Once Upon a Town

by Bob Greene

  Marian Peterson—she was Marian Rodine then—is sixty-eight. The way she recalls being a young girl in the sandhills, “We went to church, or grocery shopping, but we didn’t go to the movies. I grew up near Gothenburg, and I don’t think I saw a movie until I was in high school.”

  Which is why the Canteen was such a thrill for her, at the age of eight or nine. “I would go with my mother’s ladies’ group—it was a church group called the New Hope Dorcas. My mother never learned to drive, so my dad did the driving to the Canteen. He drove, and carried the food.

  “It was such a different way of life for me to see. The sailor boys were so good-looking, to a young girl like me. The sailors and the soldiers would just come rushing in the door, like they couldn’t believe there was enough food for them. They would play the piano and sing…that was so interesting for me, never having seen anything or done anything like that.”

  Her knowledge of the war, she said, mostly came from listening to family conversations. “I don’t know if we had a newspaper in the house or not,” she said. “We mostly gathered around the radio not to listen to war news, but to soap operas. Fibber McGee and Molly. We’d sit there and listen to it together, and play dominoes.

  “The war, to us, was not something that came out of the radio. It was the boys at the Canteen.”

  In a different part of the sandhills, the man she would marry—Kent Peterson, now sixty-seven—was growing up, too. They had yet to meet.

  “My family lived near Brady, between Gothenburg and North Platte,” he said. “We had a pretty modern radio, for the time—my uncle had a hardware store, and we came into town from the farm and bought one there. We kept our radio in the kitchen—that’s where you gathered, that’s where you had your heating stove, and your food.

  “One of our neighbors, Mr. Craig, would come over and listen to the radio with us. He liked the fights. So if boxing was going on, we’d have to listen to boxing. War would have to wait.

  “You would listen to the radio with your family in the kitchen, and you just warmed up real good and jumped in bed. You would heat up a flatiron, wrap a blanket around it, and put it in your bed down by your feet. That would keep you warm for most of the night.”

  He said he would go to the Canteen with the group of volunteers from Brady, often in the evening: “We’d get out of school, and hurry up and milk the cows. I definitely liked going to the Canteen—we couldn’t wait to get those fourteen cows milked so we could get started.

  “The servicemen from the trains were always so neatly dressed. It was such a rat race, with them hurrying around—I didn’t want to be like those guys. It was kind of scary. I was a little boy from a farm, nine years old. It was too much for me to want to be a part of.

  “But it was fascinating to see. My family and I always just wore overalls all the time—I had never seen anyone with uniforms like that. It was such an event, riding the twenty-eight miles to see all that at the Canteen.

  “Muddy roads, and no lights along the roads at night—but I hadn’t seen anything in the world. I might have gotten to town once a month, if that. To take cream in to sell to the grocer. We’d get seven dollars for a five-gallon can of cream, and we’d spend six dollars of that on groceries, and save the other dollar for church.”

  That was sandhills life, for a young person as the war was beginning. Eventually, he and Marian Rodine would meet.

  “I was a cheerleader at Gothenburg High School,” she said. “He tells me he would come from Brady to the football games and see me cheer. I graduated from high school in 1950, and I didn’t know him. I went away to the Bonnell Beauty Academy in Hastings, and then I came back to Gothenburg to work at the La Grace Beauty Shop. I met Kent at church, at an evening Christmas program. He escorted me back to my home that night. We got married in 1954.”

  Kent Peterson said: “The cheerleader girls were pretty good-looking, and she was the prettiest one of the bunch. I’d go down to the fence and pretend to be watching the game. You had to be on the move, at that fence—you couldn’t just stand there. But the reason I was there was to look at her.”

  I asked him if, when they finally met, they had fallen in love right away.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, half a century later, laughter in his voice. “We’re still working on it.”

  I rode north on Route 83, past the viaduct, past the tracks, past the old Elks Club and the softball complex, out of town. I wanted to see the sandhills at their most unpopulated.

  At one time—as late as the 1860s—this was known as the Great American Desert; some topographical experts of that era declared that it was unfit for human habitation. They were wrong; although the sandhills are, in essence, literal dunes, their fragile surface is held in place by the tenacious roots of native grasses. The grass stabilizes the hills; as long as the grass is safeguarded and kept intact, the sandhills provide the best grazing land for cattle on the North American continent, and a stunning portrait of glorious isolation for those who live here—and especially for those who are seeing all of this for the first time.

  As I proceeded farther out of town—in the direction of Stapleton, and Thedford, and Lewanna and Brownlee and Valentine, all the villages leading to the bottom border of South Dakota—the houses became fewer, and the stretches of land between the farms grew longer and longer. There was green all around, in every direction; contrary to the name, the sandhills in summer had the lush and spellbinding look of a perfect and undulating putting green, the largest putting green imaginable at the most far-flung and expansive golf course in the world.

  There were moments—almost inexpressibly splendorous moments—when the sandhills were all that seemed to exist. Nothing but them, as far as the eye could behold. I thought about Mr. and Mrs. Peterson, and what it must have been like when they were very young, coming with their parents into North Platte, which, surrounded by the sandhills, must have seemed like Manhattan. And I thought, as I was always thinking now, of those soldiers on the trains. Of what they must have pondered as they passed through this country.

  “Fourteen months ago I lost my wife of forty-eight years,” said Lawrence W. Jones, seventy-seven, who lives in Nacogdoches, Texas. “I’m coming out of a tunnel. I was just numb for seven or eight months.”

  He was explaining that he felt all right—or at least felt good enough to talk with me about the Canteen, and why it has such an enduring place in his heart.

  “It would have been about the first part of August in 1943,” he said. “I was a tailgunner in the Army Air Corps. I wasn’t even old enough to buy a drink.

  “I had volunteered out of high school in Sarasota, Florida. There was nothing to do in that town—the only jobs available were working at soda fountains, at least when the circus left its winter headquarters and was on the road.

  “I had graduated from a six-week course in gunnery school at Buckingham Air Force Base in Florida, and they sent us west on a train, to Salt Lake City. There were probably five hundred military people on that train—field artillery, infantry, air corps. And after that long trip across the country, at five-thirty one afternoon we pulled into this place none of us knew anything about.

  “We looked out the windows, and there were these women talking to us, passing us sandwiches and everything. They said, ‘Are you going to get off the train?’ We said, ‘We don’t know if we’re allowed.’ They said, ‘We’ve got it fixed—you can get off the train.’”

  And so, he said, they all did. “We lived in our uniforms—we never wore civilian clothes. We were all in our uniforms when we walked into the train station…and there were these plank tables, loaded down with every kind of food you could imagine. Homemade cakes, pies, sandwiches, Coca-Cola…We could not get over it. Out in the middle of nowhere, or at least to us it was the middle of nowhere, and it was getting toward dusk…this was like a miracle.

  “I got to thinking in my own mind: ‘Where do all these people come from?’ So I asked. And they told me that they were from al
l over that part of Nebraska, some from a hundred miles away. The farmers’ wives made chicken for us, and they brought milk from the farms….

  “And they did it day after day after day after day. We were there for so few minutes, and then it was ‘All right, load up the cookies, get back on the train.’ Puff, puff, and we were gone.”

  As the train pulled out of North Platte, he said, he couldn’t stop thinking about what he had just seen. “Those people spent all that time and donated all that money—to get the sugar and all that stuff. They gave up their own ration stamps. They were using their ration stamps for us. We all knew what that meant. I wrote home about it.”

  He was a tailgunner in B-24 Liberators over Europe and North Africa. “Wars are not about killing, and wars are not about dying,” he said. “Wars are about love. That’s what you remember. All the other stuff is incidental. The people you depended on, though, the people you came to love…

  “It’s the bulletin board syndrome. You got up in the morning and you went to the bulletin board to see if your name was on it. Whether you would be flying a mission. We were good at our jobs. We stayed good to stay alive.

  “Flying those missions, everything was in slow motion. You’re twenty-five thousand feet above the ground, and you have no feeling of movement. You watch the contrails behind the ship…the heat, mixed with the cold moisture in the air, behind each engine…The only noise you would hear is the drone of those engines. I’m all by myself back there, seeing that. I felt like I flew the whole war by myself, back there in the tail alone.”

  As he began to talk about North Platte again, I heard something in his voice. It was the sound I had come to recognize in these men.

  “I don’t know,” he said, crying. “It’s something that comes over you every once in a while. We had heard that there were women in that Canteen who had lost their sons. And they would come down there. To see us.

  “I think that we really were all in it together. The women who were there—their personal lives, and the lives of our own mothers…

  “It was either going to be freedom or slavery. If we had lost the war, the men would have been in slave camps, and the women, if they were good-looking, would have been in the officers’ clubs of the enemy who defeated us, doing their ‘duty.’ Our enemies would have confiscated all of our wealth, all of our nation’s art…everything. We never think about that, because we won the war. But if we had lost…

  “You think back to the war, and it’s not the shootings and bombings you think about. It’s the relationships with people, and some of them, you realize now, you hardly even knew, but they still meant so much to you. When veterans get together, they talk about this mission and that mission. But what they really mean is: ‘What happened to so-and-so?’

  “That’s how I feel about North Platte. What happened to all of those people? They were like our mothers and our sisters. How did they know to do that for us? How did they know how much it would mean?”

  On Route 83, with the sandhills promising to roll on forever, I decided it was time to head south again—to turn around and go back to town.

  That shoreless sea of green, no matter which way I looked—I tried to picture it in winter, covered in snow and ice, or in autumn when the grass turned brittle. The people who had driven through here every month of the year so they could volunteer at the Canteen—they must have felt that they were hurrying toward something: hurrying toward a world they had created at the depot, a world where the distant march of those war years had become authentic and present and a daily part of their very fabric. Hurrying through these silent miles toward something great.

  The towering grain elevators just north of the Union Pacific tracks told me that I was approaching the city itself. Painted across the tops of the elevators, linking them, were the two words, as definitional as an urban skyline, an unflowery and unambiguous welcome: NORTH PLATTE. And painted beneath those words, as if to patiently explain that the grain elevators were for work, not for picture-postcard show: A FARMER-RANCHER OWNED SERVICE.

  Underneath them, if you knew where to look, was the place where a train station once stood.

  “They were oil roads,” said Helen Johnson, seventy-three. “That’s how we got to North Platte—on dirt roads that had oil on the surface to keep down the dust.”

  She grew up in Brule, a town of 410, sixty miles west of the Canteen. “Brule and Big Springs had their Canteen days together, because the communities were so small,” she said. “My folks lived on a farm, so we had plenty of eggs and meat. My mom made meat sandwiches for the boys. It was easy to convince me to go. There was food in my dad’s car from top to bottom. The trunk was chock-full of sandwiches. We would hold the cakes as we rode.”

  She was just thirteen when she started going. “You were delighted to greet the guys and give them home cooking, and as a teenager you liked to see the boys. But you also had this feeling in your heart that some would not make it home. You would look at them and feel a lump in your stomach thinking about their future.”

  Although there was never an official announcement that a train full of soldiers was coming, “It seems that we sort of knew ten or fifteen minutes before. The boys were anxious as they got off the train—I suppose there was a kind of wonderment in their faces. But, oh, when they got inside and saw the food laid out for them—I’m sure some of them hadn’t had that kind of cooking for a while.”

  Seeing the young soldiers, “It made me realize all the more that the war was a serious thing. We had a radio on our farm, but the battery would always go down, and we would miss the end of the news reports about the war. We didn’t have electricity on the farm—we had our own batteries, and a gas generator. The radio was in the living room—it was a console. I have to smile thinking about it, because it always happened—just when you thought you were going to listen to a whole program, the battery would go.”

  So her main contact with the war, the actuality of the war for her, was the time spent with the young men at the Canteen. “It all happened in such a flurry, each train,” she said. “You would very quickly start putting out your sandwiches on plates, and pouring drinks so they would be ready. All of us would man our posts. The boys had such a fleeting time with us.

  “There just wasn’t time to get to know them. The faces all became a blur by the end of the day. But they were all real to us—and I think they were thankful that for a few minutes maybe they didn’t have to think about the war.”

  After the last train of the day had pulled out, she said, “Of course the Canteen seemed very, very silent and vacant. The ride back to our farm in Brule would be quiet and pretty somber. All the food containers would be empty.

  “You never really wiped away the thought of the boys. You could still see them climbing off the trains, and then filing back on. They knew not how many days they had left, or where they were going. They looked so young—they were so young—but they never said anything about it. It all went so fast at the Canteen, and they knew the train was pulling out shortly.

  “At night on the farm, it would pass through your mind. The railroad tracks in our part of Nebraska were not even a quarter mile from our farmhouse, and every time you would hear a train, you would wonder if it was a troop train. If it was some of our boys.”

  The world has changed in many ways since those days and nights, but the sandhills have remained constant. And Mrs. Johnson, who still lives there, has never forgotten what she would do, as a teenage girl, whenever the young soldiers hurried from the Canteen and back onto their trains.

  “I would pray,” she said. “For all of them. I would watch them get onto the train, and I would ask the Lord to bless and keep them. I wanted to keep smiling, in case they turned around to look at us as they left. But I was praying for them, with my eyes open.”

  Seventeen

  There was an airport in town, although I had not seen it in all my meanderings through North Platte, and had not even heard anyone mention it.

  But I k
new it existed—and that it was not just a strip for private planes, but a field that handled commercial aircraft. In most American cities that once depended on the railroads for interstate passenger service, the local airports were the reason train travel had dwindled. But if that was the case here—if the old Union Pacific depot had been torn down in large part because the North Platte airport had put it out of business—then the airport must have earned its success very quietly. Either that, or something else was going on.

  On the most sweltering afternoon of my time in town, I decided to go out and take a look. If nothing else, maybe the place was air-conditioned.

  America’s airports, in coming to dominance, had shrunk the country—had made great distances seem trifling. Part of that was illusion, but the concept of the outside world itself had without question been altered with the coming of the jets. If you could be anywhere in the continental United States within a few hours, how vast or detached could the world outside your town’s borders possibly be?

  I thought about that as I spoke with Marjorie Pinkerton, seventy-two, who had helped out at the Canteen as a young teenager when her family had lived on a farm near Shelton. She would ride a train to North Platte to volunteer along with her older sister. “I felt like just a tagalong,” she said. “Being the little sister, I just went wherever she went.”

  What Mrs. Pinkerton told me about her knowledge of the war, though—about how, as a young girl, she had kept current on the events overseas—made the new American dismissiveness of time and distance seem like the profound and pervading change that it has been. Because she learned her war news at a movie theater.

  “That’s one of the reasons that I don’t think of the trips to the Canteen as being exactly fun,” she said. “It was kind of a scary thing, because of what I was thinking about the soldiers.