More Kansas Than Krypton

But what if Superman’s rocket had landed in the Hoosier State?

Ernie Pyle Remembers Clark Kent
Posted by Withywindle in 2011 at his blog Athens and Jerusalem:

How did you meet Clark Kent?

We were on a press plane flying from England down to North Africa just after the troops landed in forty two. The ride was bumpy and we were passing around a bottle of whiskey. I offered it to this big man in the back, and he said, “No thanks, Mr. Pyle, I’m tee-total.” But he said it in a friendly way that didn’t seem stuck up at all. I said, “You know my name, but I don’t know yours. Who are you?” Somebody else said, “You don’t know him, Ernie? That’s Clark Kent, the one who did all those Superman stories.” I whistled, because those had been good pieces, and because I could see how young Kent must have been when he wrote them. I took a longer look at him. Big man, handsome man. He looked like he could have been a football player or a movie star. Half Johnny Weissmuller, half Gregory Peck. “I liked those,” I said. “I always wondered how you got that particular interview.” “It wasn’t easy,” Kent said to me solemnly. “First I had to find out where his favorite bar was. Then I had to buy him a drink. And he wouldn’t talk to me until I put a cape on.” He looked at me so seriously that I knew this was God’s own truth—and then he grinned, that wonderful smile that lit up his face and made everyone fall in love with him, even sergeants soaked in vinegar who weren’t that fond of their own mothers. I whooped until my guts hurt and after that he was the best friend I had in the war.

Just like that?

Okay, it took a little longer. We got to talking in Casablanca and on the jeeps that took us to the Kasserine fighting. He was an Indiana farm boy, just like I was. He’d been born in a place called Smallville, just outside of Muncie—named after a Hiram Small, he said, the first settler in that neck of the woods. He was a fair bit younger than I was, but he was old-fashioned. His parents were near fifty when he was born, and he’d spent a good bit of time out on the farm with them growing up, so all he knew was real old-time Indiana, turn-of-the century stuff. His mother played Sousa marches on the piano. They never bought a radio. He told me once that the first movie he saw was when the Kents moved into town, 1928 or so. A Buster Keaton feature, I think he said. So we had a lot in common—two Hoosier codgers all befuddled at the modern world, except he was twenty-five, twenty-six, about that. It was easy talking with him. And he’d grown up reading my columns and had a good opinion of the way I wrote. I didn’t mind spending time with a young man who thought that way, and I guess he liked me well enough in person that he stuck around. We bummed around North Africa, Italy, and France together. And the Pacific, of course.

How did he write his stories?

This isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but it was amazing just watching him write. He used an old longhand, the way they wrote before the typewriter. Long, curved letters, but very easy to read. He wrote as many drafts as he could before he hit his deadline and then he’d sit down at his Corona and bang something out. He was a big guy and he’d hunch over the keys and press them with this odd delicacy—except when he was on a deadline, and then he’d bang out at a hundred words a minute. Then he’d hit the keys so hard that the Corona broke, at least once a week. He was used to fixing it. He carried a bag of spare parts with him.

But you want to know how he got the heart into his stories. Damn, he had heart. He deserved the Pulitzer in forty-four, not me. I won’t be modest—I did some damn good writing that year. But his was better. You remember that interview with the artillery captain? The one who shot up our own boys in the Normandy bocage? “Our guns are so strong and you think you can do anything. But you don’t always do the right thing. I made a mistake.” Don’t know how he got that one past the censors, but I was in tears when I finished it. Honest to God.

We were in a hotel room in Rome and he left some papers on the table when he went out. I looked at them. Rough drafts. Damnedest thing. The first draft was—cold. Distant. Like some damn alien was writing about human beings, like a scientist was writing up a bug war. And the second draft was more human, the third draft even more, and by the time he finished it was a Kent story, a tear-jerker. But it wasn’t natural. He had to think his way into it. But he did such a bang-up job, you’d never know how the story started, if you hadn’t seen the drafts.

Everybody talks about what a nice guy he was.

Yeah. He was. But—you ever read about Abe Lincoln when he was young? He could talk with anybody, crack jokes you don’t tell in front of ladies, but just because he could have a good time with some dirty-minded tavern rats didn’t make him one. Kent was like that. His dad was a preacher, you know, some sort of Baptist, and that stuck to him. He wasn’t a wet blanket, but he wasn’t all there if you got vulgar. And he went to church services every Sunday. He didn’t have a Bible in his pocket, but that was because he had it memorized.

He was a nice guy, but he liked some stone-cold guys that gave me the creeps. He was friends with a batshit crazy guy in the OSS named Wayne who I think had a dozen Nazi scalps by the end of the war. Literally—I saw them in his tent once, blond hair and skin and blood. But Kent was friends with him. Yeah, and he liked Wayne’s pilot, a lady, this stunner named Prince that Wayne had plucked out of the WASPs to fly him into Berchtesgaden to put poison in Hitler’s toothpaste or whatever he was doing. She was crazy too—broke the arm of some guy who tried to get too friendly with her. But Kent liked them and they liked him and when they ran into each other they’d go out on the town together. There was something cold and crazy in him too, or he’d never have gotten on with those two.

I’ve never heard anything about Kent’s love-life. Did he date this Prince?

Could be. They liked each other. I never saw anything like that. Never saw him like that with anybody. I wondered for a bit if maybe he was a fairy, but he just never seemed interested in sex. I once said something about it, and he said—what was it? “Ernie, I just haven’t met anyone who gives me that itch. My bad luck. She must be a million miles away.” But still waters run deep and all that. Who knows?

L. Clark Kent?

You found that out? (Laughs.) Yeah, that was on his by-line when he was first writing for the Indianapolis Star. I think you also see the L in the first few stories at the Chicago Tribune. I saw some of his old clippings and I asked him, but he wouldn’t say. Only time I ever saw him embarrassed. “It’s my dad’s dad’s name,” he said. “Clark was Mother’s last name. I always liked it better.” But I saw a letter from his parents once. I’ve never told a soul this, but I’ll tell you now. Lyman.

Lyman Clark Kent?

Yup. I’d go with Clark too.

I think my favorite column of his is the one he wrote after they died.

That hit him hard. We were in Hawaii by then, headed west. Yeah, that was another beautiful story. The only one he ever wrote about himself. It wasn’t just him, though. There’s all this killing going on overseas, but people still get old and die back home. And then you get the Dear John letter, but it’s Dear John, dad is dead, grandma’s dead, sorry you couldn’t be at the funeral. And he got two of those letters in six months. He wasn’t the sort to cry on your shoulder, but he went to the padres a lot after he found out his mother had died too. I think he’d sort of expected his dad might pass, because he’d had a weak heart for a while, but his mother getting that stroke was a shock. So he kept it in, but he put all the feeling into that story. I wish I could have written about my parents that way. Hell, we all wish we could.

”They had hearts as big as the country.”

Yeah. Yeah, that. Beautiful. Though, you know, that story wasn’t the whole story.

Oh?

Hoo-boy, no. Look—no, let me tell it to you the way he told it to me. After his parents died, Indiana boy to Indiana boy.

Jonathan was a farmer, a Baptist minister, and published some farmer’s newspaper—until he lost the farm in 1928, and then he was just a minister and a publisher. Kent got his start in the business working for his father, learned the trade from him. And his dad had opinions—all the stuff you’d expect from an Indiana boy born in 1866. Hated railroad companies, hated big business, hated saloons, was for votes for women, white women anyway, didn’t like Catholics, Jews, any sort of immigrants. Not fond of colored men either, although it was Martha who had a real hate for them—she was from the southern part of the state, she had brothers and sisters down in Kentucky and Tennessee, and her whole family never had been too keen on coloreds. Neither of them were closed-mouthed folks, and Kent grew up hearing all that. In his father’s Sunday sermons too. Kent wasn’t like that himself anymore, but, you know, when we were alone, when he wasn’t thinking, the words he used were mick, sheeny, nig. Not even to be insulting, just what came to mind. I think he never took a job in New York because he wasn’t that comfortable around Jews—he was polite, but he was always a little stiff around them. A lot of that was Jonathan. You know, he loved this country, but the country he loved was Jonathan’s America.

And Martha was a bit of a terror. Her dad had been a sheriff who got shot by some bank robber, back about 1880. She was just a child and it made her a little off. She was all for the law and she hated criminals, but she liked vigilante work too. The bank robber was the black-sheep brother of some Pennsylvania millionaire with a coal mine, and the brother put enough green-backs into the jurymen’s pockets that they found him innocent. But then a whole passel of Clarks and their friends caught hold of him outside the court house when he was let free, and they hung him from the nearest lamp post. Martha was there, and she saw it, and it was the happiest day of her life. And she told Kent that, no end of times, as they were growing up.

She was pretty stern about chores, and that sank in too. Kent never slacked. In that apartment of ours in Rome, he dusted the damn furniture every morning. She even taught him to sew—that’s a bit odd in an Indiana boy. But I remember him darning his socks every week, and once when he ripped his shirt and trousers out toward Monte Cassino, he bought some cloth from a local tailor and made himself a whole new costume, just like that. Handy fella. I once asked him if he could do my socks too, though, and he just laughed.

But she really loved Kent. I remember he told me, “I was really wild when I was young, didn’t know my own strength. It got so bad they kept me home from school, because they were afraid I’d hurt the other kids. Ma educated me. And once I got so mad when she corrected my grammar, I hit her, and I broke her arm. And she—well, she gave me a tongue-lashing. But I was so afraid she’d toss me out the door and say ‘Never come back. You ain’t ours anymore.’ She didn’t. End of the day, after she’d been to the doctor’s and back, she sat down by me, and said, ‘You’re a good boy, Clark. But you’ve got to be good all the time. No more of that nonsense.’ And then she was crying and kissing me. ‘I love you, boy, I do. Don’t you worry, son. I love you.’”

Anyway. So the Kents were naturals for the Ku Klux Klan when that spread into Indiana in the 1920s. Jonathan was a bit old for that stuff himself, he never became a member, but he supported them in his newspaper. Martha loved them—fearless vigilantes, yeah? And Kent was just a boy, he loved the dress-up, the disguises, and all for America and law-and-order. He was a real fan.

But about 1924, Kent was just eight, there was a fire in town, in the boarding-house where the road-gangs slept. Mostly Irish and Italian and Polish. The local Klan had been saying as how they should leave town, and Jonathan had been running editorials too, and preaching in church, and it was like an act of God that the boarding-house came down. Two of the Poles died. And Jonathan was a shook man. He was a volunteer in the fire department and he saw the charred bodies. Kent said to him, “I thought you’d be happy.” And Jonathan slapped Kent on the cheek, hard. Then he said, “I thought I’d be happy too. But I’m not.” And he started preaching against the Klan, and writing against them, even before they collapsed when the scandal hit them the next year. It took some courage for Jonathan to do that, when most of the folks in town were still for the Klan. He stayed up with a shotgun some nights, after he wrote some particularly sharp editorial, to keep his printing press safe. Kent stayed up with him.

Martha supported her husband, of course, but she was always for the Klan. Never changed her mind. She was glad about the fire, and just wished more foreigners had burned.

None of that got into the column Kent wrote when his parents died.

So what were Kent’s politics?

Republican. But that came with being a Kent. The Clarks were Copperhead Democrats, back in the day, and Kent didn’t hate Democrats, the way some Republicans do. And the Depression rattled even die-hard Republicans. His dad had lost the farm, and the Republicans didn’t have much comfort for farmers then. Kent got his politics from his dad, during the 1930s, when his dad was looking for new politicians he could support. Jonathan never was as wild as Henry Wallace, but he said good things about syndicalism, Huey Long, all sorts of things. When Jonathan settled down, he was still a Republican, but the sort of Republican who liked Landon and Willkie because they were for a good part of the New Deal. So that was Kent.

And isolationist. He’d never wanted America to go to war. Once we were attacked by the Japs, OK, but not until then. I argued with him about it. “Yeah, we’re really strong,” he said. “And we’re sure we’re right and we’re good people, and Hitler and Tojo really deserve killing. But sometimes you’re wrong when you think that. And there’s nothing more dangerous than a strong guy who’s sure he’s right.” He never regretted being against intervention.

Wonder what he’d have thought about the Cold War.

Guess we’ll never know.

Saved your life.

Yup. In a ditch together in Ie Shima, I’m about to take a look up, and he says, “No, let me.” I started to get up anyway—don’t know why, just stupidity—and he pulled me down. Fingers like steel claws. I tumble down to the bottom of the ditch and he looks out instead. Then the Jap machine gunner starts firing to blazes and it jerks him so hard he almost flies out of the ditch. When they found his body, the face had been shot right off. Unknown Soldier material, but his clothes. I identified him. God, it would have been me if he hadn’t grabbed my shoulder. I still have nightmares.

And Superman came to the funeral.

Yeah. They must have been friends after all. I thought they might be. Kent was always sort of shy about talking about Superman, and I think it was because he was embarrassed that he’d gotten his start in the big leagues writing all those Superman stories, and he’d taken advantage over the competition somehow. He stopped doing Superman stories after, what, 1938 I think. And the rest of his career was Kent, pure Kent. Maybe he did get a leg up, but we all do, some way or another. But here it is seven years later and Supes showed up at the funeral. Helluva thing—man in red and blue just flies down to a graveyard in Ie Shima. Didn’t say anything. Waited for the preacher to finish and then flew off. Never seen him again. Yeah, they must have been friends.

Some people say they were the same person.

Some people say the mob killed Kennedy. I don’t know. Superman does that thing, you know, so you can’t see his face properly, can’t take a picture of him. Vibrates or something. I never heard him speak—has anyone? He was about Kent’s size. Could be. Could be. I don’t know. Don’t care, really. The man I knew was Clark Kent and he was a great guy. I don’t care if Clark Kent is really Superman; I want to know if Superman is really Clark Kent. If he is, I hope he’ll come over some day and have a drink with me before I die. I’ll take rum and he can have sarsaparilla. And I’ll say thank you to him, for the last forty years.

Studs Terkel, ”The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two (1984), pp. 556-62.