Was Ernie Pyle a Club member? We have the answer.
Ernie Pyle is one of the greatest names in newspaper reporting history. His Pulitzer Prize-winning work in capturing the stories of front-line troops as they slogged through Europe on their way to Berlin are legendary. Even today, stories and books about Pyle are widely read.
But was he a member of the National Press Club?
A tribute to him is on the wall leading to the Fourth Estate Dining Room, but for decades, it was assumed he was not.
Membership records are sparse from the early days of the Club. Today, we rely on past Club histories and yearbooks that were sporadically published with lists of member names to try to track down who was in the Club.
For Pyle, we knew that he worked in Washington in the 1920s as a reporter for the Washington Daily News. In 1927 he launched an acclaimed aviation column in the same year Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic Ocean and spoke at a Club event. Pyle was managing editor from 1932 to 1935. He hated the job and convinced the chief editor to let him become a roving reporter traveling all over the United States.
With so many friends and colleagues as members, Pyle most likely visited the Club during these years. But his name did not show up in membership lists in the 1928, 1932 or 1936 Club yearbooks. So, it was assumed he never was a member –- until now.
Noel-Marie Fletcher, an author and member of the Club’s History and Heritage team, is doing research on World War II war correspondents. She said Pyle was a member.
“I learned about Pyle’s membership after reading reports about the National Press Club hosting a July 3, 1945, preview of a film on based on Pyle’s life covering the war called “The Story of GI Joe,” she said. “The movie starred Robert Mitchum and Burgess Meredith,” and included fellow combat veterans and correspondents.
The movie was nominated for four Academy Awards and selected by the Library of Congress for its National Film Registry for being culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. You can see it on YouTube.
Club President Edward Jamieson of the Houston Chronicle was the master of ceremonies at the Loews Palace Theater film screening event during which actress Dinah Shore sang and Pyle’s widow, Geraldine, received a Medal of Merit jointly presented posthumously to Pyle by the War and State departments and U.S. Navy. The Medal of Merit is the highest civilian decoration for the performance of exceptional services in war efforts.
At this event, Pyle’s Club membership repeatedly was mentioned, Fletcher found. Calling Pyle a “freshman member” of the Club, a Newsweek magazine article in July 1945 discussed the public tribute to the famed journalist who had worked in DC and was known locally “for his aviation column in The Washington Daily News and for his Bohemian conviviality long before he was nationally famous as a columnist and war correspondent.”
A letter from President Harry Truman was read, stating: “Ernie Pyle typified the hundreds of correspondents who braved danger, many of them losing their lives as he did, so the free world could be fully informed of the war. It is highly fitting that he should be awarded a Medal of Merit.”
Fletcher asked the special collections librarian at the Albuquerque Public Library, which houses the Pyle papers, if she could confirm that the journalist was a Press Club member. The librarian then bounced the request to Club Archivist Jeff Schlosberg.
With a targeted time frame in hand, Schlosberg pulled out the Club Board minutes from late 1944 and early 1945. There he found that Ernie Pyle was proposed for membership as a nonresident member at the Dec. 4 meeting by Thomas L. Stokes of the United Features Syndicate and John T. O’Rourke, the editor of The Washington Daily News. He was elected to membership at the Jan. 2 board meeting.
That made him a member for 14 weeks before he was killed on April 18 by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shimi during the Battle of Okinawa.
“Ernie Pyle may have visited the Club late in 1944 just before he became a member,” Schlosberg said. “From September 1944 to January 1945, Pyle took time off from war reporting at his New Mexico home. At some point during his stateside sojourn, he was in Washington, D.C., where Eleanor Roosevelt later mentioned in her newspaper column that he had visited the White House and met her. Pyle could have made his NPC connection towards a Club membership during that visit.”
