Once Upon a Town

by Bob Greene

  “There were always the boys who had the gift of gab,” Mrs. Martens said. “They’re the ones who had a circle of people around them. But then you would see the boys who didn’t—the boys who didn’t seem to know how to talk to anyone.

  “Those are the ones you would walk over and say hello to. With boys like that, you really felt needed.”

  The American soldiers around the world may have been waiting for letters from home—letters that took weeks or months to arrive—but some of those soldiers across the oceans were writing letters addressed to North Platte.

  As I read some of those old letters, I was struck by the courtesy, almost courtliness, of the young men who took the time to write. One of the letters, sent during the war to the Telegraph by a Private John L. Lewis:

  Dear Sirs:

  I am addressing this letter to you, a newspaper, in the hope that you will contact those parties of whom I write.

  I am one of the contingent of soldiers who, while enroute from the West Coast, was treated to a display of thoughtfulness and unselfishness to warm any man’s heart.

  At the railroad station of North Platte, on or about the fifth of August, the troop train was met by a group of ladies armed with large baskets of smoking tobacco, oranges and candy which was given to the men in uniform.

  I, as a member of those troops, have been delegated to write a letter of thanks and appreciation to the ladies and the city of North Platte. That act of courtesy and kindness will long be remembered by those men.

  In closing may I state, for some of us the English language is far inadequate to fully express our gratitude. Hoping this message reaches those responsible parties, I remain,

  Sincerely yours,

  Pvt. John L. Lewis

  And always—always—there were the letters from the soldiers’ mothers. What had surprised me at first—that the mothers of fighting men who passed through North Platte would expend the effort to put their thanks on paper and mail them to the North Platte volunteers—was now something I was accustomed to. The soldiers would write to their mothers, and say how they had been treated at the depot; the mothers would write thank-you notes to the Canteen, as if not to do so would be unforgivable.

  One such letter:

  I wish it was possible for me to step into the same place that my darling boy was invited and treated so kind, so I could tell you how much I, as well as he, appreciated it. Words cannot express my gratitude to you.

  I had a letter from him yesterday and he told me of the great work you are doing. He said it was the first nice thing that had been done for them. He said “Mother, you don’t know what it means to a fellow so far away from home.”

  Heaven bless you for what you did for my boy and every other mother’s boy—I am a widow and my right hand is crippled as you can see by my writing, but through the help of God I am trying to do all I can. Again I thank you for what you are doing. I will always remember you when I approach the Throne of Grace.

  Some of the soldiers and sailors weren’t as new to the ways of the wider world—they’d been around. Ralph Steetle, now eighty-nine, a retired public television executive who lives in Waldport, Oregon, was a Navy lieutenant junior grade and thirty years old when his train took him through North Platte.

  “I had left my wife and daughter in Baton Rouge, and was on my way to San Francisco,” he said. “It was a regular passenger train, and there were about a hundred of us military on board, and maybe three hundred other passengers.

  “As we approached this one community the conductor yelled, ‘All uniformed personnel out, next stop.’ We thought, ‘Oh, hell, someone’s going to count us again.’ Another checkpoint. We’re going to be checked to see if we’re still living, or whatever.

  “As we get out, it’s quite obvious it’s not a military check stop. All these people come out of the train station, with things in their hands. It’s a town project. I got hold of the local newspapers while we were there. The society news wasn’t about parties or dances—it was about how many hams were taken to the train station, how many pies were baked.

  “It’s soon evident to us what they have done in this town. There had been some moments during the war—you might be at a bar in Chicago and someone would say, ‘No serviceman here buys his own drink.’ But nothing like this—nothing like what we found in this town.

  “Inside the train station was a counter that must have run a couple hundred feet, and a white tablecloth covering it. It was loaded with all kinds of food, and the people made it obvious it was their gift. To us. You knew as soon as you walked into the room that you would never forget this.

  “They had a birthday cake they wanted to give to anyone, but it was no one’s birthday. One of the ladies finally said to this Army captain: ‘Captain, it’s your birthday.’ And he said, ‘All right,’ and he took it back onto the train and we all ate a little of it.

  “We’d all had a weak cup of coffee somewhere, but we’d never had a feast. I figured they were patriotic souls who wanted to do their part. They thought it up, and they did it.”

  He left San Francisco for the Philippines and New Guinea: “My last sight was the Golden Gate Bridge, and I thought, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever see this again.’” Occasionally, while on duty in the Pacific, he would recall those few minutes in the town where the people had been waiting. “There are certain times during the war, when you’re going from tedium to nausea and back again, when you think of good things,” he said. “You would remember North Platte, and you’d think, ‘I wonder if those people are still doing it. If they are, bless their heart.’”

  The delivery of the mail to the fighting men in the Pacific was sporadic at best. Knowing that communication would be difficult and much delayed didn’t make the reality of it any easier.

  “I had a child born while I was gone,” Mr. Steetle said. “That was a solitary feeling, being away from my wife and knowing that the baby was coming.

  “It was six weeks after my daughter was born before I knew we had a baby girl, and my wife knew that I knew. All those weeks, not knowing. That’s just how it worked. Our baby’s not a baby now. She’s fifty-eight. Her name is Janie.”

  One cold winter day at the Canteen—according to a newspaper report of the time, which I came upon in the back of a cabinet drawer in town—the women volunteers encountered an ex-serviceman.

  The former soldier was sixteen years old.

  He was wearing no uniform—just light clothing with a pair of Army shoes.

  The women had to persuade him to have something to eat. The story reported:

  Living in a little town out of Chicago, he had enlisted…. His outfit was sent to San Francisco. Military authorities there questioned his age. He finally admitted he was 16 and received his honorable discharge.

  He had then hitch-hiked his way from San Francisco and was resting in the depot when found by women of the Canteen.

  The women of the Canteen called Hinman’s [a local service station/garage] and related the story, and a transport truck was found which took the youth to Omaha, with the promise that a ride from Omaha into Chicago would also be found for him.

  The boy did not depart, however, until the women had taken up a collection amounting to $7, which they presented the youth.

  He could not thank them, as he broke down and cried….

  Nineteen

  With all the warmth and good feelings of the Canteen years, it was potentially easy to push aside the thought that things could be more than a little dour and chilly back in that America. I found a remnant of that other America in the most unlikely of places: a display memorializing the medical profession of west-central Nebraska, in a corner of the county’s historical museum.

  Certainly the display must not have been intended to elicit somber and starched reactions; undoubtedly the people who put it together (and it appeared to have been in place for many years) meant for it merely to be an artifact of the era from which it came. But to spend time in that section of the museum, to r
ealize that it represented a very real and daily part of North Platte during the Canteen years, was to understand yet another way in which our world has changed—in this case, not necessarily for the worse.

  It started with the framed photographic portraits of the physicians who served the town and county back then. They may well have been friendly, compassionate, welcoming men (and they were, in fact, all men). But to look at those portraits was to be reminded of the American age in which the medical profession often seemed purposely distant, didactic, unalterably aloof. When doctors, at least many of them, appeared to pride themselves on ruling from on high, with little room for long discussion or questioning. Doctor knows best.

  It was a time when doctors seemed to have been encouraged to cultivate an aura of mystery—an aura that made some patients vaguely afraid, or at least apprehensive. The portraits on the museum walls, almost without exception, showed austere men with stringent, even-lipped, not-to-be-challenged expressions; shot at the Brown Harano photographic studios in North Platte, the portraits presented formal-to-the-point-of-frostiness men in eyeglasses and business suits and a visible demeanor that translated to: Don’t ask.

  It may have been unfair to judge them by the photographs, taken all those years ago, yet there was no question that the portraits had been composed to set a tone a universe away from soothing. These were doctors as the remote, elevated, mirthless older brothers of the Wizard of Oz—men behind curtains not meant to be fully pulled back, ever.

  And if the men weren’t really that way, plainly it was how they wanted the world to see them—at least the portion of the world that arrived expectantly each morning in the waiting rooms of their offices in this part of Nebraska.

  “I was very surprised to receive the letter,” said Naomi Wood, seventy-two. “I received it in 1945, and I still remember opening it and trying to figure out how they got my name and address.”

  The letter was from a hospital—McGuire General Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. The letter had been written by the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Garnet P. Francis, a serviceman who had been rendered blind by a Japanese shell in the Philippines. He had been freed from a prisoner-of-war camp after being held captive for three years. Four days after he was set free, the Japanese bombardment struck him.

  His wife, Earleen, was an Army nurse who also had been a prisoner of war. She helped her husband survive the shelling, and after they arrived back in the United States and were heading for the hospital in Virginia for treatment to try to bring back his sight, their train stopped briefly in North Platte.

  That was what the letter was about. Evidently Lieutenant Colonel Francis had been given a cake at the depot—and evidently Naomi Wood (who at the time was sixteen-year-old Naomi Smith) had baked it, and had placed a card with it that contained her name and address.

  “I probably put a birthday card with the cake, because we always assumed someone would eat the cake for his birthday,” Mrs. Wood told me.

  So, mailed from the hospital on the East Coast, there was the handwritten letter from the blinded soldier’s wife. It arrived at the home Naomi Smith shared with her parents in Big Springs, Nebraska, near the Colorado border. Lieutenant Colonel Francis’s wife began the letter:

  “I am so sorry I have neglected to write, but until now I simply haven’t had time…. We found the card [with the cake], which was so sweet…. He is in the Dental Corps. He has a chance to regain his sight in a year, maybe before. This is why we are here in this hospital. He is being treated and I’m staying with him.”

  Naomi Smith Wood told me she didn’t recall baking that particular cake, but said she had always been eager to do whatever was needed during her Canteen duty.

  “There was a group of ladies in Big Springs who would go to North Platte to help out—I forget whether it was the Methodist Club or the Happy Hour Club—and I liked going with them,” she said. “You didn’t always have an assignment when you got to the Canteen—you just let them know what you wanted to do, and they usually let you do it.”

  The man who would become her husband, Bruce Wood, an Army Air Corps pilot of B-24 Liberators, also grew up in Nebraska, the son of a farmer, and he had been to North Platte before the war: “The town was somewhat of a shopping center for us, and they had some medical facilities there.” As a young boy he had been in the train depot, but when he went through as a serviceman, “They had rearranged things to accommodate the Canteen. They had scrambled to use up the space.

  “There was a limit of time you could be in there and be served and be back on the train. If you were on a seventeen-car train and you were near the end of the train, you had a pretty long distance to cover to get to the Canteen, and get back. That’s why we ran—to get there on time. If you dawdled too long, you were going to be stuck there.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Francis had not been one of the men who ran to the depot—in all likelihood, because of his loss of vision, the cake was brought to him on board the train. Naomi Wood has kept the letter from the hospital in Virginia for all these years. The wife of the blinded soldier wrote to the sixteen-year-old girl:

  “Your cake was simply delicious…. After being a prisoner of the Japs for three years, and after being starved the way we were, it really tasted good. I hope I learn to make cake as good as yours when I start to cook. No one knows when that will be.”

  I told Mrs. Wood how remarkable I thought the whole thing was, and she seemed surprised that I thought it was so exceptional. Those kinds of things happened—at least they happened at the North Platte Canteen.

  “I was very happy to get the note,” she told me, “and I appreciated it.” At the end of the letter from the hospital, Lieutenant Colonel Francis’s wife gave an address in St. Petersburg, Florida, where they hoped to be living after he was released from treatment and accorded time to recuperate.

  “I’m sure I sent him a get-well card,” Mrs. Wood said. “And I hope he did. I hope he got well.”

  The medical equipment on display at the county museum—the array of tools used by the doctors of the war years and the years before—was as cold and forbidding as the expressions on some of the physicians in the portrait frames. The equipment was designed for healing, for making a human feel better; in these surroundings, though, laid out and labeled as if they were artwork, the devices made you want to turn your head.

  Perhaps that was it—perhaps it was the setting that was jarring, not the instruments themselves. But to see them, to read their descriptions—the “long curved forceps,” the metal appliance meant “for irrigating wounds,” the dangerous-looking cutter “to remove adenoids”…to look at all of this was to gaze into a world the doctors lived in every day. No laser surgery or micro-incisions for them, not back then—these steel implements were their stock-in-trade; for many surgical procedures, they probably still are for the physicians of today.

  To see the utensils in the display case near North Platte’s Cody Avenue was to understand, just a little, the chasm there has always been between doctor and patient. The instruments here wouldn’t cause a sideways glance, among surgeons. And the surgeons, after enough years in the profession, might not comprehend what a powerful effect the sight of the instruments might have on outsiders.

  Not just the surgical tools, either, but the more mundane items doctors of the era carried around to house calls with them, the way housepainters carried cans and brushes. The little leather packet containing (as the label informed) an “ear and nose light”; the zippered “ear, nose, throat” case, with the examining probes inside in need of sterilization after each use; the hypodermic needles in their own boxes, apparently also reusable and not to be tossed away; the big, hollow glass tubes to feed medicine into those needles, before being boiled and made ready to accept more medication for more needles…

  The metal pincers to assist in the extraction of internal organs, the long surgical scissors, as functional and harshly utilitarian as a paid-by-the-round prizefighter…

  Prairie medicine, pres
erved in this catch-you-off-guard setting.

  “When the hospital trains would come through—those were the days that would get to you.”

  Doris Kugler, eighty-three, was telling me about the toughest moments for the Canteen volunteers. She said a feeling of sadness came over the place when the trains carrying wounded soldiers would steam into North Platte.

  “We were not allowed on the hospital trains,” she said. “We were only permitted to walk up to the cars, and hand up the baskets of sandwiches and apples and oranges and candy and cookies. Whatever soldier was able to walk to the end of the car was the one to whom we would hand the baskets.

  “Sometimes you could see the guys looking out the windows of the train. You would see bandages. Some of these young kids were on stretchers, and seeing them, so injured…

  “And of course, you would see all of this knowing that your husband was overseas fighting….”

  Mrs. Kugler and her husband, Bill, had resided in McCook, Nebraska, south of North Platte, where he had been the manager of a shoe store called Pat’s Bootery. While he was in the Navy, Mrs. Kugler lived in North Platte with her mother, who had come to stay with her.

  “We got along fine,” Mrs. Kugler said. “My mom got a job in a ready-to-wear store called the Mars Shop, on Dewey, and also got a job at O’Connor’s Department Store. My dad had passed away in 1940—he was only fifty-six—so my mom said she would stay with me while Bill was in the service.

  “A bunch of us wives got together and we formed a club. We called it the War Wives Club. Eight or ten women—we would go out to eat at Tucker’s Restaurant on Jeffers. We all worked, and none of us had children, so we would have dinner and maybe a drink before we ate.