Owen V. Johnson, associate professor emeritus at Indiana University and longtime member of the History Division, died on August 6, 2022 at the age of 76. He was an expert on World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, as well as Russian and East European mass media and Czech and Slovak history.

In 2020, he joined the Journalism History podcast to talk about his edited collection of Pyle’s columns, At Home With Ernie Pyle.

Johnson’s friend and former colleague, professor emeritus Steven Raymer of the Indiana University Media School, delivered the eulogy at Johnson’s funeral. Here is an excerpt.

“With his intellect and humanity, Owen made the bedrock values of journalism — independence, truthfulness, accuracy, fairness to the facts, holding the powerful accountable, and building an informed citizenry — come to life in his classes, his scholarly writing, and his own journalism and broadcasting.  And I might add, these same ideals were often the topic of our frequent conversations in the corridors of Ernie Pyle Hall — Owen with his coffee cup and impish smile often one step ahead of me in discussing the day’s news.  I am still wresting with what Owen might have said at lunch today on the one-year anniversary of the Fall of Kabul, the Afghan capital.  Surely he would have an opinion on America’s longest war, just as surely as he knew the menus from memory at our favorite pubs.

[…]

A look at his office in Ernie Pyle Hall astonished visitors.  Professor Emeritus David Nord recalls — and these are his words — that “Owen was an academic packrat (the genteel term is archivist), whose office was always full to the ceiling with books, journals, offprints, and newspapers. Our offices opened onto an interior corridor where Owen met students for office hours. His office was too crowded to accommodate two human beings.”

Nord continues.  “Owen focused on the history of the press in Eastern Europe, and in later years he took up an interest in Ernie Pyle ….Owen’s ostensible goal was to publish an edition of Ernie Pyle’s letters.  This was a task perfectly suited to Owen’s personality because many of Ernie’s letters had never before been discovered and collected ….. He was endlessly following labyrinthian leads by phone and email, tracking down letters, and then telling me what he had found.  Soon he wasn’t satisfied with just the letters.  He decided to track down in bound volumes and microfilms of newspapers of all of Ernie’s columns that had never before been collected …. I can’t remember what all he came across, but I remember one day he was on the telephone and I overheard him say, ‘Are you sure it was Ernie’s sofa?’ A sofa? This time he really might appropriate my next door office!” 

[…]

Owen’s most beloved Ernie Pyle column was written in the rugged mountains of Italy in (1944) nineteen forty-four.  It was called “The Death of Captain Waskow” and it captured the human cost of war.  The captain, a Texan and company commander in the Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division, was much beloved by his men. 

Pyle begins.  “He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.  ‘After my own father, he came next,’ a sergeant told me.” 

In the half-light of the moon, Army mule-skinners brought bodies down a steep mountain trail one night.  One of them was Captain Waskow’s.  One by one the soldiers paid their respects to the captain. 

Pyle continues:  “ …. a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:  ‘I sure am sorry, sir.’  Then the first man squatted 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.”

Fortunately, we are not alone today. 

An old war horse of a correspondent, Mort Rosenblum of the Associated Press, wrote this weekend from his retirement home in the south of France.  And I’ll simply leave you with Mort’s profound, simple thought: 

“Age is luck of the draw,” writes Mort.  “At some point, it gets us all.  But until it does, we can learn an awful lot from what lives well-lived can teach us.”

Thank you, Owen.