The Pittsburgh Press (November 19, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In a short series of columns, Ernie Pyle is describing his experiences on the home front, before taking up soon another assignment to the battlefronts.
Albuquerque, New Mexico –
When I get back to the front, nobody less than a brigadier general had better try to high-hat me. Not that anybody ever did, but I’m just issuing a warning.
For I am a colonel myself. Not just a colonel once; not just a colonel twice; but three times a colonel. Yep – a New Mexico colonel. Aide-de-camp on the staff of the Governor.
Governor Clyde Tingley started it, several years ago. Then along came Governor Johnny Miles, and he kept up the tradition by making me a colonel again. And now the newest Governor – Jack Dempsey – seeing no way out, has had to follow suit.
Personally, I like the idea. Maybe I wouldn’t like it if I weren’t a colonel, but since I am a colonel, I like it. You get special license plates saying “Staff Officer,” and the State Police leave you pretty much alone unless you kill somebody, and furthermore, the Governor takes you to lunch.
I was just getting onto the hang of how to use our ration points when my vacation was over, and now I have to leave. Rationing doesn’t seem to me so bad, once you get onto it.
Tea strainers and death
There are lots of little things you can’t buy, but honestly, I don’t see that anybody is in much pain from it, for example, it’s impossible to buy any kind of tea strainer in Albuquerque except a plastic one which soon goes to pieces. But then did you ever hear of anybody dying for lack of a tea strainer?
Our groceryman says that the point system, instead of running him out of business as he feared, has actually doubled his fruit and vegetable business.
The reason is that people buy fresh stuff all month and eat or can it, and then at the last of the coupon period, in order not to let coupons go unused, they come in and buy just as much canned stuff as they used to.
Which would seem to indicate that the theory behind rationing has slipped somewhere along the line.
One of the greatest pleasures of my vacation was to have a real auto again. After a year of jeep and truck riding, it was like a suburb of Heaven to get into our Pontiac convertible. I didn’t know whether it was going half the time or not, because you couldn’t hear the engine. And bumps, why, you’d think the country around Albuquerque was all made of velvet.
The car has to go back into storage, for unfortunately That Girl, being poetic rather than mechanical-minded, has never learned to drive. It’s a shame too, because now she either has to strike out across the mesa on foot, like a prospector, or else spend two-thirds of her not-too-lavish wages on taxicabs.
That Girl doesn’t like it
She doesn’t like this business of keeping the home fires burning while everybody else is away. But who does?
It is the ones who stay, like her, that really take the rap. For those behind life is lonely, routine, sometimes seemingly frustrated. But for us who go, new things always appear to be endured, there is excitement, and change, and misery to challenge you. There is so little time for mooning. I am glad that I can go instead of stay – if anybody has to go.
Our little house is still a gem. Now it has some Algerian rugs on the floor, Moroccan hassocks before the fireplace, Congo ivory on the mantle.
We can still see 80 miles from our front window, and the sunsets are still spellbinding. Quail still peck in our front yard. Roaming neighborhood dogs come and visit us. So do children. The postman always has something peasant to say.
We have two cups of hot tea very early in the morning, and we are sitting here drinking it when the first dawn comes over the Sandias. The sun soon warms the desert, and the day grows lazy for us who are home on furlough. Life seems too good here within these few square feet ever to bear going away.