Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
MENTONE - What she remembers about World War I is whenever the family went to buy flour, they came home with corn meal.
"We had to buy corn meal and had to eat corn meal whether we wanted to or not," said Zula Pile, 94, of Mentone, of those days in the early part of the last century.
Also during World War I, the then-preschooler began writing to soldiers. Her uncles, Everett Henthorn, Charlie French and Larry Hughes, saw combat in France.
"Mother wrote to her brother and two brothers-in-law. When she wrote, I wrote, and they would answer."
She corresponded with troops in every U.S. war since then. Some troops have been relatives, others were friends and neighbors.
Nine decades ago, Zula received cards postmarked in France. She doesn't know what became of them. "Mother kept them, but I couldn't find them after she died."
Born in 1910, near Veedersburg, in Fountain County, Zula's parents had a fruit orchard and Percheron horse breeding operation. It wasn't a life the youngster relished.
"I was set to go to school and had to wait until the next year because the bus didn't come out far enough to pick me up that year. Dad bought a piano and I started on lessons while I waited to go to school.
"I hated the farm because I liked to see people and talk to people. It's hard to talk to animals."
Between world wars she met and married W.E. "Ernest" Pyle, who asked her to marry him on their third date.
"I was only 19 but I knew he was serious. He worried about what my boyfriend would say, and I said it didn't make any difference."
The couple's engagement lasted two years. Ernest was a Depression-era banker and spent those two years liquidating banks in Indiana and Illinois.
During World War II, her correspondence with soldiers resumed.
"I heard about how all those boys stood in line to get mail. They were homesick. What if they received no mail? I thought how bad it must be. I thought I would write to someone."
She wrote to her husband's sister's sons, nephews Dick Stockdale (U.S. Army) and Billy Grimes, a sailor, as well as to a neighbor, Lewis Henderson, also a sailor, who left a wife and two children at home.
During the Korean War she corresponded with Dick's brother, Jack Stockdale.
During the Vietnam "conflict," as it was known at the time, she wrote to her great-nephew Roger French, a Marine. She writes Roger regularly to this day.
"Roger said I was the only girl he ever wrote," the great-aunt said wryly.
As the wars waxed and waned, Ernest became president of and retired from the Waynedale State Bank. He also farmed. The couple purchased a motel and a restaurant in Georgia along with some farm ground, and moved there in 1961.
"It was interesting work, but I wouldn't do it now," she said, adding she kept pretty clear of the farm, too.
People in Hawkinsville, Ga., Zula said, claimed that her husband and the statue on the courthouse square were the only two men who didn't drink.
She chuckles as she tells stories, one after the other, about inebriated motel guests and their antics.
"I've never tasted alcohol," she said. "That might be why I've lived so long, I don't know."
She likes to credit Dr. Patrick Silveus with some of her longevity, too.
Weighing four pounds "with clothes on" at birth, Zula was kept in a shoe box in an unlit oven on orders from her grandfather, a veterinarian.
As a teenager she had heart problems and didn't' expect to live to the age of 50, let alone for 44 years past the half-century mark. She'll be 95 in two weeks.
Zula and Ernest had two children, Larry and Cynthia (Howell, now of Crown Point). Larry followed in his father's footsteps and also became a banker. He followed his parents down South and wanted to work and farm in Indiana. Following an offer of employment from the Mentone State Bank, he brought his family north in winter 1963.
Zula came to live in Mentone when Larry's first wife died in the summer of 1964. She took care of Larry's two girls until he married his second wife, Sue.
She claims the type in the telephone book has gotten smaller over the years and can hardly make out the small type in the Times-Union's public occurrences anymore, even while peering through a huge magnifying glass.
She also enlists the aid of a walker or cane as she tends to get "over balanced" when standing.
These minor setbacks do not keep her from crocheting or writing, though.
"I like to receive letters, people don't do that anymore. I'd write to anyone, even if I didn't know them. I just wonder if people appreciate e-mail as much as they do receiving mail."
Her youngest grandson, (Larry's son), Brian, received weekly letters from Zula while he was stationed in Bosnia.
Brian, so appreciative of his grandmother's letters, presented her with a troop support medal and pin from the National Guard. Brian has been assigned to Mississippi to help with hurricane relief efforts there along with other members of the 1st Battalion 293rd Infantry, Co. A, based in Warsaw.
Zula corresponds with Brian's wife, Shannon, who is serving with the National Guard in Iraq.
"Well, I would like to see this war ended. I'd like to see that."
Zula still takes the Crawfordsville newspaper. The type size is nice and large, she says. She checks the obituary section for a particular name, that of Sunday School classmate, "Hazel."
"There used to be three of us from the class," she said, "But the 101-year-old recently died. Now, there's just Hazel and I. Hazel doesn't know it, but I'm having a contest with her (to see who will live the longest)."
She lists automobiles, radios, televisions and airplanes as the greatest inventions of the last century. She remembers when a neighbor built a radio and her dad reported hearing voices coming out of the air.
"Going into space, I don't like that. They ought to stop. I don't think anyone could live up there," she says seriously, then reconsiders the rash statement.
"Well, you might get away from farming."
