2pm UPDATE: A reader graciously pointed out that we had the number of years since Ernie Pyle's death dead wrong. We've since corrected the headline. Thanks for keeping us mathematically on the beam!)

The roving Scripps-Howard correspondent Ernie Pyle touched down briefly in Albuquerque with his wife Jerry in 1940 but was soon off to cover America's global war with Germany, Italy and Japan.

It was in the closing days of that war that Pyle, who was the quintessential embedded journalist of his day, was killed by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shima, near Okinawa, on April 18, 1945.

Pyle's folksy, gut-level dispatches from the war were enormously popular and at times influential -- as when he lobbied for a pay raise for GIs during wartime -- and he was immortalized in William Wellman's 1945 movie "The Story of G.I. Joe" that was released after his death.

But he never got to settle down in that home on 900 Girard SE -- now an public library branch and an Albuquerque landmark.

Ernie Pyle Middle School on Valdora Road SW in the South Valley is also named in his honor.

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