by Bob Greene
“When the war was over he came back to Nebraska and got a job in North Platte with the railroad. For the next thirty-two years we lived very happily together. We had five children.
“The day he died, we had gone to look at the cranes. They come here every spring and fall. This was on the cranes’ spring stop here. We had driven out to see the cranes, out in the country, near Hershey. There must have been about a thousand of them, out in the cornfield, doing their dances, jumping up and down. Virgil and I always loved to drive out and watch them.
“We were driving home. I remember, we were on a street with no traffic. He hadn’t been a bit ill. It was about two in the afternoon. He slumped over the wheel; it was a heart attack. By the time the emergency workers arrived, he was gone. He was fifty-nine.”
She was silent for a second, and then said: “Don’t make it sound too flowery. It’s been a good life. I have no complaints.”
She wishes she could have seen the Canteen just once, she said, because of how it had brought her husband to her. “During the war, you couldn’t get gas for a trip like that,” she said. “Those thirty-some miles from Tryon to North Platte, and then back again…you didn’t make a trip that long unless you really had a reason you had to do it.
“But I wish they hadn’t torn the depot down. I don’t know what I would have come to, if it hadn’t been for that place. The Canteen changed my whole life—and I never even set foot inside it.”
Love will find you—apparently it has always been true. Love will find you, when it is least expected.
One afternoon when I was in North Platte, I spent several hours going through old steel cabinets where letters, documents and news clippings from the Canteen years were stored. I found this—sent in April of 1944 to Mrs. S. C. Rabb, of 514 North Maple in North Platte.
The letter had been written by the mother of a young airman who had passed through the Canteen, and who had been given a cake that Mrs. Rabb had baked.
The boy’s mother, Ethel Koncilek, of West Sayville, Long Island, New York, had written to Mrs. Rabb, whom she had never met:
At a stop in Nebraska several days ago, a dusty, hungry, travel-weary teen-age air cadet stepped off the train to relax. He had started in Nevada for home, which he was to visit for the first time in eleven months. He was still a thousand miles away. You know what happened at the brief stop in Nebraska.
Please accept this letter as a token of our appreciation for your kindness to our boy. May God bless you and your loved ones. This world may still be a better place in which to live as long as charity such as yours remains in the hearts of men.
And then there were the young soldiers who were in search of…
Well, if not love, then the next best thing.
“I was a farm boy from Wisconsin,” said Don Griffith, seventy-eight, when I located him in Indian Harbour Beach, Florida. He laughed. “I was getting ready to join the Sixty-sixth Infantry, and when we were training, we were out to meet girls and get a free dinner. In that order.”
He said that he had enlisted when he was nineteen, and was receiving Army specialized training in engineering; the course was being given in Golden, Colorado.
“We lived in fraternity houses on a college campus, and we went to classes at the college,” he said. “We were very military—when the professors walked in, we would jump up and stand at attention. I think we scared them.
“But what we really wanted to do was meet some girls. For some reason, we told ourselves that the best girls to meet were over the Colorado line, in the rural part of Nebraska. Don’t ask me why we were convinced of that.
“We would take the Galloping Goose streetcar line from Golden to Denver. Then we’d hitchhike to Nebraska, and we’d head for church. I’m not kidding you. That was one way to meet girls—find them at church.
“Now, these girls in church were pretty well chaperoned. And…
“Aw, all right—I’ll tell you why we thought we had a better chance in Nebraska. We wanted to get far enough away from where we were training that the girls we met would not be so used to seeing guys in uniform. We would stand out.
“So we’d meet the girls in church, and they would invite us back to their farm or ranch to have dinner with them and their parents…. It was nice. We were away from home. We were meeting girls. Yes, we had to hitchhike to Nebraska and go to church to do it….”
He laughed again, and then turned serious.
“We may have been young,” he said, “but we weren’t too young to appreciate what happened to us at that North Platte train station.” He had passed through North Platte after his training in Colorado was finished.
He said that although the food and the coffee he was given at the Canteen were tasty and filling, “That wasn’t the biggest thing about North Platte. The biggest thing was how those people made you feel really appreciated. Those happy smiles that you saw. They were just being so nice.
“I know it sounds like a simple thing. But I was heading for an infantry division when I went through North Platte, and I didn’t know exactly where I would end up [he would end up in France]. And I never forgot those smiles.
“The men in North Platte were mostly gone, like they were in every town. That one little town could never have supported the Canteen all by itself. It had help from all the farm communities, all around the area. They all came to North Platte to make sure no train ever went unmet.
“You don’t forget something like that, when you’re overseas. There was no place else I ever knew of, or ever heard about, that went to that great effort. A lot of people might be willing to do it. Or at least they might say they would be willing. But in North Platte, they did it.”
Mr. Griffith said that he finds himself thinking about his brief stop at the Canteen more than he would have imagined. “My generation is disappearing,” he said. “I doubt that our children or grandchildren will know that North Platte ever existed. That was the other side of the war—the one that doesn’t get mentioned in the history books. What the people at home did. How supportive the civilian population was.
“We were masses of soldiers. There were almost more of us than there were civilians—at least I’ll bet you there were more of us than there were men our age who didn’t go.
“The men of our age group who didn’t go probably never got over it. They missed the experience we had. All of us came home—and maybe you had a cousin who had asthma, and he didn’t go into the service. We’d come home and have our stories and our drinks, and the ones who didn’t go…that guy would be left out.
“It wasn’t only the battles they missed out on. They missed out on something like North Platte—they missed out on knowing how good people really can be, how considerate. It wasn’t easy, what the people at that train station did for us—as I remember, we came through in the middle of the night. The troop trains didn’t time it to make it easy for the people who worked at the Canteen. The trains came when the trains came.
“And the people were there. You should have seen it. You have no idea what that meant to us. The middle of the night. And they were there.”
Mr. Griffith was accurate about the people in surrounding towns and counties making sure that the Canteen never went unstaffed. I found a list still on file in North Platte—a list of the communities whose citizens regularly traveled to the Canteen to help.
Absolutely remarkable. More than 125 communities, not just from Nebraska but from Colorado, too. An honor roll of towns: Anselmo, Berwyn, Bignell, Brandon, Dry Valley, Dix, Oconto, Lillian, Sarben, Roscoe, Lewellen, Tallin Table, Thune, Lemoyne, O’Neill, Verango….
Some towns you can’t even find on a map, sixty years later. Towns so small they have disappeared. But during a time of precious gasoline, and no interstates to make the journey smooth, the people from those towns got to North Platte. They saw to it that when the trains pulled in, someone was there.
Holbrook, McGrew, Elsie, Brule, Bucktail, Farnam, Flats, Arthur, Birdwood, Sunol, Wallace, Westervill
e, Eddyville, Elm Creek…
They dropped everything they were doing, and when the young men looked out the windows of the trains, the smiles were waiting for them.
Love will find you. It will.
Seven
There was a photo around town—an old black-and-white picture taken at the Canteen—that I had seen more than once. For older residents of North Platte, this particular photograph seemed to sum up much of the spirit of the town during the war years.
In the photo, a young sailor—you can see him only from the back—is seated at a piano in the Canteen, apparently playing away. Surrounding him are other military men and women, all in uniform, some sipping coffee. And above the piano—as if staring down at the sailor making the music—is a caricature of Adolf Hitler.
Playing and singing in the face of war and death—what a photo. So I was surprised, one day in town, to meet the sailor in the picture, now grown older.
His name was Lloyd Synovec, and he was seventy-three. He told me he had not always lived in North Platte—he hadn’t when the war had begun.
“I was seventeen at the tail end of the war,” he said. “I grew up in eastern Nebraska—a town called Pierce, about fourteen hundred people, near Norfolk. I came from a Navy family, even though we were midwestern. I would have liked to have gone into the service even sooner, but my mother…
“Well, you know how mothers are. She said, ‘Why are you in a hurry? You can wait a while.’ But I was seventeen when I went in, in forty-five.
“I was in boot camp in San Diego, and I was given the opportunity to spend a little time back at home, so I hitch-hiked east. Me and another kid from the base in San Diego. We got some rides up the coast, and then, right outside of Reno, we got a ride the rest of the way from a wealthy guy who was there for a divorce. He was from Bayonne, New Jersey. Believe it or not, people at that time picked you up if you were hitchhiking. They’d go out of their way to give a guy a ride.
“He had a big Buick. For a seventeen-year-old kid from Nebraska, that was like a limousine. We even helped him drive. He paid for the food. He had been out there getting rid of a wife.”
After Synovec’s visit to his family in the eastern part of Nebraska, he started back to the base in California, riding on a passenger train. “I think it was in July or August,” he said. “The war was pretty close to over, but no one knew it at the time. We didn’t know the A-bomb was going to come.
“I knew about North Platte, and the Canteen. The fellow who had given us the ride home had driven through the town, on Highway 30, but we hadn’t stopped and I hadn’t seen the train station. But I knew about it, because my mom had sent a little money or something down there. Women from hundreds of miles around were baking cakes and sending them to the North Platte Canteen.
“The train heading west pulled into the North Platte station, and the conductor yelled that we had about fifteen minutes. There were other military people on the train, and we jumped off and went in. My first impression was: ‘Holy cow!’
“You just didn’t see things like that. The place was absolutely packed—in addition to the guys from our passenger train, there was a troop train stopped at the station, too, so the place was full of soldiers—more soldiers than sailors. I was kind of flabbergasted. I grabbed a sandwich and a glass of milk, and just looked around.
“There was a piano over in the corner. I had played a little bit in my high school’s orchestra—I had studied music for six or seven years because my mom made me take lessons. I kind of quit for a while until I heard that girls liked piano players. Although, at seventeen, I don’t think I would have known what to do with a girl.
“But at the Canteen I saw that there was no one sitting at the piano, and it looked like a pretty good one, so I took my sandwich over there and I sat down. I didn’t expect to be the entertainment, but everyone started gathering around.
“I knew all the tunes of the day—‘Mairzy Doats’ and ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’ and ‘I’ll Walk Alone’…the other soldiers and sailors began requesting songs, so I played them, and they sang. I remember one that they called out for….”
Synovec began singing to me, all these years later: “‘I left my heart at the Stage Door Canteen….’”
He said that as he heard the soldiers and sailors around him singing during that brief stopover in ’45, “I was pleased. Those of us who play piano are always pleased to find one that plays well, and this one did. I suppose it had been played by hundreds of guys who came through the Canteen during the war, and on this day it was me.
“I didn’t even know that anyone took a picture. I didn’t see it until years later. I had my blues on—I look at that picture today, at me in my uniform, and I don’t think I could get my leg in now where my stomach was then.
“I remember they kept yelling what songs they wanted me to play. ‘Let’s hear “In the Mood.” ’ I wasn’t nervous about playing the songs—I was nervous about time. I knew I’d have to get on my train before very long.
“Everyone was having a good time—you get that many people together, singing, there’s no chance to be blue, at least for those few minutes. I remember that when it was time for me to go, I got up and made a little speech thanking all the ladies who made the food for us.
“I was pleased as I got back on the train. I’d played for the people, I had a big old ham sandwich and a cold glass of milk in my stomach—what more could I have asked for?”
He said he was stationed at Pearl Harbor at the end of the war, and served there for a few years after that. “I came back to Nebraska, and the GI Bill was available to all of us, but I decided I was not collegiate material. Looking back, studying was not my bit.
“I got a job as a Linotype operator—this was back in the hot metal days. I worked on weeklies at first—there was one called the Fremont Guide and Tribune. I worked on some commercial printing jobs, and I got a job at the newspaper in North Platte, where I worked for twenty-two years. That’s how North Platte became my home.
“I’m retired now, unless you count mowing my own front lawn for free. I’m glad that I wound up here. This town has never been a big town, but it seems to have a good heart.
“I never would have guessed it, the day the train stopped and I went into the Canteen—I never would have guessed that I would end up spending most of the rest of my life here.
“That stop that day was so brief. But it’s funny—I can still hear the music I played that day. I can hear it right now.”
There did not seem to be an overabundance of entertainment options in town as Saturday night approached; I browsed through the North Platte Telegraph, looking for somewhere to spend a few hours, and came up empty.
I didn’t want to just spend the night in my room. Around the hotel since my arrival I had run into quite a few men and women who told me they were serving as coaches or chaperones at a big softball event that was being held in town: the Amateur Softball Association’s Sixteen-and-Under Regional Softball Tournament, in which girls’ teams from around the Midwest were competing in an effort to make it to the nationals. The men and women had suggested that I come out and watch.
So, around dinnertime, I did. The Dowhower Softball Complex was on the north side of town, past the Union Pacific tracks where the Canteen had used to be. The local favorites—the North Platte Sensations—were scheduled to play the St. Louis Lightning.
The heat wave had not broken, not even a little, and the temperature still hovered around triple digits. The dirt on the back-to-back diamonds was baked solid; the coaches were telling the girls to “drink a lot of water,” as if such a suggestion was necessary. The girls on both teams looked as though they had been on a forced march through the desert, and the contest had not even begun yet.
“You’re the one, one, one, you’re the one,” the girls chanted in the direction of one of their players, trying to encourage her toward a good performance in the game to come. The team members were cheerleaders and participants,
all at once—“They’ve got different cheers for every one,” the mother of an infielder told me.
The star of the Sensations, I could see, was a pitcher the girls called Pook. A tall young woman, she had fire in her eyes as she warmed up. I was told that her real name was Jessica German, and that she lived in Cozad, some fifty miles away. She could have pitched for the Cozad Classics, but the North Platte Sensations were a much better team, a regional powerhouse, so she had chosen to play for them.
The game began; the parents of the players stood along the baselines, or, so they could see the right diamond, sat backward on the top row of a set of bleachers built facing another field. Their legs dangled in the air. A few feet away, a “Rain Room”—a tent with mist-producing sprinklers rigged up—provided a cooldown area for younger boys and girls, including a few in diapers who ran through the falling water.
Next to the home team’s bench, a handmade sponsor board was propped up, featuring advertisements for local businesses that supported the team. The ads—pieces of paper inserted into clear plastic sleeves on the board—promoted companies that could serve a North Platte citizen on various stops from birth to death: the Old MacDonald Day Care and Nursery School. The White-Musseman Hearing Aid Center. The Carpenter Memorial Chapel, Troy Tickle, director.
“All right, Pook!” the girls on the Sensations called out as the game began. I found Pook’s father—his name was Britt German—sitting atop one of the backward-facing bleachers, watching his girl. He told me that he was an electrical lineman for the city of Cozad, and that Pook was what Jessica had been called when she was a baby; the name had stuck.
He had encouraged her to play for the Sensations, he said, because “she loves the game, and this is a better team for her than the one in Cozad.” It was not the most convenient decision; he had to drive her all the way to North Platte and back for every practice and every game of the year—each time a hundred-mile round trip. “I bring her and wait with the wives,” he said.