Once Upon a Town

by Bob Greene

  —RAE WILSON

  The men and women who helped with the Canteen—and the men and women who, serving in the armed forces of the United States, arrived at the Canteen—were in their late teens, their twenties, their thirties and beyond in the 1940s.

  Now it was sixty years later; now it was the twenty-first century. Most, almost undoubtedly, were dead; those still living were old men and women. I didn’t know exactly how I would find them, but coming to North Platte had to be the only way to start. The people of this part of Nebraska who had volunteered in the Canteen—it was unlikely that they had all left. This had to be the part of the country to find them.

  And those who had passed through? The soldiers, sailors and airmen who were on those trains?

  I didn’t know. But there might be records here—ways to find the names of some of the military men who had rolled across the middle of the United States, and who had found themselves stopping for ten minutes in North Platte. From those records, perhaps I could start to locate the soldiers who were still living.

  And then there was the Canteen itself.

  It was gone. I arrived in town, and went to the place where the train depot had stood, and there was nothing there.

  It had been torn down in the winter of 1973. Two years before that—on a day in May in 1971—the last passenger train had arrived at, and then departed, the Union Pacific depot in North Platte. The old passenger railroads were no more; the newly devised Amtrak had replaced them, and Amtrak’s management had decided that its sole route across Nebraska would not pass through North Platte.

  So the Union Pacific had demolished its station on Front Street. I went down to where it had been; all that remained was a plaque and a flagpole.

  This was going to be like looking for a ghost.

  Four

  My first morning in town I awakened with the sun and decided to walk with no set destination.

  I knew that I should head in the opposite direction of the interstate; I-80 was designed and built with the express purpose of moving people past towns like North Platte as quickly as they could drive. The interstates were meant to be the national bypass—the way to avoid taking things slow, to avoid looking the old America in the eye. They were a federally funded averted glance.

  So with my back to I-80, I followed a path that led to a bridge that spanned the South Platte River, then turned left on a street called Leota. After a few blocks I passed the Great Plains Regional Medical Center, a modestly sized but relatively new hospital complex. Centennial Park, with baseball diamonds and skateboard ramps, abutted the medical center; I passed the Adams Middle School and a church with an empty parking lot, and soon found myself at the end of Leota, with a new housing development going up within eyeshot.

  What I saw in more than a few front yards were satellite dishes—pointed toward the heavens, poised to bring the outside world to North Platte. From the north came the faint sound of a train whistle, but I knew it had to be a freight train—trains that carry people did not come here anymore, did not even run through here.

  After about forty-five minutes of walking I turned around. The temperature again was already close to one hundred degrees, and few people were out on the street. I did hear a single voice, that of a child.

  “Look what I’m making,” the high-pitched words announced.

  He wasn’t talking to me; he must have been three or four, and he was out by the open-doored garage of a house on Leota. He was speaking to a woman who appeared to be his grandmother; he was showing her something that he was doing with wooden blocks.

  I stopped at the sound, and looked over at them. The grandmother saw me, and looked back with a question mark behind her eyes. I didn’t blame her. I was a stranger in town, standing outside her home.

  I walked on, hoping my presence had not upset them.

  There was a time when no one was considered a stranger.

  “I was a high school girl when the war started,” said Rosalie Lippincott, seventy-four. “I was a cheerleader and a member of the Pep Club. As a young farm girl I grew up happy, healthy and safe, preparing for the best of the future with excitement and enthusiasm.”

  She was one of the first of the Canteen volunteers I was able to locate. Today she lives not in North Platte, but in the Nebraska town of Central City; she told me that when she was a girl, the nearest town to her father’s farm was Shelton, population eight hundred.

  “On Saturday nights, my folks would take the cream and eggs from the farm into Shelton,” she said. “For trade. That’s what my dad would do—trade the cream and eggs for groceries. For sugar, and the staples.

  “My dad would get his hair cut in town on Saturday night, too, but the real reason was to bring the eggs in. We might bring twenty-four dozen. The cream we brought to town was in five-gallon cans. They would be heavy, but my dad was strong.

  “Saturday night was the social time of the week on Main Street in Shelton. While the men were getting their haircuts, we kids would go to the picture show at the Roxie Theater. It was usually a cowboy movie, and when it was over, if we still had ten cents left we would go to Rex Honnold’s Rexall Drugstore for an ice-cream cone or a candy bar.

  “For a country girl, the drugstore was kind of an exciting place on a Saturday night. The marble-topped fountain, with spigots that poured out mysterious, bubbly drinks…the little tables with the drugstore chairs…

  “You might pick up a nice little gift for your mom or your sister in the drugstore, if you could find something for a reasonable price. But what we always kept in mind, all evening long, was that our parents had told us: ‘Now, when the streamliner goes through town, we’re all going home.’”

  The streamliner, she said, was the Challenger, en route from Denver to Chicago. “It would come through Shelton around ten P.M.,” she said. “The tracks were on the south side of Main Street. And Main Street was really only one block long. The train didn’t stop. We knew it would never stop in Shelton.

  “You could hear it from a distance. It came from the west, and it came through fast. The street would be lined with cars—people sitting in the cars, usually the women visiting with each other. And that train would come through—it looked like a streak. Sixty or seventy miles an hour.

  “Oh, how many Saturday nights when I watched that train speed through town, and I wished I could trade places with someone on the train. That’s all that I wanted.”

  But the train was gone within seconds, and her family was waiting for her at their car, for the ride back to the farm.

  Which is why—when the North Platte Canteen started, and a group who called themselves the Shelton Ladies volunteered to do regular duty there—she almost leapt to offer her help.

  “We got to ride on the train,” she said. “It wasn’t the Challenger, but it was a train. I would sleep overnight at a friend’s house in Shelton, and we would run the eight blocks to the station. The train left Shelton at three twenty-five A.M.

  “We would take hard-boiled eggs with us. In the Canteen, we would peel them and make egg-salad sandwiches. So many sandwiches—twenty bushel baskets lined with clean towels, with all the sandwiches waiting for the soldiers. It was really quite overwhelming—we would put magazines out for the soldiers. Life, Look, Liberty, The Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, comics, movie magazines. We put Bibles out, too. Everything was free for the soldiers to take with them.

  “The rest of the Shelton Ladies were…well, they were ladies. Women. But my friend and I were teenagers—and boy, was that a thrill, to be in the middle of all those guys in uniform!

  “We would hear the call of ‘Troop train coming in!’ and we would hurry to make sure that all of the fried chicken, pickles, fresh fruit, sandwiches, hot coffee, cookies, milk and chewing gum were out on the U-shaped table. And then the soldiers would come running in.

  “Oh! The different accents, the different colors of skin…the men in khaki, the boys in Navy blue, the Air Corpsmen, the Marines, the dogfaces, the nine
ty-day wonders, and those with ribboned chests. And all of this for just ten minutes at a time! I think it was the beginning of opening my eyes to a bigger world.

  “They would hesitate, and say, ‘How much do I owe you?’ When we would say, ‘You don’t owe us anything,’ they could hardly believe it.

  “There were no paper products back then, the way we know them now—they’d take their cups of coffee onto the troop train, and at the next stop someone would gather up the cups and put them on the next train back. It was done on the honor system, and we would always get the cups back.

  “So you had all these dirty coffee cups that had to be cleaned and washed. I don’t remember there being any automatic dishwasher. We did them by hand. We would fall asleep on the way home that night.”

  She told me that she did not, at the time, give much thought to where the soldiers who had eaten her egg-salad sandwiches were going. But something that she saw one afternoon on her dad’s farm made her understand.

  “There was a B-17 bomber that crashed near my home,” she said. “It was on a training flight. It just started spiraling—you could see it spiral, spiral, spiral….

  “I was out in the fields with my dad. We were irrigating—I was sort of my dad’s hired man. It was a hot August day. We saw the flames, and we went to the house and called the telephone operator. It was a hand-crank phone—she said she had just heard from someone else. The plane had gone down in a cornfield. It was a four-engine bomber, and ten men died.

  “When I think about those years now, I guess I always knew darn well that a lot of those soldiers in the Canteen were never coming back. But I was an optimistic girl, and I tried not to let it enter my mind. They were handsome young men in the Canteen, people I admired, and I wasn’t going to think about them not coming home.

  “That B-17 spiraling, though…right on the farm, right on an August afternoon…

  “There’s a big world out there. It’s not all just Main Street in Shelton on a Saturday night. I think that’s what all of us learned.”

  That first full day in North Platte, I stopped in at the Lincoln County Historical Society and began to go through some records—old guest books that had been saved from the Canteen, in which soldiers had signed in and had listed their hometowns; letters of thanks that over the years had been sent to North Platte (often just to the town itself—no name or street address; the writers were expressing their gratitude not to an individual, but to a city); documents from the Union Pacific Railroad.

  It became evident to me right away that it would be possible to find some of the men who had been on those trains. It would take some doing—but some of them still had to be out there.

  Rosalie Lippincott and her friends who had made the egg-salad sandwiches and had neatly arranged the Lifes and Libertys on the card tables…they were one side of this.

  But if ever there was a two-sided tale, this was it. Those men who had spent their ten minutes in North Platte…

  Who were they? What must they have thought?

  “On the sixth of June in 1944, I was still in high school,” said Russ Fay, seventy-five years old, when I located him at his home in Greendale, Wisconsin. “Pulaski High School, in Milwaukee. But boy, the Army grabbed me the next day.

  “I was inducted at Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago. And then right onto a troop train, on my way to basic training at Camp Roberts, in California.

  “Two men slept in the lower berth, and the guy in the upper berth got to sleep by himself. We rotated every night. We were typical eighteen-year-olds…we were in the Army now, and that was that. I don’t remember a whole lot of moaning or groaning.

  “On the train ride across the country, I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen to me. Like most of the guys, I was hoping that I didn’t end up in the infantry. We had all heard that in the infantry you had the most chance of getting killed.

  “There was a mess car on the train. Pretty soggy food, the same food every meal. We just sort of accepted that it would be that way the whole way.

  “And then we rolled into North Platte.

  “I had heard of North Platte in school, in history class, because of the Overland Trail. The pioneers. But who ever thinks they’re going to be there?

  “The train stops in North Platte…and we see these women carrying baskets toward our car. It’s the daytime, it’s hotter than blazes, and we can see that there’s sandwiches and things in the baskets.

  “We don’t understand it. The women get onto the train—for some reason we weren’t allowed off—and they’re offering us the sandwiches, and these little glass bottles of cold milk.

  “We’re seeing more people out on the platform—from what I recall, there was a wide area out there. We’re asking them why they’re doing this, and they’re telling us that they meet every train, every day, every night…and I remember how much I appreciated it, and especially I remember that the sandwiches were so good.

  “I found out later it was pheasant—these delicious pheasant sandwiches, with mayonnaise. I can still taste it. Can you imagine that? Ladies are coming onto your train, and they’re giving you pheasant sandwiches?

  “The fact that they were women…I mean, in the 1940s, you’re eighteen, but you’re still a kid, at least before you get to the war. The women are on the train—and you might whistle, but that’s all. You didn’t really flirt.

  “We were there for such a short time. The rest of the way, we kept thinking that maybe there would be other places like that. We wanted it to happen again. But it never did—Utah, Nevada, it got pretty desolate, and we’d stop to take on water and coal, but no one ever met us. We never ran into anything like that before, or after.

  “I ended up in France and Germany, in an infantry division, field artillery. And all the way over there in Europe, across the ocean, you would hear about North Platte. Guys would mention it, guys you hadn’t met until you got to Europe. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel for food, eating field rations, and someone would say: ‘I wish we had some of those sandwiches like they gave us in North Platte.’

  “You have to understand—the memory of food was such a powerful thing over there. I would see fights break out over it. Someone would get carried away describing a wonderful meal they had before they went in the service. Sort of needling the other guys. It was like a form of mental torture. A guy would say ‘Shut up,’ and the guy would keep twisting the knife about the great meal, until the guy he was needling couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “I lost sixty pounds overseas. I weighed one hundred eighty going in, and I came out weighing one hundred fourteen. My mother didn’t even recognize me at first. You talk about the Jenny Craig diet—there was nothing like the World War II diet.

  “I would say that a majority of the men on the battlefields knew exactly what North Platte was, and what it meant. They would talk about it like it was a dream. Out of nowhere: ‘How’d you like to have some of that food from the North Platte Canteen right about now?’”

  He came home after the war, he said, took a month off to do nothing, and then went to work at the Allen-Bradley electrical equipment factory in Wisconsin, where he remained for the next thirty-eight years.

  I asked him if there was anything he would like me to tell the residents of North Platte.

  “Just that I don’t know how those people kept it up for all those years,” he said. “Especially with all the shortages during the war…how did they do it?

  “It’s funny what you remember. When those ladies came onto the train, I remember that there was a real big napkin in the bottom of the basket, and the sandwiches were laid out on the napkin.

  “Just tell them that I still thank them from the bottom of my heart. And that if they ever ask themselves whether what they did really mattered, that the answer, to put it bluntly, is: Hell, yes.”

  That night in my hotel room, the weathercaster’s voice came out of the television set, giving the local forecast for the next day:

  “Ho
t, hot and more hot.”

  But in the midst of a summer of soaring heat, my thoughts kept going back to that Christmas week in 1941, to the freezing Nebraska nights when the Canteen began. For the few people there at the very start, before anyone could know how long the war would last, and thus how long their commitment would be required…

  Before it was history—when it was just a silent impulse out on the plains, in a tiny place cut off by time and distance from the rest of the country—who from the town walked into that railroad depot, and what, in their own hearts, brought them there?

  Five

  “I had read about it in the paper—about Rae Wilson needing helpers for this project she had in mind—and so I went down there on Christmas night, the first night the Canteen opened. I was twenty-three and a single woman, and I was lonely that Christmas. So I went to the railroad station. There were only five of us there that first night.”

  LaVon Fairley Kemper, eighty-three, who now lives in Littleton, Colorado, was telling me the story of that night in 1941 when the Canteen began in earnest.

  “I was teaching school in Lodgepole, Nebraska, about seventy-five miles west of North Platte,” she said. “I had come to North Platte to spend Christmas with my dad. He was single, and he was living in a rooming house. We had no Christmas tree—we really had nothing. He had a room, and I slept on a couch in the living room of the rooming house.

  “We had finished our Christmas dinner, and the paper had said that Rae Wilson was looking for volunteers, so I told my father I would be back. It must have been eight-thirty or nine o’clock when I came down to the depot. I was feeling pretty lonesome that night.

  “At the depot, there were seven or eight bushel baskets that the ladies had filled with apples and candy. They had stored the baskets in the lobby of the Cody Hotel, because there was no one to guard the apples on the train platform, and as cold as it was, the apples probably would have frozen. By the time the train came in, there wasn’t a soul at the depot except for us.