"As kids, we'd have Victory Gardens. Everything was around the war... I'd come home from school at night, and I'd read Ernie Pyle... He was in the newspapers every day. He wrote his article from the front. He was in the fox holes with the infantry men, or the tank with the tank drivers, or whatever. He was right there, up front. And he'd always have names and addresses of people that he was interviewing. And it was like you were really there. He was a great writer. He ultimately got killed in the Pacific doing his reporting...
   "I had a map where I'd mark out where the war front was. I did that every night. By that time, I probably would have been 10 years old or so. It was very important to me... To this day, I'm really kind of a World War II buff."