Once Upon a Town

by Bob Greene

  She said that she remembers the beauty of it still:

  “Bright, bright, shining lights. They looked like they came all the way from Alaska. In the winter, they seemed even brighter. My husband had a Ford—he was an electrical engineer, he helped make capacitors for Navy bombs—and he and I would sit there, not saying very much, just taking in the beauty of those stars above Nebraska.”

  She volunteered at the Canteen, she said, and in her spare time she would write letters to her two brothers. “They were my only two brothers, and they were in the service—my husband had four brothers in the service, so I would write to all six of those boys. You didn’t send your letters to an address where they were actually fighting—you sent them to an APO address, and your letters were forwarded from there.

  “I sent cookies, and they arrived all crumbled up. I would get letters back from the boys saying, ‘We got your cookies—we ate the crumbles.’”

  She laughed at the memory of that. “The meat we made for sandwiches at the Canteen wasn’t crumbled, but it was ground up,” she said. “When it was Sutherland’s day at the Canteen, we would make our own meat and grind it up for sandwiches. We knew the boys on the trains would be in a hurry, so the meat sandwiches and the boiled eggs were ready for them when they came running in. People had told them on the train that if they wanted a certain kind of sandwich, they’d have to get there first. Of course, that wasn’t true—we would give them any kind of sandwich they asked for.

  “But they didn’t know that, and they raced in—and sometimes they didn’t know what to do. They just stood there. They didn’t know what to say. So we would stand behind the counter and say, ‘Would you like something?’ They would nod yes, and we would say to them: ‘Help yourself.’

  “They were just new young boys, going to war.”

  Mrs. Townsend said that after the war she became a licensed ham-radio operator, to give herself a way to pass the hours. Pulling voices out of the sky, one at a time—not network radio broadcasts, but individual voices—pulling those voices into her Nebraska home.

  “I would be talking to a person in Venezuela, and I would tell him where I was, and he would say, ‘I went through North Platte during the war. I want you to know what it meant to me.’ And then I would hear other voices coming on, from all over the world. ‘North Platte? I’ve been to North Platte.’ ‘Did you say North Platte, ma’am? I once stopped in the Canteen.’ I would tell them that I had worked at the Canteen, and then more and more voices would join in, saying that they had been there, and thanking me. Telling me how much it had meant to them, to have all of us waiting at the station for them.”

  There was one day and night in particular at the Canteen—an especially busy day and night for the troop trains—when seven thousand soldiers and sailors came into the depot. Seven thousand, in that one day. And they were all greeted, they were all fed, they were all thanked.

  I asked Mrs. Townsend if the boys were aware that this had been the Sutherland ladies’ day at the Canteen—if they realized that the women who were working so hard to make them happy were on hand because it was Sutherland’s day to be there.

  “No,” she said softly. “That wasn’t the point.

  “The boys didn’t know it was our day.

  “It was their day.”

  Everything I was hearing about the town—every story, every remembrance—was told against the backdrop of the depot not being there anymore. Its absence from the city, for the people who had once worked inside the Canteen walls, was akin to a limb being missing from a person. Something was not whole, and never would be again.

  When the trains had constantly brought visitors to North Platte—thirty-two times a day, even after the war was over, as Mr. Beckius had told me—the town, or so it seemed, had been something that it now was not. I wanted to find out what that truly meant, from those who had been around when the depot vanished—who had been in town when the sound of the passenger-train whistles stopped forever.

  Fourteen

  There were days when I discovered that entire lifetimes had been played out on the platform next to the tracks—it was as if the depot platform had been a theater stage. Home to dramas performed without the benefit of any script.

  “I sold newspapers at the depot, when I was a boy,” said Donald Land, sixty-nine, who now lives in Kansas City, Kansas. “We had lived in a town called Dickens, Nebraska, that had a population of about one hundred fifty. But work had kind of run out in Dickens for my father, so in the summer of 1942 he moved us to North Platte. I was ten.”

  He was the new boy at Cleveland Elementary School; his father had moved the family into a house on Roosevelt Street, north of the Union Pacific tracks. Wanting something to do in the unfamiliar town, he decided to try to sell papers.

  “I don’t know what gave me the idea,” he said. “I guess I just thought of it. I would go to the North Platte Telegraph office after school and pick up my papers. I paid for the papers, and sold them for a nickel apiece. I made two cents a paper.

  “I would do it every day I could. I would wear just what I went to school in—a pair of Lee jeans. I would wear them, and a regular collared shirt, and go to the depot and wait for the troop trains to come in.

  “The GIs would get off the trains and hurry toward the Canteen, and I’d have a handful of papers. I could sell a whole bundle and run back to get some more—the Telegraph office was only about a block and a half away. I’d hold the papers in my arm unfolded, and call out, ‘Paper, paper!’”

  That’s what he was doing one day when he was startled to see a certain soldier getting off a troop train.

  “It was my first cousin Edward Yonker, from Oberlin, Kansas,” Mr. Land said. “My mother’s sister’s boy. I had no idea he was even in the service. He was about eighteen. This troop train pulled up, and I was calling ‘Paper, paper!’ as usual, and there was my cousin Edward, in an Army uniform.

  “I probably hadn’t seen him in five years—we used to have family reunions, and I had last seen him at one of those. I just walked up to him with my papers in my hand, and said, ‘Hi.’ He was just as surprised to see me. I don’t remember what our conversation was, except that he told me that seeing me made him homesick.

  “He went into the Canteen and did whatever the soldiers did in there. I kind of waited for him on the platform. He came out with a sandwich, and I waved goodbye to him.

  “The train pulled out. I remember thinking that I would have liked to go with him. When you’re a young boy, you want to be a part of all that. I knew they were going off to war, but I guess I didn’t really understand what that meant.

  “When I got home that night, I told my mom. I said that I had seen Eddie.”

  And as for Eddie himself? What had happened to him?

  Edward Yonker lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, and at seventy-six is that town’s retired fire chief. Mr. Yonker told me that on the day he stopped in North Platte, “I was going across the country on my way to catch a ship.” The ship was the USS Shangri-La, an aircraft carrier that would take him to the Pacific.

  “I had just gotten out of high school in Kansas,” Mr. Yonker said, “and I had signed up for the duration plus six months. I didn’t really know what I was getting into—I was a kid from a dry-land farm.

  “Our troop train was kind of open, and the black soot from the engine would come right into the cars. We were pretty black. I didn’t expect to see anyone I knew at the North Platte station. My buddies knew I was from that part of the country, and they knew I was feeling lonely. One of the guys asked me, ‘Are you going to go AWOL here?’ I told him, ‘I feel like it.’

  “And then I walked from the train onto the platform, and I ran into Don, my little cousin, selling his newspapers. It made me feel so homesick—I was tempted to go home with him. The fact that the train station was so close to his parents’ house…

  “Instead I just went into the Canteen and got some sandwiches and milk. I went back onto the platform and asked
Don about his family, and asked him if he had heard from my folks. I made the decision to get back on the train, of course. But I wished I could have stayed. I wished I could have stayed in Nebraska that day.”

  He continued on toward the war. But the platform next to the tracks was not finished with the Land family yet. There would be one more act in the play.

  In 1951, Don—his paperboy days over—was in the service himself, stationed in England with the Air Force. The base was near the Mersey River. At the time, the Air Force base would send out invitations to local businesses, inviting young women who worked there to come to dances.

  One young woman—really just a girl of sixteen, named Jeanette Pattullo—was working as a secretary at the Edward Denton and Sons accounting firm. “I was going to night school also, to learn shorthand and typing,” she told me. “My sister thought it would be fun to take me along. My employers scolded me for taking off from work early that day to get ready to take the GI bus to the dance.”

  That night, she met Donald Land. He was nineteen—only a few years removed from selling copies of the Telegraph outside the North Platte Canteen. “It might not have been love at first sight,” she said. “But it was infatuation at first sight.”

  Before long they were married. Then Donald Land was sent back to the United States, to another Air Force base. Their baby son was born after he was already gone.

  “So I set off for the United States on the liner Britannic,” Mrs. Land told me. “Six days on the high seas for my baby and me. My uncle was the chief bedroom steward on the Britannic. I come from a family of seafaring people.

  “We got to New York and I took a train all the way from New York City to Chicago. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law were going to meet me. The three of us, and the baby, were going to ride together to North Platte.

  “I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the Chicago train station. I didn’t even realize it was my birthday—I was too busy taking care of the baby. Before I met Donald, I had never even heard of the state of Nebraska. It sounded like something out of an American cowboy movie—Texas, California, Arizona, Wyoming, all of those places.

  “I can see all of it in my mind’s eye now. The train, the people. It was so hot that day I arrived in North Platte. Donald was standing with the rest of his family on the platform at the station as our train pulled in. It was June; I hadn’t seen him since February. He had never seen his son.

  “I remember embracing him on the platform, in all the heat. I was with my husband and our baby. The three of us were together, starting our new life. Right on that platform at the train station.”

  They have been married for forty-eight years now. The drama on the platform stage, at least for the family of Donald Land, was an overwhelming success, with many encores.

  But the stage itself—the station platform by the tracks—is long gone.

  Around town, the verbal shorthand has it that the Union Pacific passenger depot was torn down “in the middle of the night.”

  The words are said with bite and bitterness. By 1973, the passenger trains had been gone for two years. The tracks still ran through North Platte, used for the Union Pacific’s freight operations. But the days of salesmen stepping off the trains and into the station, of visitors strolling into downtown after a train trip to the city…those days were over, and they weren’t coming back.

  Still, for two years after 1971 the old depot remained. Some Union Pacific business offices operated out of the building, and it was lent out for community gatherings. It was a reminder—not just of the Canteen, but of what the city had felt like when it was a proud part of America’s passenger rail system.

  During the two years after the passenger trains disappeared, North Platte residents recall, there was talk from time to time that the depot might be demolished. No one really believed it; it was impossible to visualize downtown without its onetime lifesource.

  So when, during the first week of November in 1973, the Union Pacific, without any announcement, moved in crews to knock the depot down, there was hurt in the town, and impotent outrage. The railroad, after it was done, explained that high-speed freight service was the company’s source of revenue now, and that the old train station had no use in North Platte’s post–passenger-train era. Some in the town were convinced that the railroad destroyed the depot because it feared passenger service might return—human passengers were a money loser for railroads by that part of the twentieth century, and anything a railroad company could do to discourage passenger traffic was considered fiscally smart.

  At least that is what some of the town’s longtime residents believed. But the Union Pacific could do whatever it wanted—it owned the depot and it owned the land. What the Union Pacific wanted was to get rid of the station. It happened quickly, and was done.

  “They tore the depot down in the middle of the night,” those who loved it say today. But there are few of those people left—and their numbers diminish daily, recorded on the obituary page of the Telegraph.

  “You would hear the train whistle from off in the distance,” said Lorene Huebner, seventy-six, “and it would send a tingle down your spine. It was a thrilling feeling that you didn’t get anywhere else.”

  She was telling me about what went through her as she stood on that platform waiting for the soldiers to arrive. “The adrenaline would pump through you,” she said. “‘Here comes the train.’ I imagine the feeling is what it is like when you’re skiing down a hill.”

  She was a teenager at the time; her family lived on a Nebraska farm near the town of Hershey, and her mother belonged to the Ladies Aid of the local Methodist church. “We teenage girls didn’t get to go into town unless we had a mission,” she said. “There were only eleven students in our class. So when Mom would go to the Canteen, I would want to go with her.”

  The Ladies Aid women would dress up on their Canteen day, Mrs. Huebner said, and so would she: “The women wore their Sunday clothes, and lot of them wore hats. They didn’t have money to get their hair done at a beauty parlor, so they put the hats on.

  “I was about sixteen. It was exciting to go to North Platte and see the handsome young sailor boys. Our parents didn’t worry that we would run off into the wild blue with a boy. It was an impossibility. How would a girl run off on a troop train?”

  It was the older girls from the Canteen who would tell the younger girls how much fun the place was: “They would tell us that it was overwhelming to meet all these guys in uniform. There’s something about a man in uniform that demanded your esteem and made your heart thump. We were enthralled by them.”

  She said she liked to wear “a red dress with a keyhole neckline” to the Canteen: “I wore it because it was pretty flashy. Your heart got all aflutter when the train arrived. The ladies in the Canteen would tell you what they wanted you to do…hand out sandwiches, pass around apples in baskets…. There were no Styrofoam cups at that time, they just had the old china type at the Canteen, and each cup had to be washed and dried with a tea towel.”

  As indelible as the memories are now, she said, at the time “it was just part of your life. You didn’t put an X on the woodwork—you just went to the Canteen when it was your day.

  “That piano in the corner—some sailor boy would come in and start playing, and it was fabulous. It set the mood. I don’t remember dancing—there was so much going on, it was pure bedlam.”

  Soon enough, though, “another train would be coming down the track. You’d say ‘See you later, and good luck’ to the boys getting back on one train, and you’d get ready for the next train. Sometimes a boy would tell one of the women that she reminded him of his mother, and he might get a hug and kiss from her before going.”

  At the end of each day spent at the Canteen, Mrs. Huebner said, “You would feel like you had done something worthwhile, for the glory of God and the glory of your nation. You would pray that those boys you had just seen would come back home. They were not much older than we were.

 
“And you would ask yourself if this was ever going to end.”

  She married “a farmer boy,” and “we celebrated our fortieth anniversary. He died before our forty-first.” For a while, she said, “I didn’t care if my life went on or not.” Now she is on her own, and she is surprised by some of the things that bother her.

  “At ball games, you’re supposed to stand with your hand over your heart for the national anthem,” she said. “I go to high school basketball and football games, and I see people put their hands behind their backs, and I want to shout at them. Some don’t take their hats off. Those darn ball caps, worn backward. During the anthem. I want to scream and shout to the high heavens. Show some respect!”

  And of course she thinks of the Canteen, and of the long-ago boys in their uniforms:

  “They were all young and scared, I would say. Lonesome. A lot of times they didn’t know where they were going. We made them feel good for a few minutes, but probably by the time they were a few miles down the track, they had returned to lonesome and scared.”

  She said that what North Platte gave the soldiers was love. Not the trivial type, either.

  “There are different kinds of love,” she said. “You can love a strawberry shortcake. You can love a ride to town.

  “But this…this was real. This was love.”

  Every time I would stop by the rectangle of land where the train station used to be, I would find only vagrants there. It seemed to be a gathering place for men with nowhere else to go; I would see them drinking liquor from bottles concealed in brown paper bags, or sometimes not concealed at all.

  Day and night, they would sit with their backs to Front Street, staring toward the tracks. I thought about what might have happened to the old depot, had the Union Pacific let it stay up. Without a reason for being there, without railroad employees and passengers inside the building full-time, it might have turned into something tawdry: a drug house, a place for squatters, somewhere dangerous. A blight on the town.