War Scribe: First Reports Out: Europe Post V-E Day

By Xlibris US

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781469106724

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Copyright © 2011 by M.A. Lyons and Franklyn Grace Lyons.

Edited by M.A. Lyons, Ph.D. and Franklyn Grace Lyons

Selected articles are republished with permission courtesy of The Boston Globe.

Back Cover: Louis M. Lyons, Reading, Massachusetts

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

EDITOR’S PREFACE

WITH CONSCIENCE

AND INTEGRITY

LOUIS M. LYONS

Volume III

INTRODUCTION

FORWARD

REMEMBERING WORLD WAR II

BY JOHN W. LYONS

DATELINES

ONE

Paris, Untouched, Shows Why Ancient Cities Were Strongholds

TWO

Dinner is 40 Cents at Army Hotel and $40 in Paris Restaurant

THREE

German School Children Put

to Work Two Hours a Day Cleaning Up Rubble

FOUR

Allies Doing Best

To Get 15 Million

Back to Homes

FIVE

It’s Grim for the Germans,

This End Of the War They

Began So Cockily

SIX

"Behind Ivied Walls,

They Lie in Alien Soil… "

SEVEN

8000 Germans a Day Come Home To Cologne, a

City Without Plumbing

EIGHT

Boy Meets Girl and

GI Wants To Know

Why of Nonfraternizing

NINE

First War Criminals

Stand Trial

TEN

Yanks Wildly Applaud

German Ballet Dancers

ELEVEN

Germans Trying to Throw Baseball Are as Awkward

As Girls Used to Be

TWELVE

"Worst Thing I Can Think of

Is an Idle, Hungry Man"

THIRTEEN

The Army Decides Not to

Run Kindergartens for

German Children

FOURTEEN

A Pilgrimage to Normandy Beaches, Washed Year Ago

With American Blood

FIFTEEN

Some GI’s Find Hot Water,

Good Beds in War Rubble

SIXTEEN

Things Getting Done With Civilian Regime Under

Sharp Eye of Army

SEVENTEEN

"The Germans in This City

Look Pretty Peaked to Me"

EIGHTEEN

That’s My Home Town

Waltham

NINETEEN

Former Mayor of Woburn

Now ‘Mayor’ of Solingen

TWENTY

Krupp Plant Could Get Going

Again Within Few Months

TWENTY ONE

Americans Convinced Dutch It was

OK for Girls to Go to Dances

TWENTY TWO

Dutch Would Like to

Get Their Postmen Back

TWENTY THREE

Crisis If Leopold Returns

TWENTY FOUR

Germans Told Garden More

Important Than Clothesline

TWENTY FIVE

Boston Captain Hears of Flyer

Son’s Death in Brussels Café

TWENTY SIX

Bewildered Polish Exiles

Fear Reds, Long for Homes

TWENTY SEVEN

How We Handled Millions

Of War Prisoners in Europe

TWENTY EIGHT

Justice, Order Brought

Back to German People

TWENTY NINE

Nazis Banned U.S. Pinup

Girls in Danish Papers

THIRTY

One Place Where Americans

Aren’t Being Kicked Around

THIRTY ONE

Mass Trial of War

Criminals May Open

Around Sept. 15

THIRTY TWO

City Engineer

Of Revere Sets

Cologne Running

THIRTY THREE

U.S. Food Shortages

Amaze Well-Fed Danes

THIRTY FOUR

Why English Girls

Like Yanks So Much

THIRTY FIVE

Yanks Greeted With Lurid

Yarns of Reds’ ‘Cruelty’

THIRTY SIX

Yanks, on Fourth,

Raise Flag Over

Hitler’s Barracks

THIRTY SEVEN

Yanks, Russians Both Give

Orders to Burgomasters

THIRTY EIGHT

Cigarettes Buy

Hitler’s Silver

In Berlin Hideout

THIRTY NINE

Zhukov Bans

Allied Rule in

Berlin Zones

FORTY

Confusion in Berlin

On Eve of Truman’s Visit

FORTY ONE

G. I.’s View Paris’

Great Paintings

FORTY TWO

Populace Stays Up All Night

In Land of Midnight Sun

FORTY THREE

Food for Germany

Biggest Headache

FORTY FOUR

Allies Seek Answer

To Use of German

Power, Facilities

FORTY FIVE

President Reviews Honor Guard:

Party Closely Guarded at Potsdam

FORTY SIX

Mattapan Mess Officer

Hunts Food for Big 3

FORTY SEVEN

Stalin Believed in Berlin

Truman Calls Ship Experts

FORTY EIGHT

Potatoes and Bread

Chief German Diet

FORTY NINE

40,000 Guerrillas

Supplied by Plane

FIFTY

No Food: Fish Sandwich

Tops Breakfast Menu

FIFTY ONE

N. E. Girls Operate

G. I. Club in Oslo

FIFTY TWO

Informer Betrays

Death Camp Chief

To Night Raiders

FIFTY THREE

Allied Troops

Will Occupy

Nip Mainland

FIFTY FOUR

Truman Takes Day Off

To Visit Yank Troops

FIFTY FIVE

All That Made Waltz City

Famous Is Destroyed

FIFTY SIX

How Hitler Tangled Up

Life of American Sergeant

FIFTY SEVEN

Lyons Views a Hospital

As an Eight-Day Patient

FIFTY EIGHT

90 P. C. of Europe’s Jews

Died Under Nazi Regime

FIFTY NINE

Liechtenstein Was Able

To Keep Its Neutrality

SIXTY

Hitler’s ‘Eagle Nest’ Was Like

Grand Central Atop Mountain

SIXTY ONE

Starvation Stalks

In All Occupied

Parts of Europe

SIXTY TWO

Double Rainbow Heralded

End of War in Austrian Alps

SIXTY THREE

City’s Fire Apparatus

Stolen by Nazis, Is Back

SIXTY FOUR

Covered Wagon Era Returns

As Millions Trek Homeward

SIXTY FIVE

Czechs Take Harsh

Revenge on

Sudetenland Germans

SIXTY SIX

France to Pay G.I.’s $17

Monthly Wage Bonus

SIXTY SEVEN

People Have No Time Sense,

Can’t Understand Our Hurry

SIXTY EIGHT

Growth of Communism

Traced to 3rd Army’s Halt

SIXTY NINE

Ancient Ways, Ancient Hates

Pace Life in Middle Europe

SEVENTY

Two Boston Industrialists

Survey Surplus U. S. Stocks

SEVENTY ONE

Across Central Europe

In a German Jallopy

SEVENTY TWO

Polish Officer Locates

Family After 6 Years

SEVENTY THREE

Across Central Europe

In a German Jallopy

SEVENTY FOUR

Across Central Europe

In a German Jallopy

SEVENTY FIVE

Adventure’s End

SEVENTY SIX

Bay State G. I.’s Study

French at Sorbonne

SEVENTY SEVEN

Gig’s Live in $21-a-Day Rooms

And Go to College at Biarritz

SEVENTY EIGHT

Night Train to Paris

SEVENTY NINE

82 Top Scoring N.E. Vets

Recent Return by Steerage

EIGHTY

Just Home, Lyons Says

Most Vets to Return

From Europe on Slow Ships

EIGHTY ONE

Bringing Them Home

Jerrybuilt Camp,

Airless Ship

Make G.I. Long for U.S. Soil

EIGHTY TWO

Bringing Them Home

G.I.’s at Sea Eat Well,

400 Pounds of Potatoes Daily

POST SCRIPTS

LETTER FROM PELELIU

OCTOBER 8, 1944

LETTER FROM PELELIU

MAY 14, 1945

MEMORIES OF MY BIG BROTHER, RICH

BY JOHN WINSHIP LYONS

IN MEMORIAM: RICHARD L. LYONS

BY THOMAS TOLMAN LYONS

DISPATCH FROM NORMANDY

Dateline June 6, 2011,

67th Anniversary of D-Day

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE EDITORS

M.A. Lyons, Ph.D.

Franklyn Grace Lyons

The Louis M. Lyons Foundation

Dedicated

to the

Preservation, Research and Education

of

Conscience and Integrity in Communications

WITH CONSCIENCE AND INTEGRITY

Volume I

The Ruralist

Columnist 1922-1924

Volume II

G’Nights

The Dialect of Home

Editorialist 1927-1931

Volume III

War Scribe

First Reports Out: Europe Post V-E Day

Foreign War Correspondent 1945

Volume IV

A Pause to Copy

Memoir of Louis M. Lyons

Journalist

Volume V

Pruitt-Igoe: The True Story of Bidwood #19

Louis Lyons’s self-proclaimed first and only lesson in journalism was delivered by the copy editor of the Boston Globe in 1919, Harry Poor, who told him not to write remarkable in a news story; remarkable was reserved for editorials. Poor told his cub reporter that the job of a news story writer was to make the reader say, Isn’t that remarkable.

—The Editors

EDITOR’S PREFACE

WITH CONSCIENCE

AND INTEGRITY

Louis M. Lyons was a twentieth century American print and broadcast journalist, son of Massachusetts, who was born in September of 1897 and who died in April of 1982. The body of work he left behind spans the spectrum of communications and events of that century. His legacy rests with those who see the world and comment with conscience and integrity. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University annually awards journalists whose exemplary work represents the best of communications with conscience and integrity. This award is named in honor of my grandfather, Louis M. Lyons.

America in the early 1960’s was difficult for this wordsmith. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was deeply felt by him. The moral compass of the country was disturbing to him, primarily the issues of race relations here at home and the bloodbath in Southeast Asia. Personally and professionally overwhelmed with the loss of hope, these national disgraces and the lack of inspirational leadership, he listened to the comforting advice of his friend, publisher Alfred P. Knopf. Knopf implored him to write his memoirs to gain perspective on where we’ve come as a country and to offer hope for where we are to collectively go forward together.

The typewriter on the desk in his den on the second floor of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Kenway Street became his retreat. He wrote there during the late winter of 1963 through the early spring of 1964. His style of writing was stream of conscious. His memoirs became a conversation from his heart, beaten out by hand on the keys of his weathered manual word machine. The chapters were not written in the chronological order of his life. They do, as was his intent, flow together effortlessly. Meant to be delivered as a rough draft copy to Knopf, they were left unpolished, the edges untouched by a copy editor. Months into this endeavor, the shock of Alfred Knopf’s untimely death resulted in the manuscript being boxed and shelved away in a third floor attic of his home. Without his friend’s presence eagerly awaiting the read and with the loss of his encouragement, the project ceased to exist. Decades later, shortly before his own death, the box was found. His perusal of the contents led him to compose his final thoughts.

The manuscript was pilfered by well-meaning friends after his death and pieces were re-produced out of context by many, including the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Nieman Foundation in their Nieman Reports. Indeed, the effort of his original manuscript renewed his own memory as a few years later he undertook the massive literary effort of writing a comprehensive history of The Boston Globe and writings for the Nieman Foundation. Themes found in his previous writings pre-1963 wind their way onto these pages. An overlap is obvious. He comments on this in his final thoughts written in 1981, wistfully remarking that he wished he had had the manuscript in hand when he subsequently wrote the books and other writings because it would have made the tasks so much easier.

After his death, the original manuscript was kept by his widow Totty at Kenway Street. After her death, it was lovingly hidden away in the sock drawer of his youngest son, Thomas Tolman Lyons, for many years and then transferred to his second son, my father, John Winship Lyons, where he kept it hidden in the back of his top desk drawer. Totty’s daughter, Sheila King, kept a full photo-copy of the manuscript along with the original final thoughts in a box deep in the back of the top shelf of her daughter’s closet.

In the spring of 2004 the family decided to allow the manuscript to be made public. By unanimous agreement, the children of Louis M. Lyons gave me, his granddaughter, the distinct privilege and honor of being his final editor.

I then began an exciting journey through the life and times of my grandfather. Transcribing the memoirs into a digital format became the thrust of my initial efforts. After purchasing a laptop computer, my daughter (his great granddaughter Margaret Jessee Lyons) and I spent a week in July on the Outer Banks of North Carolina beginning what would turn into an eight month task for me of digitally preserving the original manuscript in preparation for editing and publishing.

After having read through the manuscript several times, and in the midst of transcribing and editing them, by the fall of 2004 I decided I was ready for the road. I traveled from my farm in Maryland to Cambridge, Boston, Springfield, Reading, Norwell and Newburyport in Massachusetts to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Vermont and Washington, D.C. I retraced his steps, speaking to his children, his remaining colleagues and his contemporary professionals and walked the same streets and roads as he did while contemplating the same sunrises and sunsets of his life. During my travels, after a day or evening of being the recipient of first class meals, hospitality and warm talks of memories of my grandfather, I would retreat to a hotel room and continue the clacking input of his memoirs to digital disk, the next day finding me back on the road.

The text of the memoirs revealed tangents of writing that were not well known to his family nor to his colleagues. Hidden within the pages were slivers of revelations that sent me off in new directions. He mentioned that he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor a column called The Ruralist and His Problems which led me to the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston to talk with their curator and librarian archivist. Showing them the original manuscript and elements of his writing samples, they agreed that he could be the heretofore anonymous writer of these columns. In those days columnists’ writings were considered the property of the publisher and therefore writers were not given bylines. Fires had destroyed their business records from the early part of that century, and so they were unable to document his contributions to their organization.

The columns were written in the early 1920’s while he was living in Springfield, Massachusetts and writing for the Springfield Republican. His wife’s mother and her sisters Ruth and Ethel were practicing Christian Scientists, even though he and his wife were not. Through his earlier work as an agricultural reporter in Springfield and his then current position as a reporter, his knowledge of the western Massachusetts’ countryside, seasons, harvests and farmers’ issues was vast and deep. The archivist had me follow her to the microfiche files of the Christian Science Monitor, where we spent the afternoon searching out an example of these early columns, of which we found two. The writing was his. I was told that the archives of the paper had invested in ProQuest, a process of scanning the newspapers for digital preservation and then meticulously cataloguing the information. This service was not available for the public to peruse or research in their library. As a child of card catalogues and the stacks, having completed my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertations on typewriters with bottles of white out in the pre-computer age, I cringed at the thought of hours besides boxes of rolls of microfiche, trying to piece together these columns with a bucket of quarters in the middle of my local library. Back at the hotel I made a round of calls and found that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. had the ProQuest of the Christian Science Monitor all the way back to the beginning of the paper. This meant that the early 1920’s would be part of this file. They invited me to come and research my grandfather’s work using their resources. I drove straight down to D.C. from Boston through the night, afraid that the person that I had talked to that late afternoon would somehow change their mind by the next morning. It was worth the ride. I spent the next few days in fourteen hour stretches sequestered in a basement room with complete access to the archives. The museum was undergoing renovations at the time, and so for my inconvenience they gave me free prints of his columns and all the other coverage of his life covered over the years by the Christian Science Monitor. I left clutching all 128 columns of The Ruralist and His Problems and feeling profoundly the kindness of strangers.

Feeling a newfound confidence, I returned directly to Cambridge to the WGBH studios in search of anyone or anything reminiscent of my grandfather. He was one of the first radio news broadcasters and then one of the first television news anchors for the station. To my delight the head of WGBH took my call and enthusiastically recalled his memories of my grandfather. He invited me to the studio directly. I showed up promptly. I was met by the head of the preservation department. She was delightful and introduced me to a young man, Keith Luf, the Archives Manager, whose duties partially included cataloging on the computer the warehouse of radio and television tapes and to help select those worthy of digital preservation, an incredibly expensive process and therefore reserved for only a highly select few tapes. Keith immediately told me a story that happened to him many months before when he came upon film tapings of Edward R. Murrow being interviewed by Louis Lyons. He slipped the films to the union technicians in the building and asked them to transfer them to videotape, a process that also was expensive and done only after a highly selective process. He said he knew these tapes were exceptional, after all, Edward R. Murrow! He then began seeing Louis Lyons tapes everywhere and occasionally would slip one down the hall to his buddies in the tech shop to have them transferred to video format.

The computer screen in front of Keith was blazing with columns of dates and names and programs. He picked up a small cardboard box, opened it revealing an old wheeled tape from a radio program long ago. He explained that these tapes would deteriorate if played now, and therefore only one play through would be left and that play through would have to be done by a certified technician that would be preserving it to the next level of technology. After that play through, the tape was unusable. Many of the tapes disintegrate during the process. He rolled his chair across the room and dug out a handful of videos.

Offering to set me up down the hall with a video machine, Keith settled me in front of a screen, showed me how to manipulate the controls, switched off the lights and closed the door. I then watched hours of my grandfather interviewing Murrow, Navy Admirals, freedom rider photographers and others. My favorite was a Christmas program where he traded places with Julia Childs and they filmed in each other’s studios pretending to be the other. She could be seen developing strips of film with the conductor of the Boston Symphony and he making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in her apron at her kitchen counter with her fancy knives. A pre-broadcast taping of his anguish and anger at hearing of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was riveting. I wept. Seeing my grandfather alive again and hearing his voice after 22 years since his passing was unbelievably moving. I am glad I was alone.

I had to rewind the first tape three times because I found it hard to pay attention to the content of the interview. I was focused on his hands, his face, his voice, his eyebrows, his coat jacket, his tie, his collar; everything except the words exchanged between him and Murrow! While rewinding one of the tapes, I became bored and sketched the initials LML with the dates 1897-1982 on a piece paper and used a thumbtack to attach it to a blank bulletin board in the room. Hours later, Keith stuck his head into the room and asked me how I was doing. We chit chatted while I gathered up the tapes. He stood dumbfounded in the center of the room. I asked him if he was ill and he shook his head and pointed to my paper. What is that? Where did that come from? What does that mean? he gasped.

Apparently Keith did not know that LML were Louis Lyons’s initials. He hustled me out the room and down the hall and opened a door to a huge warehouse of tapes. He walked me along the floor to ceiling shelves saying over and over LML. LML. LML. LML… . They’re all LML! I had no idea. I thought the only Louis Lyons tapes were those marked ‘Louis Lyons.’ Oh… my… God! I smiled and nodded in pride. I returned to the station several times and had many wonderful conversations with the staff. They were busy telling me that they had received a grant to digitally preserve the Lyons-Murrow interviews. True to their word, a year later my Cambridge relatives, Sheila and Bill King, sent to the farm a tape of the PBS broadcast of these interviews that had aired in Boston on WGBH in 2006. This was a wonderful tribute for my grandfather and an exciting moment for our family. My experiences at WGBH were a preliminary surveying of the field of his broadcast artifacts. It is rich and idle. There is a paucity of funds for film preservation and the sheer volume presents a daunting task. The delicate procedure resulting in the disintegration of the original tapings is problematic and risky. I look forward to returning to the warehouse one day with a plan and funding.

In February of 2005 I had completed the data entry of the manuscript and was contemplating the publishing process. At this time my mother reminded me that my brother, Louis M. Lyons II, had been bequeathed the morgue books of my grandfather’s Boston Globe writings and the scrapbooks kept of many of his newspaper articles from the Springfield Republican. Lugging two huge suitcases up to the farm one morning, he unzipped a treasure trove of the original yellowing and brittle newspaper clippings and presented them to me in the middle of the living room floor. Weeks went by as my family patiently allowed me to sit on a stool in the middle this room and arrange and read and share all of the exciting articles. After having read the behind the scenes stories of these events in his memoirs, to actually see the final production and publishing of these events was intriguing. I was particularly astonished by a faded green fabric covered scrapbook containing many of his Globe articles covering his post World War II foreign correspondence.

In his memoirs, my grandfather only briefly mentioned this experience in Europe in 1945 and likewise he briefly mentioned his writings of an editorial column that he wrote concerning his home life in Reading, Massachusetts between 1927 and 1931. His children had mentioned these stories to me several times. I then started to reevaluate the project in front of me.

Around this time the Curator of the Nieman Foundation made a connection with the Dean of the School of Journalism at Northwestern University on my behalf. I was invited to send my edited version of the manuscript to them and they might then be interested in considering including it in their revitalization of journalism curricula for students and scholars in the field of communications. I was hesitant. I wasn’t ready. I was missing something. I agreed to send it along when it was ready. Little did I know at the time that more than two years would pass before I felt that I had properly designed the presentation of my grandfather’s work.

The memoirs and accumulating writings presented more than one book possibility. I was overwhelmed and out of money. I packed the laptop and the piles of papers and morgue books up, placed them under my bed and began teaching mathematics at a local public high school in the fall of 2005. I was haunted and weighted down by the lack of movement of what I began referring to as the LML Project.

The summer of 2006 found me on my hands and knees dragging all of the neglected works in progress out in front of me from their winter hibernation under my bed. With the encouragement of my three daughters, Jessee, Franklyn Grace Lyons and Annee Lyons, I renewed my attempts to bring my grandfather’s writings to the publication stage.

My first step was to formalize the business aspects of the project. I created a non-profit organization, The Louis M. Lyons Foundation, and dedicated its purpose to the preservation, research and education of conscience and integrity in communications.

Around this time, Shirley Elder, the wife of my grandfather’s eldest son Richard Louis Lyons, sent to the farm a green folder with a few mimeographed editorial stories that had been mentioned by many in the past. With no dates and a guess by his daughter, Margaret Ford Lyons, that they may have been published in the Springfield Republican and a cover page typed by Richard remembering some of his childhood neighbor friends forever preserved in these stories of almost eighty years before, I was hooked. I needed to find out where and when they were written. They all possessed LML’s byline.

My daughters Frankee and Annee then spent a summer week of twelve hour days with me in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress. We began by subtracting 75 years from the current date to determine when my uncle was five years old. Then we, gulp, scrolled through each and every AM and PM section of each and every day of every Massachusetts publication from 1925 onward on microfiche; an awesome task. We discovered they were originally published in The Boston Daily Globe. We then found and dated all of the columns in the green folder and discovered quickly that there were more and more and more of them. We finished with 77 editorials in all.

Back on the farm the pile of the LML Project had now grown. I made a decision to produce an LML Collection beginning with his writings in chronological order: Volume I, The Ruralist, his columns from 1922-1924; Volume II, G’Nights: The Dialect of Home, his editorials from 1927-1931; Volume III, War Scribe: First Reports Out: Europe Post V-E Day, his articles from 1945; and Volume IV, A Pause to Copy: Memoirs of Louis M. Lyons, Journalist My rational was that a student of writing would study a progression of his writing, a developed mastery of different styles and a variation in method that became a word tapestry woven across a career of a voice in journalism these selected works represented. I contacted a publisher, referred by Shirley and selected by my children for being Green, and agreed to a multi-book arrangement. I was committed. But then again, I recused myself by shoving the mass onto a table in the hallway in front of my bedroom. I returned to teaching in the fall of 2006. Every day I walked by the mess on the table and sighed.

The summer of 2007 brought the final steps in the publication of these books. A major obstacle to the completion of The Ruralist and G’Nights was gaining the permission from The Boston Globe to use LML’s previously published materials. After a year of negotiations, a hero named Toby Leith, the Content Licensing Manager for The Boston Globe, formally granted me permission to republish. One person can make a difference… the power of one!

With the light at the end of the tunnel now visible, my daughters chose to undust a manuscript of their grandfather’s, his son John, which was written in 1971. It is the true story of his involvement with others in the final years of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, Missouri from 1969 to 1971. It is an important story of black vs. white and black vs. black fears of the time and became Volume V, Pruitt-Igoe: The True Story of Bidwood #19 in the LML Collection . My father has no idea about this and will not find out until after the book goes to press. Not only is the work significant and an example of conscience and integrity, it is also a tribute to him from his grandchildren for being the backbone, along with their grandmother Grace, of the entire effort.

All three of my daughters have given effortlessly to this project. Jessee preserved my father’s book, helped with the transcribing of the beginning chapters of the memoirs, and was the first one standing to tell me This is important and you must do it. Frankee preserved the WWII articles and was a phenom on the microfiche research. My youngest, Annee, preserved the editorials and the columns and also helped with the microfiche, although she admittedly got stuck on reading the original articles on Babe Ruth, FDR, the Marx Brothers and her favorite the Will Rogers’ Dispatches that filled the body of the newspapers of the late twenties which reduced her microfiche output considerably! And so be it, the true, living legacy of my grandfather. He would be proud of their tenacity and interest. He would be awestruck by our farmhouse humming to the whirlwind of four laptops going all at once throughout the summer nights and days. My children recognize the significance of his contributions and the need to bring his works into the hands of twenty first century students and scholars of communications as well as the necessity of enlightening the following generations to the ability and possibility of communicating with conscience and integrity.

My greatest pride in this endeavor was the ability to have delivered to my father and mother, my Aunt Mardie, my pal Uncle Tommy and my godmother Aunt Eleanor, my Uncle Rich and Aunt Shirley, my Aunt Emily, and my Aunt Sheila and Uncle Willie these texts. For it is they who will derive the most meaning from the words. It is they who make me proud to be a Lyons.

The LML Collection represents a gathering of my grandfather’s writings which is in no way exhaustive of his entire life’s works. This is a beginning. Along the way more of his writings may be added, along with the writings of others, that illuminate the power of writing with conscience and integrity to change the world. That is our hope. Cheers.

Mary Ann Lyons, Ph.D.

The Red Sleigh Farm

Mount Airy, Maryland 7/7/07

LOUIS M. LYONS

Louis Lyons was a man of many talents. A leading reporter of The Boston Globe whom Felix Frankfurter called the best reporter of his generation, an innovative curator of the Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, one of public broadcasting’s first and most honored newsmen. He knew everybody, and could summon the great and near-great to his nightly news program which he always began with Here’s the news . . . and ended with…that’s the news.

Growing up in Norwell, he married his high school sweetheart, Margaret Tolman, and lived for almost 30 years in Reading. Active in town affairs he commuted to The Boston Globe (1923-1946) where he covered everything from city hall to the FDR’s New Deal and post WWII Europe.

His tennis court was the center of neighborhood life. In 1946 his life went through dramatic changes. Harvard President Conant made him the full-time Curator of the Nieman Foundation for journalism and his loving partner of 27 years, Margaret Tolman, died in 1949.

A whole new life began in Cambridge. He married his secretary, Totty Malone, in 1950, a 32-year full-time partnership of great love and joy. His interests were lively and varied, he loved good talk. The living room on Kenway Street was a place of great warmth, martinis, story telling and many visitors.

Thomas Tolman Lyons

Newburyport, Massachusetts

Summer 2006

CoverPicture.jpg

The very day Louis returned

Louis M. Lyons

Foreign War Correspondent 1945

Reading, Massachusetts

Volume III

War Scribe

First Reports Out: Europe Post V-E Day Foreign War Correspondent 1945

The Dispatches of Louis M. Lyons for the Boston Daily Globe

For

Uncle Tommy

Bravery and courage lived each day

INTRODUCTION

On August 2, 2011, the descendants of Louis M. Lyons will meet at the base of the White Mountains in New Hampshire and will spread the ashes of his son, Richard L. Lyons. His daughter Mard and his sons John and Tom and his step-daughter Sheila, accompanied by their spouses, children and their grandchildren, will encircle their brother’s wife Shirley and their brother’s children, daughter Jenny and son Jim, and their spouses, children and grandchildren. It will be a time of reunion and remembrance, held on a Tuesday morning commemorating his son’s birthday, held beholding the mountains that both father and son, long ago, climbed and conquered together and where both spirits will be embraced by their loved ones.

My inability to separate the lives of my father’s father and my uncle from one another quite simply is because they were interwoven in their shared and parallel life experiences captured forever in their written words. As a young reporter for the Boston Daily Globe, my grandfather wrote an editorial column based on his home life as the father of a young boy, Richard, and captured the fleeting moments of all first time parents as they witness the childhood and youth of their firstborn.

After I published the collection of these Boston Daily Globe columns in With Conscience and Integrity Volume II, G’Nights: The Dialect of Home in 2007, my Uncle Rich called me several times and told me that he was deeply moved, moved to tears. When asked before my interview with him a year later, how he could get through his battle experiences at Peleliu in the Pacific during World War II, he thumped a copy of the book on his coffee table and said, Because of the life my father and mother gave to me that you can find here in these pages.

The only surviving letters home Richard wrote from Peleliu are dated October 8th of 1944 and May 14th of 1945 and predate the voyage his father took as an accredited foreign war correspondent with the United States Army of Occupation in Europe. The lead of the first dispatch filed by my grandfather from Paris on May 23, 1945 reveals, for him, a rare personal sentiment: I came over here to write, but no story has ever been so hard to begin. Not because I didn’t have help. All day the boys have been filling me with stories. They are going either home or to the Pacific, as I move in on the war that is over. But what went unspoken was what a fellow named Bill had one of his characters say a long time ago: Go hang yourself, brave Crillon. We fought at Acres and you were not there. They were talking right across me about their war in a language I didn’t understand. Defensively I found myself saying: I have a boy in the Pacific, a Marine. I didn’t add: He may not speak to you Army guys unless you need help. Just mentioning the boy was the payoff. From the time I took the plane in Washington I have been the old man of every group. Mine was the other war. My inferiority has yet permitted me to mention that, but meeting these lads at the crossroads of a war marks the end of a chapter.

This was the beginning of the first of Louis