In late 1934 or early 1935, celebrated columnist and war correspondent Ernie Pyle visited Marfa and was intrigued by a young couple, Charles and Ruth Moore, who had recently bought Big Bend Sentinel and were bootstrapping to keep the paper running. Pyle was impressed by their determination, and after another visit to Marfa a year and a half later, he wrote about the experience.
Mike Brainard, a member of the Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation, sent Big Bend Sentinel the column and allowed it to be published early. (It will be posted on the foundation’s The Complete Works of Ernie Pyle Substack website on December 28, but Brainard allowed for a first look here.)
As Brainard noted: “I am posting one Pyle column a day from his 1935-1945 output with the Scripps Howard chain. He wrote six days a week, 1,200 to 1,600 words per column. He was prolific.”
While Pyle reported from WW II battlefields in Europe, Africa and Japan, he spent much of his prior life in New Mexico and Mexico. You can learn more about Ernie Pyle at erniepylefoundation.org and follow the published columns here: michaelbrainard.substack.com.
The column (unedited) from the June 1, 1936, Washington Daily News:
City-Room Pipe Dream Comes True for Young Man and Wife
By Ernie Pyle
MARFA, Tex.–One Sunday night, a year and a half ago, I was walking down the street in this southwest Texas cattle town and I saw the words “Big Bend Sentinel” on a window.
So I went in and introduced myself to a young fellow, and it turned out he had just bought the paper, and he and his wife were trying to put it on its feet.
They were in their middle 20s, I’d say, and very enthusiastic, altho, perhaps, a little frightened. Their names were Charles and Ruth Moore, and we sat and talked all that evening. As Moore said:
“The depression hit me pretty hard before I got out of the University of Missouri, only I didn’t know it.
“I had a sheepskin from journalism school, and a little newspaper experience, including a short stay as copy boy on the old New York World. I didn’t think the newspaper business could get along without me. Well, it did.
“Finally I got a job with an oil company in the Texas Panhandle. I figured then that this depression was just a story. So I sent for the girl, and got married. It’s a good thing I did, for her teaching job kept us in groceries after I got fired.
“Then we had a windfall. Some friends gave us railroad tickets to New York. We landed there with $50. I worked for the City of New York for a year, then came a chance for a good job in the east Texas oil fields. We were there two years. Then I heard this weekly could be bought. We bought it.
“Marfa is a town of 4000. It’s pretty here. On a tableland a mile high, mountains all around, Mexico just two hours to the south. This is Hereford cattle country. But three years of drought have put Marfa flat on its back. I don’t know how we’ll come out.
“Any one of three things would fix us–rain, the reopening of Ft. Russell by the Army, or a hit by some of these oil wildcatters.
That was a year and a half ago. Since then I have often wondered how Charles and Ruth Moore were getting along. I was especially interested because now about 90 per cent of the newspaper men I have ever known profess an ambition to acquire a country weekly some far day in the hazy future, settle down and be their own boss.
So when I landed in Marfa this time I made a beeline for the Big Bend Sentinel office to see how things were doing. Things are doing all right. Charles Moore says:
“The paper was bankrupt when we came. My experience in job printing, which is essential to any country weekly, was zero. I had always looked at advertising work as a necessary evil for somebody else to perform. I was a news man.
“But I learned things. I learned about advertising. I learned about expenses. It cost me $600 for the privilege of issuing The Big Bend Sentinel our first year.
“And then it rained. It pushed the gramma grass knee high over the highlands. Cattle tanks filled up. The Herefords filled out again.
“There are silver mines near here, and the Government’s monetary policy pushed the silver market to the highest peak in years.
“And then last summer Ft. D. A. Russell was regarrisoned. It brought back the color of military life, a good pay roll, and joy to the hearts of Marfa business men. We began to sell some advertising and to print letterheads in our job shop.
“Then we managed to scrape up enough cash to buy our competing newspaper and to merge with our competitor in job printing. That gave us an exclusive newspaper and job shop in Presidio County. This has been our best move. We’ll make a profit this year.
“Meeting a pay roll every week I’ve found to be a greater responsibility than being on a pay roll every week. There have been times when I paid the men but not myself. We have joyously accepted eggs for subscription payments. Let’s hope those days are gone forever.
“We have both worked day and night. Ruth handles society and a lot of straight news, as well as features and sketches. And whenever selling advertising and job printing leaves me no times for the news, she steps in and covers. She also makes pin money by corresponding for city papers and wire services.
“We have managed to buy a home even tho it isn’t paid for. Our latest achievement is a bunch of baby chicks–our first venture in farming.
“We have managed to take a fair and impartial view of the little fights and petty quarrels that happen in all towns, but which come closer to the country editor. We have made friends with the town.
“There isn’t the money in publishing a country weekly that there is in other lines of business, and we are a long way from what we used to consider the center of things, but we have a great many things that more than compensate.
“We have found that the soil and printer’s ink look better on our hands than anything else we know of.”
