Those books are now on my shelves. My father willed that part of his library to me, along with his clothes (same size), a little money, and his curiosity, a trait that couldn’t be quashed by Depression, war, or depression (small d).

I thought about this as my wife Chris, daughter Annie, and I explored the Ernie Pyle Memorial Library in Albuquerque on March 31. I chanced upon it the night before as I examined the city map while waiting in line at Applebee’s behind gangs of uniformed girls from Farmington and Soccoro in town for the state cheerleading tournament. The map showed the library in a neighborhood near the hotel, so close that I couldn’t ignore it. Later, in the hotel room, I looked up the library in the city’s tourism guide. Ernie’s library was an official branch of the county system but its hours were limited. I was disappointed to see it was closed on Saturday. But we decided to check it out anyway before we resumed our road trip to Tucson.

When we arrived at the library about 9:30, I was elated to find it opened at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Chris and I wandered the yard, taking photos like the tourists we were. Annie, anxious to get on the road to Tucson, glowered at us from the car’s back seat. We paused in the garden to read the excerpt from Ernie’s writing etched into a sculpture. I remembered the scene from "Brave Men," one of the first books I ever read. He filed his dispatch, "The Death of Captain Waskow," from Italy in January 1944. Captain Henry T. Waskow’s body was brought down an Italian mountainside by mule. His body was laid out on the ground with other dead G.I.s. One by one, his men come to pay their respects to the company commander. The writing is beautiful in its simplicity.

"Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

"And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone."

As a one-time reporter and columnist, I know how tough it is to write with directness and simplicity. I would guess it is doubly difficult to write that way on a portable typewriter in a war zone. Ernie’s dispatches earned him the 1944 Pulitzer Prize.

Ernie’s solid, tidy house was built in 1940. As I looked around the neighborhood, I noticed similar houses, all occupied and well-cared-for. They once were home to the young families that arose from the World War II generation that included my parents and my wife’s parents. Albuquerque boomed during those years, as did Denver where I grew up. Guys came from Indiana and Georgia to train in the Rocky Mountain region – and returned here to live after the war. They were G.I. Bill students at University of New Mexico, just a short walk from here. That generation has moved out and died off, replaced by their grown children and grandchildren.

Ernie and his wife Jerry moved into the house in 1940. Ernie was often away, traveling the world as a roving correspondent for Scripps-Howard newspapers. His trips really picked up after Pearl Harbor. He covered campaigns in North Africa, Italy, and France. In early 1945, he departed for the Pacific Theater which, at that time, seemed to have no end. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet on April 18, 1945 on Ie Shima, a neighboring island to Iwo Jima. A column written for the upcoming V-E Day was found in his pocket.

That column, heavy with editing marks, is on display inside the library. There’s also a letter from Eleanor Roosevelt and one from Dwight D. Eisenhower, wishing Ernie well as he departs for the Pacific. The walls feature photos of Ernie with dogfaces and at least one general – George S. Patton. A glass display case holds his portable typewriter, Coleman stove, and goggles from the desert campaign. Copies of his books – and those about him – line the shelves below.

I picked up a copy of "Brave Men," a collection of his war columns and probably his best-known book. My father had this book in his library. I read it when I was in the fourth grade. As were most boys of our generation, I was fascinated by my father’s war. We didn’t hear many stories first-hand. During family gatherings, we eavesdropped on the conversations of our fathers, hoping to capture some of their glory. But usually the conversations were filled with oblique references and strange acronyms and names of dead strangers. We knew that the stories got more interesting as the men drank more beer. But that’s when they told us to get lost.

So we turned to books and movies to fill in the blanks. The books held the best stuff. I read Bill Mauldin and enjoyed his irreverent Willie and Joe cartoons. I read Ernie Pyle’s "Brave Men" and "Here is Your War." I read "Guadalcanal Diary" by Richard Tregaskis. Now here were stories of death and heroism. Pyle’s stories were of simple men from all over the U.S. doing some extraordinary things. Ernie always included the hometowns of his subjects. He grew up on an Indiana tenant farm, and seemed to search out those G.I.s from small towns and rural places. He knew that the stories were in the field and not back at headquarters with the brass. He experienced scores of battles. It is sad but fitting that he was doing his job when he was killed in action.

Ernie and Jerry had no children. She died seven months after her husband was killed. It might be tempting to say that Jerry, whom Ernie called "That Girl" in his columns, died of a broken heart. But she was a serious alcoholic and drug abuser who suffered from a mental illness. Her habits only grew worse in Ernie’s absence.

They bequeathed the house to the city of Albuquerque and it became its first branch library in 1948. It’s a small place but the library’s creative staff uses every bit of space. The check-out desk is in the kitchen and the bathroom is the magazine reading room. On the rack above the toilet is the recent issue of Newsweek that ponders the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war. I wonder what Ernie would make of that debacle? Would he tolerate the era of embedded reporters? It’s certainly difficult to imagine him lounging in the Green Zone while G.I.s from Belton, Texas, and Dana, Indiana, conducted house-to-house searches in Baquba and negotiated Baghdad’s I.E.D.-strewn suburban streets. He would want to be where the action was.

Chris and I talked to the librarian, who showed us the letters to Ernie displayed under a glass tabletop. To read them, he had to move aside the guest register and a rack of new releases. He apologized, noting the library’s cramped quarters. I know museum people and archivists who would be aghast at the lack of display room. But it fits Ernie and his legacy. Much better, I think, to have to move a few books to view a letter from the wife of the president and the Supreme Commander of U.S. Forces. Makes them more human, I think.

The librarian told us about the upcoming Dia de los Ninos Garden Celebration at the library April 21. It will include music, puppet theatre, refreshments, and the planting of a "victory garden" in the yard. The garden is a way to instruct kids about events on the homefront during World War II. "Most of them don't know what a victory garden is," he said.

Many people planted wartime victory gardens for the very practical reason of supplementing their diets during a time of food rationing. It also put their patriotism on display.

Annie finally grew tired of the car and came inside. When I saw her, she was reading Ernie’s final column, the one found on his body at Ie Shima. She’s a writer and she often asks me to edit her work, so the marks on Ernie’s dispatch look familiar. She said she came in to use the bathroom and asks when the heck we’re getting on the road to Tucson so she can see her brother and go swimming in the hotel pool. I realized that my morning sojourn as a literary tourist has come to an end.

My last act was signing the register. I signed our three names, but made this notation in the comments section: "My father, Corporal Thomas R. Shay, U.S. Army Signals Corps, 1942-46, would have loved this place." My father, the accountant, loved books and libraries. He invited us to read any book in his collection and signed us up for library cards before we could read.

Then I realized that my father could have visited this library. After graduating college in 1949 on the G.I. Bill, he took a job with Armour & Company in Albuquerque. He and my mother were married in their hometown of Denver in February 1950 and lived in Albuquerque through August 1950. My mother was pregnant when they returned to Denver. Her story was that I was conceived on a spring night after partying in Old Town. It’s a good story so I’ve kept it, never caring whether it was true or not. It provides a link to Albuquerque I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Anyway, my father was a quiet type and he preferred reading to almost anything else. He would have been lonely in Albuquerque. I could see him visiting Ernie’s library in 1949 and checking out some books. Maybe he explored the memorabilia and read the same letters we did. If so, he never mentioned it – and it’s too late to ask him now.

For more about Ernie Pyle:

The Ernie Pyle Library is located at 900 Girard Blvd. SE. FMI: 505-256-2065.

Ernie and Jerry Pyle in front of their Albuquerque house