Once Upon a Town

by Bob Greene

  But variations of that story, too, were appearing in papers in every city in the country—stories of the celebrations on hometown streets. Only the names of the streets and the names of the towns were different.

  In North Platte—lower still on the front page of the Bulletin, with a one-column headline—was a story that could have been written nowhere else.

  CANTEEN HEARS V-J NEWS, the heading read.

  And the report:

  Every describable emotion was expressed at the Canteen last night when news of the Japanese surrender reached the visiting service men. Some cried, most of them just shouted, and still others stood numbed, unable to believe what they were hearing. Meanwhile, the Canteen board, realizing the importance of continuing to greet the returning veterans with smiles and treats in the months to come, made plans for the future.

  The War Dads of Kearney, forty-five strong, were on hand with a large donation of supplies….

  That was the news from Front Street that August day—the war was ended, but the volunteers from Kearney had driven a truck over with 480 candy bars, magazines, 10 crates of oranges, 80 cases of soft drinks, 400 loaves of bread, 300 pounds of meat, 3,000 hard-boiled eggs, 75 sheet cakes….

  It was as if they didn’t know that everything had just changed—or perhaps it was that they could hardly absorb it.

  Within a day, the news in town had already shifted to the next phase—to plans for a city, and a nation, at peace.

  The headline above the story by Larry Hayes the day after was: NORTH PLATTE TO RE-OPEN TODAY; VICTORY DANCE FOR CANTEEN SLATED TONIGHT. It began by informing the townspeople:

  Stores will be open this morning, and it will be “business as usual” in North Platte.

  After the first wild outburst of rejoicing, the city assumed a calmer aspect yesterday and observed peace for the first time since Pearl Harbor, with a complete closing of all retail business.

  Gasoline rationing went out and blue points are no longer a worry…. Hotels were turning patrons away as tourists sought to lay over….

  The biggest local attraction for the V-J celebration will be the big Victory dance at Jeffers pavilion tonight. The dance will climax the city’s celebration, and, fittingly, will be a Canteen benefit affair. The Royal Nebraskans will furnish the music, and the dance is being sponsored by the North Platte Lions Club.

  Local merchants had hastily put together display advertisements promoting not their products or services, but the end of the combat. Munson’s Texaco Service Station, 1020 North Jeffers, sponsored an ad showing a drawing of a cemetery field filled with crosses, with the heading: A LASTING PEACE—THAT THOSE DEAD SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN. The Fairmont Creamery Company, 112 West Sixth, took out an ad with a small drawing of a dove carrying a ribbon in its beak, alongside the words: PEACE AGAIN. TODAY, WHEREVER THE FOUR WINDS BLOW, THE EYES OF MANKIND BEHOLD THE VISION OF THE BETTER WORLD TO BE.

  The Canteen, while announcing that its job was not finished, began to acknowledge that the end was coming:

  The North Platte Canteen will continue to operate up to ten months following victory day, Mrs. Adam Christ revealed yesterday. Mrs. Christ, chairman of the general committee, said, “We will still have a tremendous task before us and I’m sure the people in the surrounding territory will continue to give us full support.”

  She reported there would be a true need for the center as the millions of personnel in the armed forces return. “We can fill a mission of real welcome to the returning veterans,” she said.

  I stood in the emptiness where the Union Pacific station had been. I thought about whether the Canteen volunteers could ever have contemplated this—could have looked ahead and seen in their minds a day when the building would be vanished, when no trains would stop on Front Street.

  I had spoken with a woman—Ann Perlinger, sixty-nine, of Paxton—who had been one of the youngest Canteen volunteers, and who had seen the place go from being a dream in her excited eyes, to being a vacant lot she now made a point not to visit.

  “I was nine years old when I began to help out,” she told me. “We didn’t get to do much—we put the popcorn balls together. We just popped the corn and made a syrup—sugary water, really. We formed the popcorn balls and wrapped them in waxed paper.

  “They were put into the baskets that were carried to the troop trains. One day I guess I decided to put my name and address inside the wrapper.

  “I received a letter from a soldier—a Private William Washille. Paxton only had about seven hundred people, and here was this letter from a soldier in the Army, arriving at our home.

  “Inside the envelope was a little note from him saying he had come through North Platte, and had seen my name in a popcorn ball. I wrote him back and said, ‘You’re going to be disappointed—I’m only nine years old.’ He then sent me a Christmas card.”

  Everything about the Canteen captivated her: “I remember the milk bottles. Pint bottles and half-pint bottles—the soldiers just tipped them up to their mouths and drained the milk right out of the bottle, then put the empty bottles back.” Her mother was the postmaster in Paxton, she said, and “I was always going to the post office, because we had a box there. I was allowed to open it. I would get all excited—I told my mom, ‘I’m hearin’ from my popcorn ball.’”

  She grew up and got a job as a secretary to Paxton’s school superintendent, and then a job at Paxton’s only bank; she met a man and married him, and they farmed until his death in 1998. They had five children, two of whom now live in Paxton, two in Omaha, and one in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

  She often travels the thirty-two miles from Paxton to North Platte—“We have no shopping here in Paxton”—and every time she pulls into town, “I can remember it like it was yesterday.

  “All those young men, so many of them, all those uniforms…I guess it made the world seem big. We didn’t know where those boys were from or where they were going. When they would leave, I would want to get on the train with them.

  “When I go to North Platte now, I never go down by the railroad tracks. There’s not much down there anymore. All those boys…they were here and then they were gone.”

  For eight months after the end of the war, the Canteen stayed open, still there for every train that came through town. The soldiers and sailors were coming home, and they were rolling across the country again, this time heading toward peace.

  So the volunteers continued to report to the Canteen, but after a while it did not feel quite the same. There was not the urgency; there was not the sense of being so needed. As the spring of 1946 approached, almost all of the soldiers who were returning home were home.

  The decision was made. The announcement was carried in a brief story in the newspaper:

  April 1 was set as the definite date for closing the North Platte Canteen at a meeting of the general Canteen workers Tuesday night. The vote was almost unanimous….

  Letters will be sent to the towns and committees who have supported the Canteen, informing them of the closing date. They will be invited to choose a date to serve before April if they wish to do so.

  On April 1, 1946, sixteen trains were scheduled to bring soldiers through North Platte on the Canteen’s concluding day of operation. Mrs. Charles Hutchens, secretary of the Canteen at the end, put out a request “asking that all persons who have loaned cooking utensils and other equipment for the duration of the Canteen call for the articles tonight.”

  The Ladies Aid of St. John’s Lutheran Church of Gothenburg was the main group of volunteers that final day; they had been scheduled for the day, so there they were.

  The last soldier to enter and then leave the Canteen—the last of the six million—was Charles H. Plander, of Marshalltown, Iowa. He and eleven other servicemen had arrived on a train that was making the customary brief stop; they did not realize that the Canteen had just closed for good, and encountered three volunteers doing last-minute cleanup. They were Mrs. Hutchens, Mrs. T. J. Neid and Mrs. Amiel Traub.


  “Don’t feel bad about closing the Canteen,” Charles Plander said to the women. “You’ve earned enough points for your honorable discharge.”

  Mrs. Hutchens, Mrs. Neid and Mrs. Traub, their work completed, had just finished making a large pot of coffee for themselves.

  They gave it to the soldiers instead.

  Twenty-three

  It was getting toward dark, and I knew I should be leaving the railroad tracks—walking away, for the last time, from where the Canteen had been.

  I was finding it difficult to do. There was nothing here—yet I still wanted to stay a while more.

  I thought about some of the people from the Canteen years, men and women with whom I had spoken earlier. Two of them in particular—at the end of our conversations, they had told me what the town had felt like to them after the Canteen was gone, and after the depot had been torn down.

  Doris Dotson—the woman who had collected the patches from the soldiers, the woman who, when she was a girl, had made the insignia jacket for herself; the woman who, because of her stroke, was no longer able to dance—had told me this before we said goodbye:

  “It was very sad when the Canteen stopped. We still had troops on trains going through, but not very many of them, and the people on board soon enough found out that there was no Canteen.

  “It was such a good feeling that the war was over—a good feeling for the whole country—but here in North Platte there was a sense that suddenly there was a void. You just kind of felt lost.”

  Larry McWilliams—the man who had told me that North Platte was once “a rough and wide-open town,” a city that felt “like a little Chicago” before the Canteen made it wholesome—had said this to me at the end of our talk:

  “After the Canteen closed in 1946, it was a period of postwar wind-down in North Platte. The passenger trains were still coming through, but there were fewer and fewer soldiers on board.

  “Still, it was fascinating to watch. In the late 1940s, there were still big differences in this country. The way people talked, the way people dressed. Passengers would get off the trains at the downtown depot, if just to stretch their legs before getting back on, and it was polyglot. The different ways the people spoke…East Coast people getting off the trains, more stylish than you would see in central Nebraska…

  “It’s more difficult to distinguish different accents these days, even in a place like Texas. I think television has brought the country into one language, one sound, now. You can still hear accents, but not as much.

  “In central Nebraska, for instance, film was ‘fill-um.’ Arthritis was ‘arthur-itus.’ Get was ‘git.’ Wash was ‘warsh.’ You could stand at the train station and listen to the people who got off, and you really could tell that they were from someplace else.

  “When I come back to North Platte now, I go downtown, and I think about what it felt like when the streets were always packed, and the train depot was always filled with people. It almost doesn’t register for me—I look at it, and it almost doesn’t register that the depot isn’t there.”

  Within two weeks of the Canteen’s last day of operation, its volunteer officers had typed up a final audit that was as painstakingly fastidious and devoted to exacting particulars as had been the Canteen itself.

  Dated April 13, 1946, the audit reported that the bank balance as of March 1 had been $4,181.22, and that the balance at the close of operations was $3,033.56. Expenses during that last month had included $766.29 for sugar and fruit, $19 for eggs, and $21.70 for flowers for retiring Union Pacific Railroad president William M. Jeffers, who had donated the space at the train station for the Canteen.

  The audit noted that the first deposit in the Canteen’s bank account, on December 27, 1941, had been $56.76: “Only during the first month or so of operation did Canteen finances bring headaches to the management; then the generous and patriotic people of western Nebraska and eastern Colorado learned of the commendable and satisfactory service that was rendered to the uniformed men and women passing through, and from then on voluntary cash contributions monthly were sufficient to pay all bills promptly.”

  The audit conceded that so much food was donated to the Canteen by the people of the area that no accurate accounting was possible: “The value of the food contributed during the operation of the Canteen is a mere matter of guessing.”

  The Canteen’s pocket-size deposit book, issued by the First National Bank of North Platte, showed that at least once a week for every week of the war someone from the Canteen visited the bank to put a few dollars in, which was duly noted by a teller’s hand on each page of the ledger. Whenever there was a withdrawal—such as on May 8, 1943, when $294.75 was taken out for expenses, dropping the account to $257.74—a deposit was promptly made, in this case on May 11, taking the account back up to $354.50.

  Every detail was looked after at the end. The members of the Canteen’s steering committee gathered for a group photo before the furniture and equipment were removed from that part of the train depot; the committee voted not to use any of the remaining funds for the purchase of a plaque on the side of the train station to memorialize the Canteen. The women of the board decided that “a memorial of some sort is appropriate,” but that “inasmuch as the funds were given for the benefit of servicemen,” any expenditures for a plaque “should be raised in some other way than taking them from the Canteen balance.”

  The committee voted that the $3,033.56 on hand at the close of the Canteen should be used for the benefit of veterans in hospitals. Equipment, including recreational items for the recuperating soldiers and sailors, was purchased and donated to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lincoln, the state capital. One hundred thousand matchbooks were purchased, to be distributed at regular intervals to the hospitals in Lincoln and in Denver; on the covers of the matchbooks was printed: With the Compliments of the North Platte Canteen.

  On October 1, 1946, John R. Yorby, chief of special services for the VA hospital in Lincoln, wrote to Mrs. Charles Hutchens, the secretary of the Canteen board in North Platte: “It is impossible to express adequately our appreciation for the many donations which you have made to the hospital…. After working with you grand people, we can understand why the Canteen was such a grand success and your praises sung by service people all over the country…. We hope that the friendship and good will between us will continue on through the years.”

  “I was working as a tool-and-die maker in Kenosha, Wisconsin,” said Harry Mulholland, seventy-nine, who still lives in the Wisconsin town of West Allis. “I was twenty years old. This was 1942. I quit my job to go into the service. I was overweight for the Coast Guard, but the Army didn’t care. I was a body.”

  He ended up spending twenty-six months of his thirty-eight months in the service overseas, including at Utah Beach. He stopped at the North Platte Canteen three times—in 1942 heading east to west, then twice in 1943, once heading west to east and once heading back.

  “In those days, the trains stopped for water and coal,” he said. “On that first trip, we were added on to a regular passenger train. You were with the other guys in the troop cars—the unknown made me nervous. I was a twenty-year-old kid, the first time away from home…. You didn’t know what was going to happen, or where you were going to go.

  “You would sit on the siding during some parts of the trip west, as other trains would go by. There were a lot of cornfields—not much to see. You slept in a berth with some guy you never saw before. No shower—you could shave, but that was about it. You felt filthy.

  “As we were getting close to a town in Nebraska, someone who had been through there said, ‘Wait till you see this.’ I don’t know why, but I believed him.

  “And we arrived in North Platte, and…”

  He waited a few seconds, and then, through his tears, said:

  “…the kindness…”

  He had to stop again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, struggling. “Being away from home—my mom and dad and my bro
ther and I, we were such a close family, and being away from home…”

  He said that after the train left North Platte, “Everyone in the troop cars was so enthusiastic about what had just happened—how wonderful it was. And the next time I came through, I was able to tell the guys on the train, ‘Wait till we get to North Platte.’”

  On that second trip across the country, Mr. Mulholland said, “It was a mob scene at the train station, so many people—it had been not quite a year since my first time at North Platte, but what was happening at the train station seemed to have gotten bigger. Just as friendly, though. The idea that the people had done this—the whole time I had been in the service, that they had been doing it every day and every night at their train station…”

  His third time through, he said, “I was thinking that overseas was coming up. Again, the unknown. On that train, you slept wherever you could sit. And when I left North Platte that time, I didn’t know that I would not see them again, but I thought that might be the case, and it was.

  “They were the greatest doggone people….”

  He and his wife of forty-five years live in a retirement community now. He told me that “many years after the war, we were on vacation, and we had driven across the country to California. On the way back to Wisconsin, I decided that I wanted to have a look. I wanted to go to North Platte.”

  He had told his wife all about the Canteen, of course. “We got to the edge of town, and there was a restaurant near the highway—a Perkins or something. We went in to have lunch.

  “There was a young waitress. I asked her if she knew anything about the Canteen. She said she thought her folks might have worked there.

  “I said to her, ‘You thank your folks for me.’ She was eighteen or nineteen. There wasn’t much there. She was hardly listening to what I was saying. She was born after the war. I could tell that what I was saying didn’t mean anything to her.