Portrait of Herbert Pyle (1919 - 1965) (1970)

Herbert James Pyle. Grew up in Floyd and Charles City, Iowa. He married Betty Jean Gardner in 1941 and left for the Army a few days later. He attended Army Maintenance School, then Caterpillar Service School in Peoria. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was sent to Shemya Island in the Aleautians to join the 368th Engineer Maintenance Company. The mission was to establish a presence that would help thwart a potential Japanese air attack on the US West Coast. He stayed for 30 months living under fairly tough conditions.

After the war, he and and his wife ran an Oliver sales & service business in Charles City for a period. In 1953 he was offered a test engineer job with John Deere in Waterloo. He died of a heart attack in 1965, age 46. Herbert Pyle was an ace mechanic and loved to putter around in his workshop at home. He had five kids.