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“Whereabouts in Wheeling, West Virginia?” he’d ask.

Ernie started covering the war in North Africa, and even though he didn’t deal in The Big Picture, he knew North Africa was only the beginning.

“This is our war,” he wrote, “and we will carry it with us as we go from one battleground to another until it is all over, leaving some of us behind on every beach, in every field. We are just beginning with the ones who lie back of us here in Tunisia. I don’t know whether it was their good fortune or their misfortune to get out of it so early in the game. I guess it doesn’t make any difference once a man is gone. Medals and speeches and victories are nothing anymore. They died and the others lived and no one knows why it is so. When we leave here for the next shore, there is nothing we can do for the ones underneath the wooden crosses here, except perhaps pause and murmur, ‘Thanks, pal.’”

Ernie Pyle gave war correspondents a reputation not all of them deserved. All that those of us who shared that reputation can do for Ernie now is to say, “Thanks, pal.”

Frank Sinatra, Boy and Man

There was a small Italian bakery on Mott Street in New York City called Parisi’s. Joe Parisi made his bread in two ovens on the back wall of his basement and I liked it so much that I’d often drive downtown to buy three or four loaves even though it meant an extra half hour getting home. I didn’t know whether anyone else liked Joe Parisi’s bread or not but I found out in a most interesting way.

Frank Sinatra, Boy and Man 221

Twenty-five years ago, I flew to Palm Springs with Walter Cronkite and Don Hewitt, the producer, to write an hour special about Frank Sinatra on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. I got thinking about the experience on his seventy-fifth.

We made a mess of Frank’s house by rearranging the furniture and laying wires for lights all over the place, but he opened the house to us and was a gracious host.

The second day we were there he invited several of us to sit down and have lunch with him. The meal was prepared by an employee of Frank’s who seemed to do everything for him—keep the house, take care of his clothes, and cook his meals.

We were having a good time talking and Frank passed a basket of crusty bread my way. I took a piece, looked at it suspiciously, took a bite and sat back, astonished.

“You okay?” he said.

“Where did you get this?” I asked. “I know this. This is Joe Parisi bread. He makes it in his basement on Mott Street two thousand miles from here.”

“We have it flown in every week,” Frank said. “Great bread.”

I’ve been soft on Frank ever since that day I discovered he had such good taste in bread. Now, twenty-five years later, there’s no one I like to hear sing a song as much as I like to hear Sinatra.

When I was young, I was cool toward him and his music and much put off by the crowds of young girls who made fools of themselves in his audience. To me, Sinatra was an awkward, gawky-looking jerk without much of a voice and no charm at all. Those fans my age were indistinguishable from the young people who, generations later, fawned over Elvis Presley.

Sinatra has made about thirty-five movies and even won an Oscar for his performance in From Here to Eternity, but everything he does besides singing is a sideline. He’s great to see in person but it isn’t necessary and that accounts for the phenomenal success of his records.

We went to a recording session of his while we were doing that show and I was surprised at how serious a musician he is. During the session, Sinatra got dickering with the orchestra leader about whether the note should be an F-sharp or an F-natural. I had always assumed the words just fell from his mouth in a random assortment of notes.

It’s not just his voice or his knowledge of music that makes Sinatra sound so good, either. People who understand music hear sounds from Sinatra that no one else makes. And it all happened to him, you know it did, as he sings.

It’s apparent to anyone listening to Sinatra that he enjoys his work.