Curiosity Corner #301: A sad passing on Peanut Island.

http://cjoint.com/data/cCdP4EE50p.htm

This stamp features the famous war correspondent, Ernie
Taylor Pyle.

It represented double letter-rate in the then, new schedule
of charges.

The U.S. Postal Service issued a 16-cent stamp
honouring Ernie Pyle, the Scripps-Howard newsman who
brought the common man's war into millions of homes.
Pyle covered World War II as no other war had ever been
covered, for he was more concerned with the privations
of privates than with the communiques of generals. His
despatches were warm with human interest. He had a
premonition of his death, and he was killed by Japanese
gunfire on the Island of Ie on April 18, 1945.
The vertical stamp, which will be printed in brown on the
Cottrell press, was designed by Robert Geiss-mann, of
New York City. The portrait is based on a photograph
made by Alfred Eisenstaedt, which appeared in Life
magazine on October 2, 1944.
Ernest Taylor Pyle, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for
Journalism in 1943, was born near Dana, Indiana, on
August 3, 1900.
He left college shortly before graduation for a job as a
cub reporter on the La Porte (Indiana) Herald, to begin a
career that would take him to jobs in Washington, D.C.
and New York and later as a roving reporter throughout
the United States and South America.
Pyle covered the bombing of London, prior to U.S. entry
into the war, and when that occurred he was on hand for
the invasions of North Africa, Italy, France and to the end
- the invasion of Okinawa. It has been said that he
captured the GI in words with the same sympathy as Bill
Mauldin did in cartoons.
He was a small, wiry, diffident, red-headed man, who
once said "I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting
people for fear they won't like me. Millions learned to
love him, and GIs cried when they learned of his death.
The obituary editorial in the New York Tunes echoed
those millions with these words: "He was the chronicler
of the human side of the war. In writing without
inhibitions of his own fear and misery and weariness, he
spoke for the average soldier everywhere. His columns
were treasured by both the soldier and his family here at
home, because they were what each would like to have
written had they possessed Ernie's gift of words. And it
was a great gift."

Acknowledgement: Mr. Richard C. Dahlem 1971