on a brother's California ranch before coming home and marrying
a neighbor seventeen years his junior, Nancy Hammond. ¹

Ernie's mother, Maria Taylor, was born across the Illinois line in
1870. Her father, Lambert Taylor, was Hoosier-born, and in 1895
moved his family back to a one-story frame house a mile or so
east of Ernie's birthplace. Lambert Taylor is supposed to have
had a strain of German blood; other than this, Ernie's ancestors on
both sides appear to have been of Scottish and English origin.

Ernie's parents did not get past the eighth grade. Will at-
tended a one-room school along with thirty or forty other
"scholars." One of his earliest memories was of his teacher lifting
him up into the engine of a work train on a new railroad the Balti-
more & Ohio was laying from Indianapolis to Decatur, Illinois, past
the schoolhouse. Samuel Pyle sold wood to the railroad for cross-
ties.

The Samuel Pyles had seven children, of whom five reached
maturity. Will was twelve when his mother died, and a couple of
years later his father married a widow with three daughters. Will
and the rest were put to the chores and the plow as soon as they
were of a size. Will was a well-behaved boy. He never took but
one chew of tobacco in his life, from which he was sick in bed half
a day. Later on he used to smoke a Sunday cigar or two, but quit
before he married. He never was a drinker, although his father
liked whisky and always had some in the house. There was much
work, and no luxury, on the Samuel Pyle farm. When Will got
chance to make a little money he took it: he worked over in Illi-
nois all one autumn cutting broom corn and husking field corn.
Then he hired out to a farmer north of Dana. It was during this
period that the widowed Lambert Taylor came back to Indiana
with his son John and his daughters Mary and Maria.

On a Saturday night in the fall of '95 Will came down by baggy
for a festival at the United Brethren church. There his sister

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