Some context: Pyle was born to William Clyde Pyle and Maria Taylor near Dana, Indiana, on August 3, 1900. After attending local schools, he joined the United States Navy Reserve during World War I at age 17. He served three months of active duty until the war ended, then finished his enlistment in the reserves and was discharged with the rank of Petty Officer Third Class. After the war Pyle attended Indiana University, editing the Indiana Daily Student newspaper and traveling to the Orient with his fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
On April 17, 1945, Pyle came ashore with the Army's 305th Infantry Regiment of the 77th "Liberty Patch" Division on Iejima (then known as Ie Shima), a small island northwest of Okinawa. The following day, after local enemy opposition had apparently been neutralized, he was traveling by jeep with Lt. Col. Joseph B. Coolidge, the commanding officer of the 305th, toward Coolidge's new command post when the jeep encountered enemy machine gun fire. The men immediately took cover in a nearby ditch. "A little later Pyle and I raised up to look around," Coolidge reported. "Another burst hit the road over our heads ... I looked at Ernie and saw he had been hit." A bullet had entered Pyle's left temple just under his helmet, killing him instantly. Pyle was buried with his helmet on, among other battle casualties, with an infantry private on one side and a combat engineer on the other. The men of the Army unit he was covering erected a monument, which still stands, at the site of his death. Its inscription reads, "At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy. Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945." Eleanor Roosevelt, who frequently quoted Pyle's war dispatches in her newspaper column, My Day, paid tribute to him there the following day: "I shall never forget how much I enjoyed meeting him here in the White House last year," she wrote, "and how much I admired this frail and modest man who could endure hardships because he loved his job and our men." Though newspapers reported that Geraldine "took the news bravely", her health declined rapidly in the months following Pyle's death. She died on November 23, 1945. They had no children. After the war Pyle's remains were re-interred at the Army cemetery on Okinawa, and later at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. In 1983 he was awarded the Purple Heart--a rare honor for a civilian--by the 77th Division's successor unit, the 77th Army Reserve Command.
What were the final years of Pyle's life like?
A: On April 17, 1945, Pyle came ashore with the Army's 305th Infantry Regiment of the 77th "Liberty Patch" Division on Iejima
Some context: Blood, Sweat & Tears (also known as "BS&T") is a jazz-rock American music group. They are noted for their combination of brass and rock band instrumentation. The group recorded songs by rock/folk songwriters such as Laura Nyro, James Taylor, the Band and the Rolling Stones as well as Billie Holiday and Erik Satie. They also incorporated music from Thelonious Monk and Sergei Prokofiev into their arrangements.
Al Kooper, Jim Fielder, Fred Lipsius, Randy Brecker, Jerry Weiss, Dick Halligan, Steve Katz and Bobby Colomby formed the original band. The creation of the group was inspired by the "brass-rock" ideas of the Buckinghams and its producer, James William Guercio, as well as the early 1960s Roulette-era Maynard Ferguson Orchestra (according to Kooper's autobiography). Al Kooper was the group's initial bandleader, having insisted on that position based on his experiences with the Blues Project, his previous band with Steve Katz, which had been organized as an egalitarian collective. Jim Fielder was from Frank Zappa's the Mothers of Invention and had played briefly with Buffalo Springfield. Kooper's fame as a high-profile contributor to various historic sessions of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and others was a catalyst for the prominent debut of Blood, Sweat & Tears in the musical counterculture of the mid-sixties. Kooper, Colomby, Katz and Fielder did a few shows as a quartet at the Cafe Au Go Go in New York City in September 1967, opening for Moby Grape. Fred Lipsius then joined the others two months later. A few more shows were played as a quintet, including one at the Fillmore East in New York. Lipsius then recruited the other three, Dick Halligan, Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss, who were New York jazz horn players Lipsius knew. The final lineup debuted at the Cafe Au Go Go on November 17-19, 1967, then moved over to play The Scene the following week. The band was a hit with the audience, who liked the innovative fusion of jazz with acid rock and psychedelia. After signing to Columbia Records, the group released Child Is Father to the Man. The album cover was considered quite innovative showing the band members sitting and standing with child-sized versions of themselves. The album slowly picked up in sales despite growing artistic differences among the founding members which resulted in several personnel changes for the second album. Colomby and Katz wanted to move Kooper exclusively to keyboard and composing duties, while hiring a stronger vocalist for the group, causing Kooper's departure in April 1968. He became a record producer for the Columbia label, but not before arranging some songs that would be on the next BS&T album. The group's trumpeters, Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss, also left and were replaced by Lew Soloff and Chuck Winfield. Brecker joined Horace Silver's band with his brother Michael, and together they eventually formed their own horn-dominated musical outfits, Dreams and The Brecker Brothers. Jerry Weiss went on to start the similarly-styled group Ambergris.
what was the Al Kooper era?
A:
Al Kooper was the group's initial bandleader, having insisted on that position based on his experiences with the Blues Project,