by Bob Greene
“When we would go to the Saturday night movies in Shelton, they would always have a newsreel. We had a little theater in town—the Conroy family, right in Shelton, owned the theater, and it had just one aisle, and no balcony. The girl who would take us to our seats—she was Kathleen Moog, she was my best friend, we were in the same grade in school—would have a flashlight to show us where to sit. Bill Conroy—he was in my class, also—would run the movie projector.
“We would wait for Bill to make the movie start—we would be ready to see Mrs. Miniver, or whatever the movie was that night. But first there would be the newsreel. Without television back then, that is how we knew what the war looked like. The battle coverage.
“It was black-and-white, and it would really bring it home. When you just heard about the war, you had to imagine things and picture it in your mind. But the newsreels made you see it. When troop trains would roll through Shelton, we would wave at them, and the boys would wave right back at us, out the windows of the train. Right there next to Main Street, across from the movie theater—troop trains, right through Shelton. Whenever that would happen, I couldn’t look at the boys in the train windows without thinking of the battles in the newsreels.”
The local feel of much of America—the feel that lasted right up until air travel became commonplace—even played a role in how she would meet her husband. Their meeting was a byproduct of a local evening newspaper—sort of.
“In 1950 I had moved to North Platte, and I was a teacher at the Franklin Grade School,” Mrs. Pinkerton said. “I taught third grade. I was walking home after school one day, and I saw a crippled lady—she was on crutches—on Third Street. She was in front of her house, and the newspaper was on the grass. I suppose the paperboy hadn’t thrown it far enough.
“She was on those crutches, so I picked the paper up and carried it to her. We talked, and I still had a few blocks to walk to where I lived, and she said to me, ‘Well, come over this weekend, and we’ll have lunch together.’ So that Saturday I went to her house, and we started visiting back and forth, and she told me that she had a grandson. She took me to her china closet and said, ‘This is his picture.’
“It was his high school graduation picture, and I thought to myself, ‘Gee, I don’t want to meet him.’ She told me that he lived with his mom and dad on a ranch in the sandhills, about thirty miles away. His graduation picture didn’t do anything for me, but she kept insisting and kept insisting. So I said, ‘All right, I’ll meet him.’ And she had him come to the house, and we did meet.”
He was Harry Pinkerton, and they were married for forty-six years, until his death in 1999. They had two children. “It was a perfect match,” Mrs. Pinkerton said.
And it began on a side street with a mistossed copy of the evening newspaper as she walked home from work late one afternoon. It couldn’t happen that way now. There is no longer an evening paper in North Platte.
Out Fourth Street, past downtown to the east, onto the old Lincoln Highway and through fields and countryside, I looked both to my left and to my right, trying to find the airport.
I almost missed it. An unprepossessing building miles out of the main city, it had a free parking lot with no attendants—the kind and size of parking lot you might find at a suburban branch bank. There were no cars parked next to the terminal building; anyone could pull right up to the door and walk in.
No passengers, either—that’s what I discovered as soon as I got inside. At the single boarding gate of the airport—the place is called Lee Bird Field, named to honor a North Platte family’s son who was killed while training as a military pilot in 1918—no agents were visible. I checked the schedule—there were only two flights today, and both had already departed.
I approached the ticket counter; a woman told me she was unable to issue tickets to passengers, because an agreement between United Airlines and Great Lakes Airlines to run a joint operation had recently fallen apart, and until the details of Great Lakes’ unshared proprietorship of the route could be worked out, purchases had to be made through a 1-800 number, and not at the airport.
Not that this affected all that many passengers; on a weekend day like this one, there were just the two flights to Denver (on Beechcraft twin-engine propeller planes); on weekdays there were three flights. The airplanes held only nineteen passengers, and were seldom full.
This is what had helped to do away with the once-bustling railroad station downtown; this, at one time, had seemed to be the lustrous future of long-distance transportation out of and into North Platte. Frontier Airlines had for a time flown jets—737s—into here, but after the deregulation of the airline industry was put into effect in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Frontier got out. It had happened all over the United States—when airlines didn’t have to serve smaller cities, when they weren’t required to by the government, they cut their losses and departed for good.
So twice a day—three times on weekdays—the nineteen-seaters set down here; twice a day—three times on weekdays—they took off. I walked over to a machine selling big, various-colored gumballs, the old kind of gumballs in the old kind of vending machine you used to see in drugstores and on carnival midways—the sort where the gum rolled down clunky metal chutes with drop-down metal doors. A sign said that part of the proceeds would be “Donated to Civic Activities.”
I tried to envision the railroad depot in its busiest years, with those thirty-two trains a day steaming right into downtown, letting passengers off, taking passengers on, both the depot and the passengers filled with the sensation of being somewhere. There was a series of clocks on the wall of the airport, each clock set to the time zone of a different city, and labeled as such. LOS ANGELES. DENVER. NORTH PLATTE. NEW YORK. LONDON.
I walked up to a window that was hot to the touch and looked at the runway in the sun, with not a plane to be seen.
“They said I was too valuable on the homefront,” said John Zgud, eighty. “I was working at Martin Aircraft in Baltimore—I was the foreman in a sheet metal machine shop.
“My bosses told me that I was needed where I was, and that even if they did release me to go into the service, the Army wouldn’t take me, because working in the aviation plant was too important to the war effort.
“But I said to myself, ‘I’m going to quit my job.’ I went to a tavern on the corner, and ate some crabcakes and drank some beer, and I thought about it.
“I knew I could stay a civilian, and have every excuse for doing so—I was helping to build airplanes. But when the war was over, people would have asked me, ‘What did you do in the service?’ And I would have had a new suit on, and money in the bank, and I could have said, ‘I worked in an aircraft plant.’ I was young. I didn’t want to say that.
“When the war was over, I wanted to be able to say that I did my part.”
So he quit the job in the aircraft factory, he joined the Army Air Corps, and he found himself on a train across the United States on his way to prepare for combat. He ended up as an aerial gunner on B-24s, flying thirty combat missions in Europe. But first was the train ride.
“It was a troop train made up of fifteen or twenty old passenger cars,” he said. “We had to keep the windows closed, or all the soot would get in. The train was packed full—no shower, no place to eat. We ate these dried-up field rations.”
It was one of those times in American life when the way in which people moved from place to place was irrevocably, everlastingly changing. He gave up a safe job in an aircraft plant…to ride on a train all across the United States…so that he could learn how to fly in airplanes that got shot at. It was his decision, and he has always believed it was the right one.
“After all that time on the train, and all those field rations, North Platte was almost too much to believe,” he said. “These girls came out of the depot and toward the train with cigarettes, candy, chewing gum, telling us to go on inside and have some food and something to drink. Pretty, young girls—I still know a few of them.”
That is because today he lives down the road from North Platte, in Cozad. He came back to the United States and got a job in Philadelphia as a plumber. He didn’t much like it—and his wife said she had a sister who lived in a place they might enjoy more.
“Betty’s sister lived in Nebraska,” Mr. Zgud said. “We came out to see her, and we said, ‘This looks like a pretty good place to settle.’ And it has been.”
When Mr. and Mrs. Zgud want to go somewhere, though, the highway is about the only option. The passenger trains don’t come through here any longer—and the limitless promise of the air age is down to the thin drone of twin propellers, two or three times a day.
A sign on the wall of the airport building said that North Platte had been home to the nation’s first lighted airfield. (The lights had consisted of fuel-burning barrels placed around the perimeter of the runway in 1921, so that a two-plane airmail caravan that was originating in San Francisco could touch down for servicing on its initial route east. One of the planes crashed soon after leaving California.)
There would be no more planes in North Platte this afternoon—no planes requiring lights, no planes not requiring lights—and I walked back into the parking lot, where the sun had turned the blacktop into goo that clung to the bottoms of my shoes. The sound of no noise was everywhere.
Whatever the birth of air travel may have promised the country—speed, convenience, the vanquishing of gravity—it took something away in the course of delivering those promises. What was taken away was, in no small measure, the country itself: the country as land, the country as place. On an overcast day, passenger jets don’t just speed over North Platte—they don’t even provide an opportunity to acknowledge it exists. People looking down from the sky have no idea it is there.
Those thirty-two trains a day, moving in and out of the old depot downtown—maybe there were days when the trains stopped, and not a single person got off, not a single person got on. Maybe the stops at North Platte, on days like those, were useless.
But at least the people on board knew they had tarried somewhere. At least they had to concede the fact of the town. If only by hearing the sound of the conductor’s voice, announcing that they had arrived in a place that had a name.
“We lived in Lexington, sixty miles east of North Platte, in the war years,” said Maxine Yost, eighty-two. “I was a young mother of two small children and, with the consent of my husband, I lined up a baby-sitter for the day. I volunteered to come with the ladies of the Presbyterian church to help in the Canteen for that one day.”
If the North Platte airport was a reminder of how the way of arriving in town has been altered, Mrs. Yost’s tale was a different kind of reminder—a reminder of how coming to town, even in the Canteen years, could hold hidden letdowns.
“We left Lexington early in the morning, bringing crates of hard-boiled eggs furnished by many of the nearby farmers,” she said. “I was delegated to stay in the kitchen of the Canteen to peel the eggs, and it took many hours. I was disappointed to have to stay in the kitchen and not be able to talk to or visit with any of the servicemen.”
That’s what she had not expected: to work in the Canteen, yet never speak to a soldier. “I could only peek out once in a while and see the servicemen,” she told me. “I wished I could work out in the dining room, and serve some of the men. But somebody else took the eggs out to the main room. I just wanted to wish the boys good luck—to tell them I hoped they had good luck where they were going, and that they would come back safe.”
Mrs. Yost said that she does not regret having traveled to North Platte that day, although it was not what she had anticipated. “I knew that I was helping,” she said, “if only by peeling the eggs for the boys to eat.”
She was back home in Lexington in time to make supper for her husband, she said, and that night, when she thought to herself about what had happened at the Canteen, “I knew it had not been a wasted day.”
Still, she said, it was a big world out there into which the young soldiers were being sent, and she has for a long time been sorry about one thing:
“I wish I would have at least walked out onto the platform. To see them get onto the trains and pull away. To see that with my own eyes, and to tell them goodbye.”
Eighteen
At dinner one night, while waiting for my meal to arrive and reading some old news clippings I had found from the town’s wartime years, I heard something: the William Tell Overture.
I didn’t even have to look up to know where it was coming from, but I did anyway.
A cell phone—the phone of one of the other people eating in the restaurant.
It was a thin, trilling, reedy version of the melody—the William Tell Overture as it might sound on a tiny kazoo—which the man had programmed his phone to play instead of ringing in a conventional way.
He let it keep ringing—the man allowed the William Tell Overture to play again and again, as he checked the phone’s display screen for the caller ID of whoever had placed the call. Then he could decide whether to take the call—while the rest of us in the vicinity of his table had to listen to the phone’s music.
What it made me think of was not the usual assortment of complaints about how telephone discourtesy has taken over the land. Instead—because everything I was encountering in North Platte was in the context of the Canteen, and what had happened there—the phone and its musical ring made me consider another fact of life faced by all those young men on the trains, in the days before instant communication became an American birthright.
They went years without hearing the voices of the people they loved, some of those soldiers did—years without hearing the sounds they would have cherished. Now we expect that voices be delivered to us anywhere, any time—we demand it, really. The William Tell Overture beckoned the man who could not decide whether to permit the caller’s voice into his life right now, and I tried to imagine it: riding across the country on a troop train, knowing the voices you adore will be lost to you for years, knowing you will not even be able to count for certain on receiving a letter from those who care the most about you. Cast adrift on your way to war, with no lifeline home.
“If someone wanted to mail a letter, you’d put a stamp on it for them.”
Leona Martens, seventy-three, was telling me what would happen in those first moments when the soldiers hurried into the Canteen. She was a teenager in Wellfleet, Nebraska, during the war: “Just a jump and a holler,” as she described the town of fewer than one hundred residents.
But then she would go to the Canteen.
“I was really young at first,” she said. “A freshman in high school. Those boys would come into the Canteen like you’d known them for a long time. ‘Well, would you like to see a picture of my girlfriend?’ ‘Sure I would.’ They’d pull a picture out and show me.
“It was probably pride, and loneliness, too. They were proud to show you their girl—show you what they had. But they knew they were leaving that behind.”
Her job inside the depot, she said, was preparing the fixings for sandwiches. “I helped with the meat grinder. It was a big commercial grinder that you ran by hand. It wasn’t something they’d let the little kids do.”
They wouldn’t? I thought she had said she was young when she came to the Canteen.
“I was thirteen,” she said “That’s not little—not when you’re born on the farm.”
So she ground the meat—“it went further when you ground it, put in a little pickle, a little mayonnaise”—and did whatever else was requested of her: “Anything they needed. One day I poured iced tea all day.”
But the main thing was the boys—the young soldiers and sailors. “Any woman who tells you that flirting didn’t go on isn’t telling you the truth,” Mrs. Martens said. “They forget what they were like when they were fourteen and fifteen and sixteen if they tell you they didn’t flirt.”
The era, of course, was quite different when it came to the ramifications of flirting
: “Girls didn’t go to bed with boys the first night. You just smiled and talked with them and maybe rolled your eyes a little.
“The night before, I would talk to my mother about what a fun day it was going to be. We would bake cookies and my mom would tell me that we were going to get around early in the day.”
Get around early in the day?
“That meant get up right away and get breakfast over with,” Mrs. Martens said. “And when we got to the Canteen, it was just kind of a rush. They had big double doors looking out on the tracks, and those doors would open up and the soldiers would come in off the train in droves. There’d be no one in there, and the first thing you knew, the place was full.
“I’d always be wearing a skirt and blouse. No pants on girls back then—we wore skirts and felt like pretty girls. When those boys came in…well. I’ve always been a flirt. Don’t let the other women you’ve been talking to fool you. These were handsome, eligible guys on those trains.”
I asked her what the soldiers would say to her.
“You’d always hear, ‘You remind me of my sister,’” she said. “Don’t you know the lines boys use on girls that age?
“But a lot of times we’d just get done with one train, and here comes another one. You’d not hardly recover from the last train—you would have had fun with that bunch, joshed with them—and the next bunch comes in. A lot of them had been on their train from clear across the country.
“City and farm kids both, never been away from home, some of them. You could tell those—they were the ones who were so quiet.”
Those were the boys, she said, who sometimes would have letters in their hands. They would have written home while on the train, and they would be looking around for a place to mail the letters, and the girls at the Canteen—having seen the looks in the eyes of lonely boys many times before—would walk up carrying postage stamps, and would take the envelopes, and would assure the boys that the letters would be on their way.