Description:

Pyle Ernie

This unnumbered check is inscribed overall and signed by American war correspondent Ernest T. Pyle as “Ernest T. Pyle” in dark blue fountain pen. The $25.00 check, issued from the Union Trust Company of the District of Columbia in Washington, DC on November 9, 1944, was addressed to one Shirley Mount. The pale yellow ground depicts a green bank at center haloed by a round District of Columbia watermark behind it. The check, partly punched out “Paid”, also bears red stamps and the recipient signature verso. Graded by PSA/DNA as “GEM MT 10”.  In very fine condition, still showing perforation marks at left where it was torn out of the check book. The check measures 6.25” x 2.75” while the slab measures 9.5” x 4.5”.

 

Ernest Taylor Pyle (1900-1945) aka Ernie Pyle, was a hardscrabble journalist who gave his life to reporting the news. Pyle dropped out of Indiana University to accept his first work as a journalist at a LaPorte, Indiana newspaper until his relocation to Washington, DC where he served as a tabloid reporter. In the mid-1920s, Pyle and his wife Geraldine “Jerry” Siebolds drove 9,000 miles around the United States in a Ford roadster, meeting people and seeing places that would eventually figure in Pyle’s 1935-1941 reporting of Depression life in rural America. During World War II, Pyle served as a war correspondent, writing many articles and books on the American military experience.

 

In July 1944, Pyle narrowly avoided death in a bombing accident in Normandy. The event, along with other incidents in the war, shook Pyle. He was likely recuperating in New Mexico when he signed this fall 1944 check. Yet Pyle was back on the job just five months later. On April 18, 1945, he was killed at Iejima, Japan while canvassing the terrain in a jeep. He was buried in his battle helmet between two other servicemen.

 

The recipient of the check, Shirley Mount Hufstedler (1925-2016), befriended Pyle when her father, an Albuquerque housebuilder, oversaw construction of the reporter’s house. Mount later had a distinguished law, teaching, and government career.

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