Pyle was born to William Clyde Pyle and Maria Taylor near Dana, Indiana, on August 3, 1900. After attending local schools, he joined the United States Navy Reserve during World War I at age 17. He served three months of active duty until the war ended, then finished his enlistment in the reserves and was discharged with the rank of Petty Officer Third Class. After the war Pyle attended Indiana University, editing the Indiana Daily Student newspaper and traveling to the Orient with his fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

In 1926, Pyle, tired of working at a desk, quit his job. Over the following two years he and his wife traveled over 9,000 miles across the United States in a Ford roadster. In 1928 he returned to The Washington Daily News, and for the following four years served as the country's first and best-known aviation columnist. As Amelia Earhart later said, "Any aviator who didn't know Pyle was a nobody."  In 1932 Pyle once again became managing editor of The Washington Daily News. Two years later he took an extended vacation in California to recuperate from a severe bout of flu. Upon his return, to fill in for the paper's vacationing syndicated columnist Heywood Broun, he wrote a series of 11 columns about his stay in California and the people he had met there.  The series proved unexpectedly popular with both readers and colleagues. G.B. ("Deac") Parker, editor-in-chief of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, said he had found in Pyle's vacation articles "a Mark Twain quality that knocked my eye out." In 1935 Pyle once again resigned his position as managing editor to accept an offer from the Scripps-Howard Alliance to write his own national column. Traveling the highways and back roads of the country and the Americas, he wrote about the unusual places and people he met. Selected columns were later published posthumously in Home Country (1947).  Perpetually dissatisfied with his writing, Pyle suffered from bouts of deep depression. He continued his daily column until a few months after the United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941.

Using a quote from the above article, answer the following question: what did they travel across the US for
Pyle, tired of working at a desk,