Ernie Pyle Correspondence with Karl Martz
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Ernie Pyle (born 1900) was a notable journalist.
He traveled around the USA and
wrote a daily column about people and places.
The column was syndicated nationally starting in 1935.
One of his columns, Traveling, from August 29, 1940,
is seen in the newspaper clipping at left.
In it, he says:
Karl Martz is reticent, low-spoken, gratefully polite.
He does not speak in arty terms. ... The parlor of his
home is the exhibition room. In it today stand the most
beautiful pieces of pottery I have ever seen. Each piece
is an individual thing, almost with a soul. He never makes
a duplicate of anything. His most expensive piece is priced
at $40. They run on down to $2.50. The intenuity and artistry
that he fashions into his clay are actually touching.
Apparently Karl wrote a letter to Pyle thanking him for his
glowing appraisal. (No copy of that letter has come to light.)
Pyle replied with the letter shown at right, in which he opens
with:
If there is any compensation (besides the pay, which I must admit
is pleasant) to the struggles of getting out a daily column,
it is in getting such letters as yours. If there had been no others
at all as result of the Brown County series, I would have felt that I had had
appreciation enough.
Later, Pyle became a highly praised and popular war correspondent
in the Second World War, writing from the perspective of the common
soldier and winning a Pulitzer Prize. In 1945, Pyle was killed on the
island of Ie Jima (near Okinawa) in Japan.