Description:

Pyle Ernie 1900 - 1945 PSA/DNA Certified Ernie Pyle endorsed check signed four months before his death at Iejima



This unnumbered check, issued from the Union Trust Company of the District of Columbia in Washington, DC on December 9, 1944 in the amount of $16.75, was made payable to "Charlotte Drager, 516 E. Grand Ave., Albuquerque, NM" and signed "Ernest T. Pyle" in blue fountain pen lower right. The uniform cream check depicts a green printed image of the bank at center haloed by a round District of Columbia watermark behind it. Marked verso and perforated as cashed. Graded by PSA/DNA as NM-MT 8 and contained within 9.5" x 4.5" slab.

Ernest Taylor Pyle (1900-1945) aka Ernie Pyle was a hardscrabble journalist who gave his life to reporting the news. He was born in Indiana, and served as a teenager in the United States Navy Reserve for three months until Armistice. 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. His gritty on-the-ground coverage of Allied efforts in the European, Pacific, and North African theaters won him the Pulitzer Prize. Just over four months after signing this check, on April 18, 1945, Pyle was traveling by jeep when he was shot in the left temple by machine gun fire at Iejima, Japan. He was buried in his battle helmet between two other servicemen. President Harry S. Truman said, "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told." It seems fitting that Pyle was interred next to the military personnel whose experiences he had related with such frankness and sympathy.

The check is slabbed and graded by PSA/DNA as NM-MT-8.

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June 14, 2017 10:30 AM EDT
Wilton, CT, US

University Archives

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