10,000 tons, compared with the 1940 tuna catch of 104,000 tons.

Albacore go south – for keeps

Each year the albacore, after disappearing to the south, would show up in these local waters at a certain time. They were as regular as the seasons; as faithful in their rendezvous as the swallows of San Juan Capistrano.

And then, in 1926, they didn’t come. And they’ve never been back since. It threw the fishermen for a loop that year. But they recovered quickly. They decided to go south, farther away, after tuna, which are bigger than albacore.

Then began an era of building bigger and bigger boats. Today there are tuna clippers that cost $250,000 and can cruise for 15,000 miles. They go as far south as Peru, and fish 1000 miles from shore. Sometimes they are gone three months, and return with 400 tons of tuna.

Tuna clippers go to sea on the “share” system – each member of the crew gets a percentage of the value of the whole catch. The biggest of the boats carry 22 men, and can bring in as much as $64,000 worth of tuna on one trip.

They say tuna fishermen are the highest-paid seamen in the world – $3000 a year is not unusual for just an ordinary pole man. Engineers make as high as $8000 and $10,000 a year.

There are about 1200 actual tuna fishermen, and most of them are Portuguese – 90 per cent of them, in fact. Eight per cent are Italian, and 2 per cent plain American. So fruitful is the tuna game that some of them have fished themselves into quarter-million-dollar boats and $50,000 homes here in San Diego.

Tuna helps himself into boat

Tuna are all caught individually, on hand lines, and it takes experience to make a tuna fisherman. Because you fish by rhythm, and your nerves and eyesight must be above par.

The tuna fisherman must yank his pole just a split second before the onrushing tuna actually strikes the hook. Then the tuna’s own momentum carries him on up out of the water and over the rail into the boat! Otherwise, it would be hard to get them aboard.

Some of these fishermen actually seem to have “fish sense.” They tell of one captain who will stand on his bridge for hours, looking out over empty water. Nobody else can see a thing, but finally the captain will say, “They’re over there,” and sure enough they always are.

When the Navy took over the tuna clippers many of the fishermen enlisted and went right along with the boats. And I’ve heard one report from a naval officer that, as lookouts, these fishermen made the regular Navy men appear silly. They could see things with the naked eye long before an officer could see them with binoculars. And, oddly enough, they’ve found that the best-seeing tuna fishermen are color blind.

Japan has been extremely active in tuna fishing on this side of the Pacific. For years she had the tuna concession from Mexico, and was in complete charge of the waters around Lower California. That, of course, has been canceled now.

Also, there were many Japanese fishing out of San Diego. In our trusting way, we paid little attention to them. They had years in which to study and map every foot of our coasts.

The tuna fishermen say if they’re ever hailed by a Jap submarine it won’t surprise them to see one of their old San Diego fishing companions stick his head out the conning tower.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 13, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN DIEGO – Art Ponsford is an Englishman, tall, slender and neatly dressed. He has been in America since 1912. He is a public-relations man. He is one of these fellows with a perpetual enthusiasm. When you listen to him you’d better just relax and enjoy it, or his vigor will have you exhausted within half an hour.

Everything is dramatic to Art. And one of the most dramatic things in his world is tuna fishing. He has done more than anybody in South California to publicize tuna. He has even made lecture tours over the country, telling tall fish stories. He doesn’t get a penny for it from the tuna industry either; he does it just because he loves it.

So I sat one day for hours listening to Art Ponsford tell tuna stories. I’ll try to recreate a few of them for you, although I can’t put on paper the Ponsford gesture, the Ponsford gleam in the eye, the Ponsford dramatic hush of the voice. Ponsford tells tuna yarns as though he were playing Shakespeare. I’ll just have to give them to you straight.

Pete Szalinski, skipper of the clipper Golden Gate, suddenly found his ship convoyed by four California-gray whales, two on each side of the clipper.

Knowing the sea, he sensed the reason. They had run to his ship as scared chickens run to a hen. For, in a great circle around them were orcas, or killer-whales. The killers were after these helpless California-grays, and the grays knew it.

Well, Pete didn’t mind playing nursemaid to four innocent whales. That is, he didn’t until one of them on the windward side “blew.” Instantly the whole ship was sprayed. And they say they don’t know what those whales had, but halitosis is far too mild a word for it.

Then the others “blew,” and the clipper crew was gasping for breath. It was so horrible the men simply couldn’t stand it.

Grays follow ship to safety

So Pete grabbed the high-powered rifle that clippers always carry, ordered full speed ahead, and literally shot his way through the outer ring of killer whales.

And the bad-breathed grays, repulsive but not so dumb, formed themselves into a convoy behind the clipper and rode its wake right through the killer herd to eventual safety.

Then there is the story of the Bering Sea halibut fisherman who drifted down to San Diego and got a job with the tuna fleet. He had never fished for tuna before.

The very first time he threw out his line, a 300-pounder got hold of it and went away in a flash. This fellow, new to the ways of tuna, was jerked overboard. He landed astraddle the tuna’s back, as though he were riding a horse.

The tuna carried him on a fast and splashy ride until it finally “sounded,” and left him floundering in the water. They picked him up in a skiff. He refused to fish again the entire voyage. The minute they got to San Diego he headed right back for the Bering Sea.

And there’s a similar story, but a more tragic one. A new fisherman hooked a big one that jerked him overboard. For some reason, he went panicky and, like a student at the controls of a training plane, “froze” onto his fishing pole. Simply couldn’t let go.

The tuna dragged him through the water for quite a distance, then started for the bottom. The poor fellow still couldn’t let go of his pole. He went right on down behind the tuna. And he never came up again.

Many experiences with sharks

Tuna fishermen have many shark experiences. Joe Monise, who owns the clipper Endeavor, was once fishing beside a fellow who was jerked overboard and attacked by sharks.

On a tuna clipper, the “racks” where the fishermen stand are very low, almost down to the waterline. In this case, Joe saved his fellow fisherman by reaching down and literally pulling him out of a shark’s mouth by the hair of his head.

Tony Rosa, engineer of the clipper Lusitania, once slipped and half fell over the side. His clothing caught on the rail and he hung suspended against the side of the boat.

Just then, a marlin lunged out of the water toward him, and the marlin’s sword went right through his thigh and pinned him to the side of the boat.

The sword broke off, and the marlin disappeared. They hauled Tony up, pulled the sword out of his thigh, poured iodine into the hole, and then for hours kept sea water running through it, to prevent “fish infection.” He came through in fine shape.

Denny Santos, skipper of the Sacramento, was fishing off the mainland of Mexico. Denny suddenly saw a killer whale coming in to attack the school of tuna. He grabbed his rifle, ran to the stern, and fired point blank at the whale’s head.

In death agony, the whale gave a tremendous leap, climbing out of the water in a great arc, right over the top of the boat. In midair, it lost its momentum and came crashing down right across the boat, smashing everything.

And it took the crew three days to cut the whale into small enough pieces to be handled and thrown overboard.

While they were cutting they looked for Jonah, but they didn’t find anybody.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 14, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN DIEGO – You can’t help but feel war when you are in San Diego, for this city today is existing on the by-products of war – the aircraft factories, the armed forces, and all the wartime construction that goes with them.

The streets are jammed with soldiers, sailors and Marines. In some ways it is like a college town, for in every hotel dining room you’ll see young soldiers or sailors eating with their parents who have come from back home for a visit.

Since I was here last spring more housing projects have gone up, vast new trailer camps for the workers have been established, changes have been made around the plane factories. There are nightly, permanent blackouts in certain parts of the city.

There isn’t much you’re allowed to tell, but you can tell that this is a city living on war. It will be a chaotic day here when the war ends and all this terrific war structure begins to crumble. Unfortunately, it probably never can crumble clear back to the good old sleepy San Diego of 10 years ago.

Censorship is strict here. Occasionally a naval vessel well known to San Diego puts back in, but it isn’t in the papers. Only on special occasions is the news of plane crashes given out. Criticism of war production has not yet appeared in the public prints.

Yet all these things are discussed openly and loudly in every bar and on every sidewalk in San Diego. That seems the biggest problem in the line of military secrecy right now.

Service men like to talk

I’ve heard it all up and down the coast. You can keep the newspapers mum, but you can’t keep the tongues of service men still when they get a few under their belts. As a friend of mine remarked, “The best way for a spy to work in California would just be to sit around the bars all evening, pretend to be drunk, and keep his ears open.”

I have made a few discreet inquiries into the crime and sin situation in this boom town.

This area, if you take in Tijuana across the border, has always had plenty of offer. But today things seem to have slowed down to a good Christian Endeavor pace. The old-time red-light districts, supervised and run with the blessing of the Navy and the police, are no more. Gen. DeWitt has ordered them out all up and down the coast, and out they have gone.

In Tijuana it’s different. The soldiers and sailors don’t get over there much, but Gen. DeWitt doesn’t control the aircraft workers. Tijuana is their Saturday-night howling ground.

Betting on the horses is about the only form of professional gambling left, either in San Diego or Tijuana. Big-time gambling in Mexico went out some seven years ago, when President Cardenas took office. The hotel at Caliente was closed, and is now a public school.

In San Diego there are many bookie joints, but they are raided occasionally. A newspaper friend told me that the last time he checked there were 54 bookmakers in San Diego.

Morals of boys in uniform safe

Agua Calinte doesn’t have a racing season any more, but instead has Sunday races the year ‘round. Betting is permitted. The track makes sure to keep the attendance below 5000 – on account of Gen. DeWitt again – for if the crowds get too big he’ll close the border.

All in all, it appears to me that the parents of the thousands and thousands of boys in uniform in this area have little to worry about along the morality line.

The birth-certificate rage is still on here. You can’t get a defense job without one, and lots of people can’t get certificates. The aircraft plants are hiring women. Women stand in line by the hundreds to apply for these jobs, but most of them don’t have birth certificates.

Prices are up, but not exorbitantly, it seems to me. Friends say there has been considerable slashing of tires, apparently by Axis-minded patriots. Young fellows with a little experience are making $100 a week as carpenters, but they have to work themselves to death for it. The U.S. Grant Hotel’s bar and coffee shop is THE meeting place of San Diego. Unlike the last war (as I remember it), you’ll see as many enlisted men as officers in the nicer cocktail lounges.

If you talk over the telephone now between San Diego and Mexico, your conversation is censored. You’re warned not to mention the weather, troop or ship movements, and so on. At the first word of anything suspicious they’ll cut you off.

Which leads up to the experience of a sports editor, I believe it was, who was trying to talk to a Mexican radio station about a broadcast for a football game this winter.

It seems San Diego has a professional football team called “The Bombers,” and every time the sports editor would mention “Bombers,” they’d cut him off.

He finally had to get the chief operator on the wire and explain it all to her, before he could get his sports information over to the radio station.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 16, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

ENSENADA, Mexico – This is the famous town 65 miles below the California border where tourists used to flock and rich people used to come for their luxurious vacations.

It is a town that I have heard scores of people speak about, and I’ve never heard anyone speak of it except glowingly. It’s known as the gem of the Lower California coast, and its Hotel de la Playa is noted for its lavishness.

But all that is changed now. Plain tourists aren’t coming in droves these days. And no vacationing moneybags are luxuriating in the Hotel de la Playa.

There is a paved road all the way from the border to Ensenada. It has some bad holes in spots, but for the most part it is a good 60-mile-an-hour road. Half the time it runs along the ocean, and the view gives you a sense of isolation and peace.

It’s really no more trouble to get across the border than it ever was, although if you have baggage they do give you a good frisking. We came across at 10 o’clock of a Saturday morning, and had to wait in line 20 minutes before getting to the gate.

The only restrictions I know of now are that you can bring only one spare tire across, no cameras at all, and they take your newspapers away from you. You can buy the same edition when you get on the Tijuana side, but it will have been censored.

On the way down we got a flat tire. Had a nail in it. Before reaching Ensenada we must have passed a dozen cars changing tires. I supposed that was normal, what with tires now getting thin and Mexican roads sometimes having on over-frequency of nails anyhow. But I’ve learned from friends that it isn’t normal. It’s their opinion that maybe saboteurs were putting nails in the road. I wouldn’t know.

No signs of war

Along the way we saw neither Japanese landing parties nor any soldiers to repel them if they did land. Mexico has cleared the Japs out of the whole Lower California area. It used to be filthy with Jap fishermen and farmers, but they’ve been moved to the mainland.

Ensenada is the home of Gen. Abelardo L. Rodriguez, who was president of Mexico before Cardenas, and who is said to be the richest man in Mexico. He has a magnificent home along the highway a couple of miles before you get to Ensenada. All around it are groves of olive trees. He uses the olive oil in his fish canneries.

The Japanese used to have the fishing concessions in these Mexican waters, but now they have all fallen to Gen. Rodriguez. Also he owns a big rubber company in Mexico City, and has countless other holdings.

They say he is a real power in Mexico, possibly THE power. He seems to be well liked and respected. I had hoped to see him, but he was in Mexico City.

Ensenada is lovely to look upon as you come round the last hill on the shelf road and look down across the bay, curved like a South Sea lagoon.

The town is more than 5000, much bigger than I had supposed. Its main street shows what it has lived on for years – tourists. There are many bars and curio shops, and nearly all the signs you see are in English. American money is accepted. Tourists and fish, those were Ensenada’s business. Now it is fish and soldiers.

Dempsey promotion

The beautiful hotel sits alone in the white curve of the beach, half a mile or so from the town proper. It is the one Jack Dempsey helped, promote several years ago. It ran into difficulties, and was closed.

Most of the leading business establishments in town are owned either by Luis Grande or the Hussong Brothers.

Luis Grande is very close to Gen. Rodriguez. He is an Italian, but is now a Mexican citizen. He owns bars and curio shops. He once ran the Italian-American Club in Seattle. He speaks good English. He says he wishes he could get hold of enough money to buy a shark-fishing boat – he’d clean up.

The Hussong Brothers also own bars and curio shops. They are of German descent. Now that the hotel is closed, they own probably the most popular place in Ensenada – a small city of beachside tourist cabins. They say that on week-ends, when San Diegans come down, you have to make a reservation ahead of time to get a cabin.

If the Japs ever try to invade this continent, Lower California may become a very hot spot. It is little populated and the Japs, through their fishermen, know every inch of its coastline. The Mexican and American governments of course are not unaware of this.

Things are being done down here which can’t be told. It isn’t inconceivable that this lovely spot might some day become a battleground. At any rate, Ensenada as a “paradise” is out until peace comes again. It seems a shame. Yet I guess that is one of the least of the millions of things that seem a shame in this world today.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 17, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SAN DIEGO – I’ve heard a couple of funny soldier stories here in this soldier sailor town.

One has to do with a new contingent of draftees, among whom there happened to be several lawyers, and they happened to be placed together in the same barracks.

The lawyers had money in their pockets, so after getting onto the ways of the Army they began giving the old-time noncoms money to go out and get them extra things to eat and drink, making Army life more comfortable for themselves.

But the old-timers pulled a fast one on them – they’d take the money and never bring anything back. And because of their superior rank they figured the newcomers would be afraid to squawk.

Well, the lawyer-soldiers didn’t squawk, but they solved the problem all right. They got together one evening, talked the situation over, and then called their cheating superiors before them. They read them the Constitution, the Army regulations, and certain sections of California law dealing with larceny and embezzlement. Then they summed up the case in good courtroom fashion. Before it was over they had the perplexed noncoms looking right through the penitentiary gate.

So now the situation has reversed itself, and the “wise” noncoms are running errands for the lawyers with no pay at all. The commissioned officers in charge have heard about it over the grapevine, but they’re just putting their tongues in their cheeks and grinning.

Salute with wrong hand

The other one has to do with a draftee from a wealthy family, who was on sentry duty in a San Diego office building taken over by the Army. His post was in the lobby.

Having extra money, he hired another soldier one day to go to a nearby restaurant and get him some sandwiches in a paper bag. He had just received them, and had them in his right hand, when a captain walked thru the lobby. The soldier quickly stuck the bag behind him. fumbled with his rifle, and saluted snappily with his left hand.

The startled captain came back to see what that was all about. “How long have you been in the Army?” the captain asked.

“Five months,” said the soldier, “but I was drafted.” (I still don’t know what that has to do with the story, but anyway that’s what the soldier said.)

“You certainly know after five months how to salute,” said the captain. “Now salute me properly.”

Whereupon the befuddled soldier shifted his rifle to his left hand, handed the captain the sack of sandwiches, saluted correctly with his right hand, and then reached out and relieved the captain of his burden.

The captain, sensing the futility of it all, just fumed away and let the matter drop.

Human characters have gone through the mill of this column by the hundreds over the years.

Some of you who read the column regularly may wonder sometimes what has happened to So-and-So whom we wrote about years ago. Of course, I never hear again of most of the people I write about. But now and then comes news of some of them. A certain kind of news has been much in my mail recently.

My friend “Sunset” Cox, the old China hand who after 40 years in the Orient was shipped back to California with tuberculosis, has finally had his vast enthusiasm stilled. “Sunset” is dead. He was nearly 70, but to me he seemed my own age. I’ve never known anyone who enjoyed every minute of his life more than “Sunset.” He didn’t live in vain.

And Uncle Steve Whaley is gone, too. He lived at Gatlinburg, Tenn. Uncle Steve is the mountain farmer who turned into a rich hotel man when the tourist fad struck the Great Smokies. Uncle Steve was a sly one. He said he graduated from Bear Pen Holler University, and “didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’.” But he got rich, and love it in his whimsical mountaineer way. Life was worthwhile for him, too.

He couldn’t wait to see

And gone also is Adrian Egbert, the man who lived luxuriously in caves at the south entrance to Death Valley, and who figured he’d be safe from bombing, if bombing ever came. But he couldn’t wait to see.

And gone, too, is Scotty – no, not “Death Valley Scotty” – but another Scotty you may remember, the old Australian who lived in squalor on the banks of an irrigation canal at Phoenix, Ariz., and kept around him constantly nearly 100 stray dogs, goats, burros, cats and other forms of animal life. He drowned last fall while swimming the canal. I do not know what became of his animals.

As I think back upon these men, it seems to me that those people who have within them the capacity for being a little different from the ordinary run of men – difference enough, for instance, to make them characters in a column – have had better lives than the rest of us. All four of these men had an enthusiasm for being alive. None of them was humdrum. It is a gift that hasn’t been given to all of us.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 18, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. – On the way up the coast I stopped past LaJolla to see Max and Margaret Miller. My periodic knockings at the Miller door have become sort of a tradition, so now one of them just opens the door and calls to the other, “Here he is again.”

Max Miller, as you well know, writes books. He is on his 14th now, if I have kept count correctly. He had just finished the first draft of his newest one, and felt so relieved over it he decided to take a vacation and ride up to Los Angeles with me.

We put the top down and came ripping up the highway in our camel’s-hair coats and with the sun beating down on our balding heads, and we were the cynosure of all eyes, as Shakespeare would say.

On the way up we told spinach jokes, and finally got around to the more serious question of what each of us was going to do, personally, about the war in lieu of continuing to write our respective brands of deathless literature.

It wound up that we were both in a quandary, didn’t know what we should do or wanted to do, probably couldn’t do it if we tried, and got exactly nowhere with our problem. “I thought maybe you’d have an answer,” Max said. "But I guess it’s the halt leading the blind.”

At any rate, neither of us can see how writing a thousand words a day – even such beautiful words as ours – can destroy any Japanese.

Margaret Miller has caught the writing habit, too, and has recently composed what is doubtless an epic, on sea life. It is a book for children. It isn’t out yet, but will be very soon.

Also, Margaret not long ago sneaked over on Max a magazine piece on the trials and tribulations of being an author’s wife. Her title for it was: “It’s Better Than Working in a Fish Cannery.”

Max still feels like spanking her.

Ocean passes front window

It being a literary day, we stopped in South Laguna to see another author – John Weld by name. We stayed a couple of hours and all praised each other to the skies. It was wonderful.

John Weld writes semi-historical novels. So far he is little known, but he is a painstaking craftsman with a facility for words and a tenaciousness about research – he devotes as long as two years to a book – and I don’t doubt that some day his name will carry great respect.

He and his wife Katie live in one of the most spectacular houses you ever saw. It is a small cottage perched on a shelf half way down the high perpendicular cliff that rises smack out of the Pacific Ocean.

You can’t even see their house until you walk to the edge of the precipice and peek over. Then you look right down upon its roof. You descend by a steep stairway. You walk in the back door, through the house, and look out the front window. And from there you look straight down into the ocean, far below you; and look at ocean northward, and southward, and westward.

The ocean is the highway that passes their front window, but the traffic on their highway is much more interesting than on any concourse for wheels and tires.

Last week on the rocks below their window a huge turtle lay for hours, a gigantic fellow that must have weighed a ton. Such a turtle is almost unknown in these parts.

Yesterday they saw two white whales. And as Katie Weld says, “I always thought Moby Dick was the only white whale that ever existed.”

Occasionally they’re thrilled by a procession of warships and submarines; and when Los Angeles puts on its anti-aircraft fireworks they can see it better than the people in Los Angeles; and one day John Weld swears he saw a regular fictional sea monster swimming past, although Katie laughs at him.

They recently picked up part of a rudder from a wrecked ship on their beach. And just a few days ago a can of Navy paint came floating intact to their threshold. A quart can, in perfect shape. So now the Weld back door and porch – which have wanted painting for many a month – are a nice, new battleship gray.

My job looks wonderful to a lot of other people. Other jobs look wonderful to me. The next pasture is always greener. I envy the Welds and their hidden house by the side of the vastest road on earth.

A sailor has his troubles

Coming out of San Diego on this trip I picked up a sailor who had been there on 24 hours’ leave and was headed for his station back up the coast.

I don’t know the sailor’s name, and he doesn’t know mine. He rode with me less than three miles. But that three miles was proof of how sometimes a man just has to talk.

For in that short time he told me where he was from and we discovered a mutual acquaintance in his home town; told me how proud he was of having advanced through three ratings in less than a year and a half in the Navy; told me he got married five months ago to a swell girl and they had a nice apartment in San Diego, and he had just been down to see her.

But the main thing he wanted to tell – and he told it almost as soon as he stepped into the car – was that this swell girl had told him the night before she was going to divorce him!

“She just said she didn’t love me any more, that’s all she’d say,” the sailor said. “And all the time, every day, she’s written how much she loved me. And just married five months. Ain’t that a hell of a note?”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 19, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LOS ANGELES – Pershing Square in Los Angeles is one of the funniest places I’ve ever seen.

It is a nice block-square park in the center of downtown Los Angeles. And for some reason it has grown into a place where people congregate and argue in public. It is the Hyde Park of America, except that it’s much better than London’s Hyde Park.

In Pershing Square people don’t get up on soapboxes and make wild speeches. It’s more personal than that. They stand in little knots and argue man to man.

I don’t know how each individual argument gets started, but I suppose a potential arguer simply walks along, sees some other guy who looks like an arguer, walks up to him and says, “Do you think all inventions are accidents?”

The guy says yes, or possibly no, and they’re off. Rapidly a little crowd gathers around. Pretty soon an onlooker will shove in his two cents’ worth. And the argument in that one group will flow back and forth among various contestants for hours.

If you walk through Pershing Square you’ll find the place dotted these little belligerent groups. It’s a circus. I’ve listened to dozens of them, and as far as I can figure out, nobody knows what he’s talking about. In no other place in the world will you hear so many four-dollar words so thoroughly misused as in Pershing Square.

For instance, the other day one group, of which I was a member, was arguing on the age of the Chinese people. One well-dressed college fellow said the Chinese were thousands of years old before the Bible was written.

They never discuss the war

Whereupon a middle-aged man, an Englishman with a broad provincial accent, shook his fist and yelled, “Naow, sir! The Chinese frustrated that lie. If you don’t believe it go to the library and read the historicals.”

The thing that has amazed me most about the Pershing Square thinkers is that the war hasn’t changed their arguments at all. One afternoon I stopped past a dozen different groups. Not a one was discussing the war. They were still arguing the same old subjects they’ve been screaming at each other about for years – Socialism and God.

People tell me that the attitude of the public toward Filipinos has changed radically. Heretofore Filipinos in Southern California have been treated worse than Negroes. But now they’re being treated with respect.

I have a very dear friend here who is a Filipino. He is a steward on a crack Southern Pacific train between here and San Francisco. So I asked him about this change.

He says it is true. The public is bending over backward to be nice to Filipinos. It’s easy now for a Filipino to get a job. And he says the travelers whom he serves are practically gushy. They give him long speeches of praise as though he personally were back from Bataan after wiping out a few hundred Japs. So goes the world.

If I ever get in the Army, it is my ambition to receive a directive to proceed to an unannounced destination and set up a military installation.

Jap girls become Eleanors

A friend of mine who teaches in a grade school and has a lot of Japanese pupils tells of a funny incident.

Previously all her students had thoroughly unpronounceable Japanese names. But the morning after Pearl Harbor all the little Japanese girls showed up with American first names, such as Mary, Carol and Virginia. But the most popular name of all, that morning after Pearl Harbor, was Eleanor.

You know that story about the tramp hitchhiker predicting the war would be over in July. Well, he is apparently a ubiquitous tramp. He is everywhere.

Letters have rolled in from every corner of the country, saying the same tramp with the same name had been through there. Sometimes it was two gypsies instead, but otherwise the story was always the same. The earliest report of it seems to have been hard about three months ago.

A friend has suggested that I try to trace the yarn down to its beginning, but I imagine the entire FBI could never run down its source. Many people say the story circulated during the last war, both here and in Europe.

Most letter-writers seem to feel that it’s a form of fifth-column propaganda, planted by the enemy to lessen our war efforts. I’m so dumb it never occurred to me there was anything insidious as about it. But I guess no harm was done in repeating it. Everybody in America apparently had heard it before I did anyway.

Around Laguna Beach there is a movement to organize deer hunters into a band of guerrillas to fight the Japanese when and if they try to invade California.

The story was published in the papers, and mail has been coming in from all over Southern California. One enthusiastic hunter wrote, “I’m not a crack shot, but I always get the meat.” Apparently he just slips up and strangles his deer – and his Japs.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 20, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – One day Fred Othman got an indignant letter from some female newspaper reader in the East, giving him the dickens for something he had written about the movies.

She closed by saying scornfully, “Anyone can tell from your writing that you are fat, red-headed, and completely without sex appeal.” Othman laughs about the woman’s anger, and then says gravely, “But isn’t it strange how she hit the nail on the head?”

So that’s Fred Othman – fat, red-headed and without sex appeal – and one of the happiest men I’ve run onto in years. He is Hollywood correspondent for the United Press. He writes a daily feature story – not a gossip column – about the movies.

His column appears occasionally in some 1300 papers, and regularly in about 150. He has been doing it for five years. And it is no secret that around the studios he is the most respected writer in Hollywood. His integrity is supreme.

In return, he has a very high regard for motion picture people. Carole Lombard was the best friend he had, and he can hardly bear to speak of her now. He has no sneers for Hollywood. Directors are his special heroes. Fred tells a story to explain why.

For a long time he went around, like other people, thinking directors were over-touted, and kept their jobs mainly by wearing polo shirts and yelling wise-cracks.

Then one day, as material for his daily story, it was arranged that Fred should direct a picture himself for one afternoon.

He read the script until he knew it by heart. On the first scene he called the actors to their places, gave a few instructions, got everything all ready to fire, and then a cameraman had to come over and speak as follows: “Mr. Othman, where do you want me to put the camera?”

That’s a civil question. It’s plain and to the point. It’s one of the simplest of the fundamentals. And yet Mr. Othman thought and thought, and realized that actually he hadn’t the remotest idea where to put the camera. From that day to this, you better not belittle directors in his presence.

Regular reporter’s path

Fred Othman came out of St. Louis, and followed the regular reporter’s path upward through the newspaper and press association business. I knew him years ago in Washington.

Five years ago, the United Press sent him to Hollywood, because they needed a regular man out here and Fred had displayed a pretty gay touch on his typewriter in Washington. In these five years a rather remarkable companionship has grown up between Fred Othman and Hollywood. Each has taken the other over.

Othman has fallen so hard for California that he practically buttonholes people on the street to tell them about it. He is shameless in his enthusiasm. He can’t tolerate the thought of ever leaving California. He is a happy man.

Othman’s house is the wonder of all visiting firemen, and he displays it with almost childish delight. I’ve heard about it for years, now finally I’ve seen it.

The thing sits on a hilltop, just a little way from Hollywood Boulevard. Nine families live up there, including the mayor of Los Angeles. And the only way they can get up to the hilltop is by elevator!

Yessir, the hillsides are sheer. The elevator is in a concrete shaft, like a square silo, which sticks up in the air alongside the cliff that forms one side of the hill.

Those nine families up there own and operate the elevator. They pay $3 a month each. They call it “The Hightower Elevator Co.,” and each year at income tax time they have to hire a lawyer to go down and explain to Uncle Sam that they don’t manufacture elevators for profit.

Famous designer

Othman’s house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the noted architect. I don’t know what happened, but it became unoccupied, and ran down terribly. Tramps were sleeping on the lower floor. That’s how the Othmans picked it up for a song.

It’s a beauty now. Fred, who considers himself quite a painter (house, not canvas), did most of the redecorating. Mrs. Othman, who is Hilda, did the rest.

The place is practically all windows. And the sun is so bright it takes the dye right out of their furnishings. So they have to have white curtains and rugs. Deep, woolly white rugs. Maybe you think that doesn’t look luxurious.

Furthermore, they have gold-plated doorknobs. Fred is so proud of those he can hardly contain himself. The silly part of it was that they cost almost nothing – a little discovery I am glad to hear about. Maybe I can get gold tires when the rubber runs out.

Fred says all his life he has wanted a fountain. So he made one. You turn a valve, and a funny little stream, about the size of a pencil lead, comes squirting out and falls into the goldfish pond. Fred sits and listens to it tinkle all Sunday afternoon.

Yes, the Othmans live in an almost magazine-like Hollywood luxury and because of Hilda’s uncanny nose for business opportunities, it costs them no more than living in an ordinary suburb. They live a banquet life on the price of a hamburger.

The house, however, does have one grave fault. It’s so damn nice Fred can’t write in it! So every afternoon, after doing the studios, he has to drive clear to downtown Los Angeles, among the ticker machines and the frenzy of the UP office, and there he writes his daily dissertation about the movies.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 21, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LONG BEACH, Calif. – Among the many things about the conduct of the war which aren’t clear to me, is whether city people should try to grow their own food.

I’ve read pieces coming from Washington telling of the formation of a national Garden-for-Victory movement, or some such similar title, and urging people to get right out in their back yards and hoe against Hitler.

I’ve also read pieces coming from Washington urging amateurs not to put in back yard gardens, on the theory that their inexperience would squander valuable seed and fertilizer and insecticides that could be used better in more professional hands.

So what are we to do? Certainly I don’t know. But I do know that in England everybody and his brother has a little war garden; that clerks and bookkeepers and bus drivers are farming “allotments” in city parks; that even on top of Anderson shelters you’ll frequently see a few vegetables growing.

So I’ve gone to the foremost war-garden expert in this Los Angeles area, to see what he thinks about it. Naturally he’s for war gardens; like anybody all wrapped up in a certain line of work, he sees the war being won by a great devotion to his especial hobby.

This man is Maj. Harry L. Bateson, who has been a horticulturist all his life. He is a Canadian by birth, but an American citizen now. He is a sort of local Burbank. He has been gardening and flowering and breeding and preaching around here for 12 years.

What attracted me to him is that he runs actual classes for adults, teaching them how to become their own private gardeners. He says he can take the dumbest guy that ever lived and make a self-sufficient gardener out of him in six weeks. And the funny part about it is that he doesn’t charge his students anything.

Bateson says that the average back yard will keep a family of four in vegetables. In Southern California you could have a different kind of vegetable coming in every week of the year; in colder regions it would have to be confined to summertime.

Maj. Bateson is quite a fellow. He has been all over the world. He is middle-aged with bushy hair; wears a lumberjack shirt with red handkerchief tied around his neck; and on his finger a fascinating gold ring given him by Sun Yat Sen.

He was raised in the cold North, 300 miles above Edmonton, Alberta. He says he was at work when he was 7, making his own living at 9, and in foreign countries at 14.

He studied and worked in England as a youth. So England was not new to him when he arrived there as a Canadian soldier in November, 1914. He was with the famous Princess Pat regiment. They were in the trenches by Christmas.

Bateson fought and was gassed and wounded. But as he recuperated, he pounded on his hobby of gardening. He says he was the father of England’s war gardens in the last war. He’d get a soapbox, plant it in front of a cathedral, and preach gardening as the people came out.

After the war Bateson spent long years in veterans’ hospitals, both in Canada and the United States. In the late ‘20s he wasn’t expected to live a week. But finally he began to regain his health at El Paso. And then in 1930 he came to California and started working in the open. Today he’s twice as hale three times as hearty as I am.

He expounds his gardening in classes, by example and over the air. He has been on the radio in this region every day for the past 12 years. He gets about 40,000 letters a year asking questions about gardening, and has to have a staff of secretaries to answer.

In 1932 he talked the leading citizens of Long Beach into establishing what was known as “Thrift Gardens.” It was at the depth of the depression, and people were desperate.

So real estate operators donated land, the city collected money for seeds. Maj. Bateson furnished the direction, and pretty soon they had 3200 families at work gardening. The thing is actually still in existence, although the gardeners are down to 75 now. These are otherwise unemployable; all the rest have jobs.

Bateson is as interested in handicapped and unfortunate people as he is in vegetables. Several very old people called while I was there, looking for work or wondering if they could still swing a hoe, and Bateson gave them all a nice life-begins-at-80 pep talk and I’m sure sent them away much happier than when they came.

And, in addition, he has classes of boys working in his gardens, all of them handicapped physically, some of them mentally. They stay anywhere from three months to a year and a half. The sun and exercise and friendliness do wonders for them. The School Board helps keep them.

Bateson says in the entire Los Angeles area, including suburbs, there are now about 100,000 gardens. He thinks there should be many times that number.