Indiana U plans statue of WWII journalist Ernie Pyle

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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) — Indiana University officials are
planning to honor celebrated World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle with a
statue on the Bloomington campus.
The life-size bronze statue
will be modeled after a wartime photograph of Pyle, an IU student in the
1920s, sitting on a crate, working with his typewriter on a table, with
goggles pushed above his knit cap, Provost Lauren Robel told the
school’s Board of Trustees during a meeting Thursday.
The statue
will be placed outside Franklin Hall, where IU’s journalism program will
be relocating as part of a new media school, The Herald-Times reported (http://bit.ly/1eVQKqr ).
Pyle’s
statue will be the third on the Bloomington campus. The others honor
Herman B Wells, who was the university’s president from 1938-1962, and
composer Hoagy Carmichael, a Bloomington native and IU graduate.
Robel
said the crate next to the Pyle statue will be large enough that
visitors will be able to sit with Pyle as they can on a bench next to
the Wells statue.
The Pyle statue should be completed in advance of Franklin Hall’s dedication in 2015, she said.
Pyle
grew up on a farm near the western Indiana town of Dana and attended
IU, but left before graduating to embark on his journalism career.
He
was a household name during World War II for his dispatches about
individual soldiers, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944. He was killed
by a Japanese machine gunner on a Pacific island in April 1945.
The
merger of IU’s School of Journalism, now housed in Ernie Pyle Hall,
into the new Media School has faced controversy, and a legacy committee
recommended the statue as a way to honor Pyle.
The statue will be sculpted by artist Tuck Langland, a retired IU-South Bend campus professor who made
the Wells statue.
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Information from: The Herald Times, http://www.heraldtimesonline.com
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.

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