Indiana - Day 15 - Ernie Pyle and Eugene Debs

Crawfordsville KOA
Saturday, 15 June 2019

I'd wanted to spend the day here in the campground - the weather was forecast to be bad and I was tired - but the Eugene Debs home is closed on Sundays, so off we went today.

today's route

Driving
Almost as soon as I got on the road, I started to feel strong crosswinds.  Any time I went in an east/west direction I got shoved around by them pretty seriously - had to keep both hands on the wheel.  Any north/south angles were much easier.  Fortunately, much of today's route was north/south.

I drove through a lot of flat farmland, both going and coming.

Winter wheat
Since I've been in Indiana, I've seen fields that seemed to be growing some kind of grass, but I couldn't figure out what it was.  And during the last week or so I've seen some of those fields being cut down and the grass gathered together by machinery, but still couldn't figure out what it was.  Today I passed a place that advertised winter wheat for sale and finally realized maybe that's what I've been seeing grown.  It just didn't occur to me because I always assumed it was planted in the fall and harvested in the spring, and June isn't the spring anywhere.  But now that I've looked it up, I know that it's planted Sept.-Nov. and harvested summer or early autumn - in Chile it takes longer than a year to mature (per wikipedia).  I had no idea.  And now you know too.

More driving
I crossed the Wabash River again - I've seen it so often it's beginning to feel like a friend - but this time I noticed it seemed to be much fuller here than I'd seen before.  I later looked it up and learned that it rises in Ohio near the Indiana border, and meanders for 503 miles across Indiana until it hits Illinois, where it turns south and forms the southern half of the IN-IL border.  And it's the largest northern tributary of the Ohio River, at least partly because there aren't any dams on 4/5 of it.  All of which would explain why I thought it looked bigger than when I first met it driving north to the South Bend area on my first day in the state.  Back there it was just getting started.

I'm seeing huge fields of corn on both sides of the highway in this area.  The rain should help it grow, I suppose.

I saw a sign saying State Route 63 has been designated the George Rogers Clark Memorial Highway.  I've been seeing that name around here often so finally looked him up.  He was the highest-ranking American officer on the northwest frontier during the Revolutionary War; he's especially noted for taking the fort at Vincennes (Ind.) from the British, which contributed to the British later ceding all of the Northwest Territory in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.  So yeah, he deserves recognition, even more than 200 years later.

I've seen almost no litter in Indiana, except when I'm near a fast food place, of course (cities should require any fast food joint to pick up all litter within a ___-yard radius of their restaurant).  But I keep seeing dead critters all along every highway I've been on.  I've never seen anything like this kind of carnage in any of the other states I've visited so far, so what's the difference with Indiana?

North of Dana (where I was going) is something called the Newport Chemical Depot.  I didn't see a road sign for it but saw it on the AAA map and looked it up.  Kinda odd.   en.wikipedia.org/Newport_Chemical_Depot   (The wikipedia article is almost as interesting for its caveats as for what it says about the subject.)

Ernie Pyle Home/World War II Museum
I guess the main reason I came here was in memory of my parents, who talked about Ernie Pyle occasionally the whole time I was growing up.  Ernie Pyle seemed to be almost synonymous with WWII in their minds.  And I'm really glad I came here - for me, more than for them.

I got here much earlier than their opening time and tried to take the dogs for a walk, but it was absolutely pouring rain with very strong wind and thunder, so I didn't want to take the dogs out for very long.  But while we were in the RV, Dexter and I enjoyed watching a rabbit who crossed the front yard, waited, then crossed the street, waited, then crossed the railroad tracks.  I didn't see where he went - visibility wasn't so good - I don't know if Dexter was able to track him or not - he didn't tell me.

This museum is in the tiny border town of Dana, IN - the sort of place where the city hall and library are in the same small narrow building that looks like it's only got one tiny room on either side of the central door.  But they're proud of Ernie Pyle.

The museum consists of his family's home and 2 quonset huts.  The quonset huts were constructed but never used, and the Scripps Howard folks (who Pyle worked for) donated the huts and a bunch of money for the museum.  I only visited the quonset huts.

Ernie Pyle was, without contest, the most beloved war correspondent of our country.  He was born in 1900, a farm boy, but joined the Naval Reserve hoping to fight in WWI, which ended too soon for his participation.  He went to journalism school and joined Scripps Howard newspapers.  During the '30s, he and his wife traveled the US and wrote travel columns that were syndicated and achieved national recognition.  Then WWII came along.

He went to London and wrote first-hand accounts of the Blitzkrieg bombing attacks.  He traveled through North Africa, Sicily and Italy with the troops; he was on the Normandy Beaches right after the D-Day landing and was present at the liberation of Paris.  He wrote intimate stories of the GIs he spent his time with.  Eventually, he went to the war in the Pacific, where he wrote about the Battle of Okinawa and daily bombing raids launched from the USS Cabot.  He was killed west of Iwo Jima 3 months before the war ended, 6 days after the death of FDR.  For some, it would be difficult to say which of the two was mourned most.

His columns were syndicated throughout the country, and ordinary people relied on him for his stories about ordinary soldiers, for the human element of the war.  After his death, he was awarded a Purple Heart, which took a special act of Congress because that's not a civilian honor.

Mostly this museum honors his columns, and I've taken photos of all that they showed.  I've made the photos as clear as I can, though you'll have to blow them up to read them, but it'll be worth your while.  They speak clearly and intimately about the sorts of lives the GIs were leading.  Some families learned that their loved ones were still alive because he'd mention the names of regular guys in his columns.

replica of the Coleman stove in preceding column

And this is what the museum had about his death.

A man like that deserves to be honored.

Back on the road
Just a few miles from Dana, and a few miles from each other, are the towns of Montezuma and Mecca.  They suggest such different heritages that it seems odd for them to be so close together, and in Indiana.

We had lightning break almost right over the RV.  I keep telling myself that the tires are supposed to provide grounding protection, and if anybody knows any different, please don't tell me.  It's rained almost half the time I've been in Indiana, and if I had to stay put because of fear of lightning (which could strike us just as well sitting in a campground as out on the road), I wouldn't be going many places here.

I was on my way to Terre Haute, partly because I've always heard the name and wanted to put a face to it, and partly to go to the Eugene Debs Home.  Terre Haute, by the way, is pronounced by Hoosiers as TARE-ah HOTE.

Eugene V. Debs Home

What you see on the historical marker here is as much as I've ever known about this person.  I came here because I was curious: I've heard his name all my life - probably because he kept running for president - but didn't know anything about him.  Unfortunately, I still don't know much.  I was unlucky enough to have visited on the day the museum was hosting a book-signing by an author who had written a new book titled, The Edge of Anarchy - The Railroad Barons, The Gilded Age, and The Greatest Labor Uprising in America.  I understand that Eugene Debs formed a significant part of his book.

The front room (parlor?) of the house was filled with rows of seated people facing a man standing at the door to the back room (dining room?).  A young woman near the door ushered me out to the porch so we could talk; I declined to go listen to the author; she apologized for wanting to listen to him rather than show me around, but she did take me all the way up to the attic so I could start my own tour.

The ceiling in the attic is completely covered with a mural.  These are my photos from left to right, and around the corner and back into the ell.

Section on the right shows Mother Jones in the center right, who Debs knew and wrote about.  You may remember she was a powerhouse in coal miners' strikes and other labor disputes.

You can see in the photo on the left that there were even more murals than I took photos of.

The photo at left is of his actual desk and chair.  Nice pieces of furniture in their own right.

caption for mural on the left

After I'd seen the attic and 2nd floor and was about to leave the house, I was joined by a woman about my age who I'd seen in the audience downstairs.  She lamented I hadn't come listen to the speaker, she wanted to give me a personally conducted tour and, when I declined, she cornered me against the furniture to tell me what a wonderful man Eugene Debs was. 

Part of that situation was my fault because I don't like having people - especially strangers - talking to me with their faces less than 3' from mine.  Clearly her body space was much smaller than mine, because that's what she was trying to do, so I kept backing up.  She was so involved in what she was saying that she was actually shaking with intensity.  It got a little unnerving and I finally asked her to back up and let me out of the corner, where I could establish a little breathing space.

This encounter continued all the way down the stairs to the 1st floor because she just couldn't accept that I really wasn't particularly interested in Debs or socialism or the labor movement or whatever all it was she was so intense about.  It was all very odd.  I didn't see the first young woman again, which was too bad because she seemed a much better ambassador for their organization - certainly she was much calmer about it all.  I found out later that first young woman is the museum director.  I should have stuck with just reading the wikipedia article.   en.wikipedia.org/Eugene_V._Debs

But all very strange.  Almost a caricature of the fervor of the early Socialists.

More driving
I discovered that Terre Haute has brick streets underneath its asphalt.

The Debs museum is on the campus of Indiana State University, which seems very attractive.

Back at the Ernie Pyle museum the folks there gave me a brochure for a Holocaust museum in Terre Haute.  Another time, when the weather's not so bad and I have more time, I'd like to go.  The brochure says this particular Holocaust museum focuses on the ghastly experiments Josef Mengele performed on twin children at Auschwitz.  The museum's founder is one of those twins.  Somehow both she and her twin sister managed to survive the war (they were almost 11 when the camp was liberated), and she's worked to help other twins get more information about the experiments and to bring Mengele to justice (he was never captured after the war but did drown in Brazil). 

She's also concerned that today's world isn't taking the Holocaust seriously - there are so many deniers out there, and children today aren't learning the personal side of these atrocities - so her museum is trying to preserve that.  Here's the museum's website  https://candlesholocaustmuseum.org/ and here's yet another wikipedia article, this one about Mengele   https://en.wikipedia.org/Josef_Mengele

I took a different road back to the campground and saw cornfields as far as the eye can see.