Once Upon a Town

by Bob Greene

  “But we would drive to North Platte, to the Canteen. And when the trains rolled in…man, the sight of all those guys jumping off…

  “None of us girls were allowed on the trains. Those guys had been away from women for a long time. We knew we should stay away from the train cars.”

  I told her that I had heard the soldiers were always perfect gentlemen to the Canteen women.

  “Like I say, they had been away from women for a while,” Mrs. Schomer said. “Let me put it this way: My mom and dad would have killed me if I had put my name in a popcorn ball.”

  Her life, she said, had not turned out exactly the way she might have dreamed. “First I worked in a dime store,” she said. “F. W. Woolworth. I was getting ready to go to the teachers’ college in Kearney, but I had major female surgery two weeks before. And then that was the year the crops failed.”

  She got married when she was twenty-one, she said, “but twelve and a half years later my husband died. I was a widow at thirty-three.” To support herself she went to work for the Union Pacific Railroad, as a clerk, and stayed with the company for thirty-three years.

  “I feel very sad that the passenger trains don’t come through anymore,” she said. “It used to be that if you wanted to go to a big town like Denver or Omaha, you could just jump on the train and go. I could get a train to Denver at five-thirty or six in the morning, shop for three or four hours, and be home that night.

  “It was fascinating just to have the trains coming through all the time. If you didn’t have a lot of money to spend, you could go down by the tracks and watch the trains, and play pump-pump-pullaway with your friends—where you pull each other apart. Or you could play andy-andy-over, where you would throw a ball over a building and have your friend try to catch it on the other side.”

  She can still see the old depot, she said, even though it is gone. “Do you know, I can see the soldiers running to make the trains,” she said. “In my mind, I can see all of it. I visualize that, more than I visualize the soldiers running off the train and into the depot. Because there was something about how much they liked being here—they knew they had to get to that train or it would leave them, but they always stayed to the very last minute.

  “That’s what I see, when I close my eyes—those soldiers on Front Street, running.”

  It wasn’t that the East Coast, and what it represented, was foreign or exotic to west-central Nebraska during the Canteen days. Then, as now, national companies did everything they could to drum up sales everywhere in the U.S. I went through some old editions of North Platte’s newspapers from the war years, and on most pages there were advertisements for famous brands—Waneita Schomer may have been a girl on a family farm with no electricity, but that didn’t stop the merchandisers from trying to entice families like hers to be customers.

  Montgomery Ward proclaimed that “in spite of rising costs, in spite of material shortages,” it was cutting its prices on radios. “Here’s your chance! Trade in your own set on this sensational 1942 Airline.” The Airline was a stand-up console radio, bigger than most of today’s television sets. Wards was selling it for “$59.88, less liberal trade-in.” For families on budgets, a smaller radio could be had for $26.88. The war was the context of the sales pitch—“Now! Get Europe!”—and the little radio was promoted for its strong reception, necessary out on the plains: “Price cut on this powerful 7-tube! Look at the features—automatic tuning, tone control, loop aerial, big speaker! Includes rectifier!”

  Burpee’s seed company, operating out of headquarters at W. Atlee Burpee’s Burpee Building in Philadelphia, took out ads offering the people of North Platte Burpee’s Giant Zinnias in the “five best colors—scarlet, lavender, yellow, rose and white.” Five packets of seeds could be purchased for a total price of ten cents. Pepsi-Cola, through its local bottling affiliate, was running a wartime promotion with North Platte bowling alley owners: “There’s PEP in Pepsi-Cola to improve your bowling score! Insist on it always! Twice as big—twice as good!” The manufacturers of Camel cigarettes were positioning their product in an elite category, depicting in their advertising a man and woman on a ski holiday, enjoying Camels in the great outdoors; it was said to be “the cigarette of costlier tobaccos.”

  The nation and its famous products in the 1940s entered North Platte in myriad ways—from the Buicks on sale at Hahler Buick-Olds, to the name-brand couches, chairs and tables on display at Midwest Furniture Company on Dewey Street, where living room suites started at $49.50. So it was not that North Platte during the war was unaware of what the rest of America found to be alluring. North Platte knew—its citizens were being asked on a daily basis to purchase parts of that allure for themselves.

  The affecting thing was not that North Platte knew about the East Coast and the big cities. The affecting thing was that men from those big cities were learning about North Platte. Men like George Dawson, of Manhattan.

  “I was drafted into the Army Air Corps in January of 1943,” said Mr. Dawson, who is now seventy-seven. “I had been a college student at City College of New York; before that I had gone to the High School of Commerce on Seventy-fourth Street.

  “What they got when they took me into the service was a kid from Manhattan who had never been farther west than Hoboken. I became a B-24 navigator. There was a long trip across the country soon after I went into the service. A train trip to California.”

  On the train ride, he said, he began to see an America he had only heard or read about. “I liked the vistas,” he said. “The immense spaces. I had not been used to that.”

  As the train approached North Platte, “I knew about the river, and Lewis and Clark and all that, from my studies in school. I did not expect what came next. A sergeant told us that we could get out of the train in North Platte, and we did—and here was this Union Pacific train station, loaded with tables….”

  As Paul Metro had when he had spoken with me from his hospital room, Mr. Dawson began to cry. He said:

  “There was love there….”

  He had to stop.

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a few moments. “It wasn’t Times Square, that depot. It wasn’t Grand Central Station. But what that depot was…I was overwhelmed by the pure, simple generosity. We were treated as if we were their sons. They could not have treated their own sons with more kindness than they treated us.”

  He paused again. It was a while before he could continue.

  “Nothing fazes a New York teenager,” he said. “I took it in stride, that day. When you grow up in New York, New York is the city, anything else is the country. That day at the Canteen—all of this was happening to me with a bunch of guys. At some level when you’re in your teens, you just accept the things that happen to you as the way things are.

  “Nebraska was unknown territory to a New York kid. Before that day, I probably thought of Nebraska in terms of big, Scandinavian people. Probably what I saw in a Hollywood movie about Middle America. That day I learned something. I learned that the country was a hell of a lot bigger than Manhattan island. I found that out in North Platte.”

  He lives on Cape Cod now, he said: “above the state forest.” He spent his life after the war as a sales representative for academic textbooks. He finds himself thinking of North Platte often, “with tender thoughts and feelings.” There is a reason for that, he said:

  “I don’t know if you talk to many other fellows my age, but there is more looking back than looking forward. I had an uneven childhood. Things were not always the happiest in the house where I grew up. I needed a feeling of community more than most people, or so I suppose. That’s what moved me so much in North Platte. It was their acceptance of me without question. I didn’t grow up with that.

  “Who were we, on that train? We were the hope of the world, at that moment. We were any kid on the street. We were all the same. We all wore the same uniform. We were ‘our boys.’ We were their boys.”

  He went into the service as a private, he said; he
left as a second lieutenant. He went through North Platte twice more: “The next times I was there the feeling was the same, but I could let the guys on the train know what was waiting for them there.”

  He still recalls his first impression of the people who greeted him in the Canteen. “They seemed more secure, more centered than the people I was used to,” he said. “I was not made to feel like an outsider. I brought that with me—the idea that I would be seen as different from them. But they were so welcoming.”

  He apologized again for being so emotional; he said he was surprising himself by the depth of his reaction. He said he had not talked about North Platte for a long time, and that he doubts he will ever get back there before he dies.

  I asked him if there was anything he would like for me to say to the people of the town.

  “Tell them they have a secret admirer on Cape Cod,” he said.

  “Tell them there’s someone who loves them.”

  The horse was there every day, at Cornhusker Circle and McDonald. NO HORSES ALLOWED, the sign at the entrance of the nearby park admonished. But the horse was not inside the park—it just seemed to live in a city neighborhood, in a city where such a thing did not seem so unusual. In a city that even now did not feel like every other place in the world.

  Thirteen

  The twin sounds—I was getting accustomed to hearing them. One sound from the south of town, one from the north.

  The sound from the south was the seamless roar of speeding cars. They were on Interstate 80, on their way farther west into Nebraska, or to Wyoming and Colorado. Even when you could not see the cars, you could hear them—their engines, their horns, their tires against the concrete. Through the trees, that sound never stopped, day or night. People moving, at the wheels of their own vehicles. No stoplights or stop signs on the interstate—never the noise of anyone or anything coming to a halt.

  The sound from the north was only intermittent. If the constant whine of the automobile traffic never let up from the south of town, the whistle or rumble of a train coming from the north section, out past the viaducts, would catch you by surprise. The trains were freight trains, of course—no passenger train came anywhere near North Platte anymore. The freight tracks on the north side of the city were in the same place as had been the tracks that delivered the soldiers to the depot, all those years before. Maybe the people who now lived near the tracks kept a schedule in their heads—maybe they knew what time of day and night the different freight runs rolled through. But I could never make sense of it.

  Every time I would hear the first hints of a train on its way, it surprised me anew. It was as if the cars to the south, on the interstate, were providing the solid bed of some song, the steady background part, and the trains up north were the veteran, temperamental lead singer, strolling into the studio to record his vocals only when he felt like it. The tune they made together was a pleasing one—I never tired of it. In North Platte, I began to hear it in my dreams.

  I wasn’t the only one.

  “I was coming to North Platte with my father when I was three or four years old, to pick up groceries for his store,” said Jim Beckius, seventy-four, who now lives there himself. “I was born in Stapleton, thirty miles north. My father had a grocery in Stapleton. He bought it in 1929, of all times to buy a business.

  “It was called Beckius’ Cash Grocery. But it seemed like it was all credit in those days. People just didn’t have the money. There weren’t many streets in that town, and the streets that there were didn’t have names. There was just one real intersection, with street lamps on all four corners, and drinking fountains on two of the corners. As a boy I worked Saturdays and Sundays, stacking shelves and taking care of the eggs the farmers brought in to trade for groceries. Twelve or thirteen dollars was a huge order—that would buy enough groceries to fill up two or three boxes.

  “My father helped out a lot of people in our town, by carrying them on credit so their families could eat. After he died, I looked at his records. There were people with twelve hundred or thirteen hundred dollars in bills, people who never had been able to pay him back.

  “I was sixteen when I graduated from Baker Rural High School in 1943. There were only eighteen students in my graduating class. I went into the Navy as a combat air crewman. I had the glorified title of aviation radioman and gunner. I was afraid of the water. In the sandhills we didn’t have any lakes, and I never did learn how to swim. I learned when I was in boot camp near Memphis. They throwed you in. I went right to the bottom, and they pulled me up. That’s how they did it in the Navy during the war—if you couldn’t swim, they gave you lessons. I got to be a pretty good swimmer, but I never did it after I got out of the Navy.”

  In December of 1943, he said, he was allowed to come home to Nebraska for a seven-day leave. “If you were from around North Platte, and you knew about the Canteen, you were kind of proud of it,” he said. “You’d tell the other guys on the train: ‘You’re really going to be fed well, and it’s not going to cost you one cent.’ They didn’t believe it. They said that no one ever got nothing for nothing.

  “And then they got there, and saw a lot of ladies with a lot of food, and young girls of nineteen or twenty out on the platform with baskets of apples and magazines…. In pheasant season the people at the Canteen would fry up the pheasants for sandwiches, and some of these kids didn’t know what a pheasant was. I’d have to tell them. I love pheasant—when I was a kid the hunting limit was twelve a day. I was seventeen that December when I came home for Christmas. My family didn’t even know I was coming.”

  The depot that Christmas, he said, reminded him of when his father had taken him into North Platte all those times when he was so young. “I didn’t know any of the people in North Platte when the train pulled in on my Christmas leave, but it felt like home,” he said. “The next year, in December of 1944, I spent Christmas at Union Station in Chicago. It was as empty as a tomb. I’d always heard about Union Station, how busy and full of people it was. But that Christmas there was no one there. It made me think about all the people at the depot in North Platte, all the people at the Canteen.”

  He served in the Pacific, got out of the Navy in August of 1946, and arrived back home on a bus. He got a job with the Union Pacific, at a time when rail travel was at a peak. “In October of 1947, there were thirty-two passenger trains a day stopping at the depot in North Platte. Think of what that means for a little town—thirty-two trains a day.

  “The great trains—the City of Los Angeles, the City of Denver, the City of San Francisco, the Challenger, the Gold Coast. After the war, so many people were riding the trains. A lot of salesmen—even if they weren’t staying in North Platte, they’d have time to run across the street and have a beer. They set foot in the town.

  “It was better for the town, just seeing people all the time. And people from all over this part of Nebraska would come here to get on the trains. It makes a town feel like it has life. Once they made the highways better, and everyone started staying in their cars, the railroad just kind of started to fade away.

  “It’s been so long since we’ve had passenger trains. There would be no depot to go to, anyway. The town sounds different. You don’t hear those old steam whistles. I hated the steam engines, at the time. You’d work on them, and they’d be hot in the summer and cold in the winter—you’d wish for something better. But when they left, I missed them. That sound, especially. Thirty-two trains a day—the sound was always in the air in this town. All the time—the sound was like the air itself.”

  It wasn’t that the outside world had stopped coming to North Platte entirely. The world was simply delivered in different ways—more efficiently than by railroad trains.

  The satellite dishes were a daily reminder of that to me. There was one that I kept passing—in front of a house on the 1500 block of Buffalo Bill Avenue. There was something about the juxtaposition of that—the snout of the dish aimed up toward the stars, ready to suck the world’s images
down to the ground, to a piece of road named for Buffalo Bill—that made me stop and pause next to the dish more than once.

  But it had always been so. Only the technology had changed. During the war years, when first-run movies were America’s primary form of visual entertainment, the theaters in North Platte showed the same films that audiences in New York and Chicago were seeing. During my time spent reading through North Platte newspapers from the 1940s, I found references to Midnight Manhunt starring William Gargan and Ann Savage, playing at the Paramount; For Whom the Bell Tolls starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, playing at the Fox; Man from Music Mountain starring Roy Rogers and Trigger, playing at the State, all of the movie theaters downtown, near the Canteen.

  And there had been radio: KODY in North Platte, WOW sending in its strong signal from Omaha, KFAB beaming in from Lincoln. The voices that floated out of the sky and into the homes here were voices that were being heard in Los Angeles, in Dallas, in Miami: Clifton Utley Speaks at 7:30 A.M., The Fred Waring Show at 10 A.M., Young Dr. Malone at 1 P.M., Burns and Allen at 6:30 P.M., Elmer Davis News at 7:55 P.M., The Kay Kyser Program at 9 P.M., The Ramon Ramos Orchestra at 11:30 P.M.

  One day I spoke with a woman named Dorothy Townsend, who told me that the radio signals coming out of the sky weren’t the only joy being delivered from above.

  “It could be pretty bleak out in Nebraska during the war,” said Mrs. Townsend, eighty-eight. “The towns we lived in were mostly very small, and there was not a lot for a person to do.”

  She and her husband had lived in Sutherland, she said, and one of the ways they had come up with to entertain themselves was to look at the stars.

  “We would stop and watch the northern lights,” she said. “We would pull off the road and sit and look at the sky. We would make an evening of it—we would come to North Platte to go to church, and then we would eat a bite before driving out to look at the stars.”