War correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese machine gunner a lifetime ago, but 14-year-old Cole Turner didn’t forget about the 70th anniversary of the reporter’s death on Saturday.

"I like his writing," said Turner, a World War II history buff who has read and reread a book compiling Pyle’s wartime dispatches.

Turner was with dozens of others who paid tribute to Pyle at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl on Saturday, April 18, the same day Pyle was killed while reporting on the war in Okinawa in 1945.

"Pyle would have been embarrassed by this commemoration today," said Owen Johnson, associate professor emeritus of journalism at Indiana University and a Pyle scholar, during the ceremony. "He would have said that he was just one of 500 U.S. war correspondents. He was the last of 54 of them who died during the war. Most significantly, he would say that the almost 300,000 U.S. troops who died in the war were much more important than he was."

Pyle was a Scripps-Howard correspondent and his personal stories about ordinary GIs in Europe and Asia appeared in 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers across the country, according to the nonprofit Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation.

"He was kind of a hero as I was growing up," said Linda Ritter, who became emotional while speaking of Pyle, her mother’s cousin. "I’m just real impressed the way he portrayed the soldier to the people at home."

Ritter, 68, who came from New Mexico to attend the ceremony, recalled growing up blocks from the Ernie Pyle Library in Albuquerque, N.M., where Pyle briefly lived.

Also at the ceremony, the foundation unveiled a memorial stone about 200 feet from where Pyle, who had a short stint in the Navy, is buried. The stone sits across from Lady Columbia, the center statue at the cemetery, and honors Pyle and the infantry in WWII.

Gerald Maschino, a Legacy Foundation director, said Pyle had the ability to convey the troops’ feelings in his writings, and his work affected many, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who once remarked that she began her mornings with a cup of tea and Pyle’s articles from the battlefront.

"His style of writing is something that goes on for generations," he said.

Born Aug. 3, 1900, in Indiana, Pyle grew up in a small town and attended Indiana University. He covered aviation news and became a columnist in the 1930s, writing about people he met while traveling across the country, said Johnson, the Pyle expert.

"He was an icon for people who lived through World War II," Johnson said. Americans "were telling each other that, ‘If you want to really know what the war was about, read Ernie Pyle.’"

Johnson said Pyle was a talented reporter who composed stories from memory, using his notebook only to take down names, ages and addresses.

"He could really soak up information and that’s because he was somebody who had great sensitivity to everything that was going on around him," he said.

He continued: "He knew how to tell a good story and to draw people in. … In a way, he was a small-town reporter writing for people that he knew, even if he didn’t know them personally."

Pyle won a Pulitzer Prize for his columns in 1944, and in 2011 the National Society of Newspaper Columnists voted Pyle’s column "The Death of Captain Waskow" the best American newspaper column.

In that column, Pyle wrote: "You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions."

Retired Air Force Maj. Thomas Cowan, president of the Legacy Foundation, said Pyle’s stories about how front-line combat troops received the same pay as those in the rear, whose lives were not in danger, led to modern-day combat pay.

Weiguo Xu, a Marine chief warrant officer stationed at Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe, attended the ceremony with his sons, who were helping escort visitors.

"It’s pretty cool what he did, sacrificing himself," Xu said. "As a reporter, you don’t have to do that. He took the time and devoted himself to the country to share firsthand what was going on."