Once Upon a Town (11 page)

He still recalls his first impression of the people who greeted him in the Canteen. “They seemed more secure,
more centered than the people I was used to,” he said. “I was not made to feel like an outsider. I brought that with me—the idea that I would be seen as different from them. But they were so welcoming.”

He apologized again for being so emotional; he said he was surprising himself by the depth of his reaction. He said he had not talked about North Platte for a long time, and that he doubts he will ever get back there before he dies.

I asked him if there was anything he would like for me to say to the people of the town.

“Tell them they have a secret admirer on Cape Cod,” he said.

“Tell them there's someone who loves them.”

 

The horse was there every day, at Cornhusker Circle and McDonald.
NO HORSES ALLOWED,
the sign at the entrance of the nearby park admonished. But the horse was not inside the park—it just seemed to live in a city neighborhood, in a city where such a thing did not seem so unusual. In a city that even now did not feel like every other place in the world.

The twin sounds
—I was getting accustomed to hearing them. One sound from the south of town, one from the north.

The sound from the south was the seamless roar of speeding cars. They were on Interstate 80, on their way farther west into Nebraska, or to Wyoming and Colorado. Even when you could not see the cars, you could hear them—their engines, their horns, their tires against the concrete. Through the trees, that sound never stopped, day or night. People moving, at the wheels of their own vehicles. No stoplights or stop signs on the interstate—never the noise of anyone or anything coming to a halt.

The sound from the north was only intermittent. If the constant whine of the automobile traffic never let up from the south of town, the whistle or rumble of a train coming from the north section, out past the viaducts, would catch you by surprise. The trains were freight trains, of course—no passenger train came anywhere near North Platte anymore. The freight tracks on the north side of the city were in the same place as had been the tracks that delivered the soldiers to the depot, all those years before. Maybe the people who now lived near the tracks kept a schedule in their heads—maybe they knew what time of day and night the different freight runs rolled through. But I could never make sense of it.

Every time I would hear the first hints of a train on its way, it surprised me anew. It was as if the cars to the south, on the interstate, were providing the solid bed of some song, the steady background part, and the trains up north were the veteran, temperamental lead singer, strolling into the studio to record his vocals only when he felt like it. The tune they made together was a pleasing one—I never tired of it. In North Platte, I began to hear it in my dreams.

 

I wasn't the only one.

“I was coming to North Platte with my father when I was three or four years old, to pick up groceries for his store,” said Jim Beckius, seventy-four, who now lives there
himself. “I was born in Stapleton, thirty miles north. My father had a grocery in Stapleton. He bought it in 1929, of all times to buy a business.

“It was called Beckius' Cash Grocery. But it seemed like it was all credit in those days. People just didn't have the money. There weren't many streets in that town, and the streets that there were didn't have names. There was just one real intersection, with street lamps on all four corners, and drinking fountains on two of the corners. As a boy I worked Saturdays and Sundays, stacking shelves and taking care of the eggs the farmers brought in to trade for groceries. Twelve or thirteen dollars was a huge order—that would buy enough groceries to fill up two or three boxes.

“My father helped out a lot of people in our town, by carrying them on credit so their families could eat. After he died, I looked at his records. There were people with twelve hundred or thirteen hundred dollars in bills, people who never had been able to pay him back.

“I was sixteen when I graduated from Baker Rural High School in 1943. There were only eighteen students in my graduating class. I went into the Navy as a combat air crewman. I had the glorified title of aviation radioman and gunner. I was afraid of the water. In the sandhills we didn't have any lakes, and I never did learn how to swim. I learned when I was in boot camp near Memphis. They throwed you in. I went right to the bottom, and they
pulled me up. That's how they did it in the Navy during the war—if you couldn't swim, they gave you lessons. I got to be a pretty good swimmer, but I never did it after I got out of the Navy.”

In December of 1943, he said, he was allowed to come home to Nebraska for a seven-day leave. “If you were from around North Platte, and you knew about the Canteen, you were kind of proud of it,” he said. “You'd tell the other guys on the train: ‘You're really going to be fed well, and it's not going to cost you one cent.' They didn't believe it. They said that no one ever got nothing for nothing.

“And then they got there, and saw a lot of ladies with a lot of food, and young girls of nineteen or twenty out on the platform with baskets of apples and magazines…. In pheasant season the people at the Canteen would fry up the pheasants for sandwiches, and some of these kids didn't know what a pheasant was. I'd have to tell them. I love pheasant—when I was a kid the hunting limit was twelve a day. I was seventeen that December when I came home for Christmas. My family didn't even know I was coming.”

The depot that Christmas, he said, reminded him of when his father had taken him into North Platte all those times when he was so young. “I didn't know any of the people in North Platte when the train pulled in on my Christmas leave, but it felt like home,” he said. “The next year, in December of 1944, I spent Christmas at Union
Station in Chicago. It was as empty as a tomb. I'd always heard about Union Station, how busy and full of people it was. But that Christmas there was no one there. It made me think about all the people at the depot in North Platte, all the people at the Canteen.”

He served in the Pacific, got out of the Navy in August of 1946, and arrived back home on a bus. He got a job with the Union Pacific, at a time when rail travel was at a peak. “In October of 1947, there were thirty-two passenger trains a day stopping at the depot in North Platte. Think of what that means for a little town—thirty-two trains a day.

“The great trains—the
City of Los Angeles,
the
City of Denver,
the
City of San Francisco,
the
Challenger,
the
Gold Coast
. After the war, so many people were riding the trains. A lot of salesmen—even if they weren't staying in North Platte, they'd have time to run across the street and have a beer. They set foot in the town.

“It was better for the town, just seeing people all the time. And people from all over this part of Nebraska would come here to get
on
the trains. It makes a town feel like it has life. Once they made the highways better, and everyone started staying in their cars, the railroad just kind of started to fade away.

“It's been so long since we've had passenger trains. There would be no depot to go to, anyway. The town
sounds
different. You don't hear those old steam whistles. I
hated the steam engines, at the time. You'd work on them, and they'd be hot in the summer and cold in the winter—you'd wish for something better. But when they left, I missed them. That sound, especially. Thirty-two trains a day—the sound was always in the air in this town. All the time—the sound was like the air itself.”

 

It wasn't that the outside world had stopped coming to North Platte entirely. The world was simply delivered in different ways—more efficiently than by railroad trains.

The satellite dishes were a daily reminder of that to me. There was one that I kept passing—in front of a house on the 1500 block of Buffalo Bill Avenue. There was something about the juxtaposition of that—the snout of the dish aimed up toward the stars, ready to suck the world's images down to the ground, to a piece of road named for Buffalo Bill—that made me stop and pause next to the dish more than once.

But it had always been so. Only the technology had changed. During the war years, when first-run movies were America's primary form of visual entertainment, the theaters in North Platte showed the same films that audiences in New York and Chicago were seeing. During my time spent reading through North Platte newspapers from the 1940s, I found references to
Midnight Manhunt
starring William Gargan and Ann Savage, playing at the Para
mount;
For Whom the Bell Tolls
starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, playing at the Fox;
Man from Music Mountain
starring Roy Rogers and Trigger, playing at the State, all of the movie theaters downtown, near the Canteen.

And there had been radio: KODY in North Platte, WOW sending in its strong signal from Omaha, KFAB beaming in from Lincoln. The voices that floated out of the sky and into the homes here were voices that were being heard in Los Angeles, in Dallas, in Miami:
Clifton Utley Speaks
at 7:30
A.M.
,
The Fred Waring Show
at 10
A.M.
,
Young Dr. Malone
at 1
P.M.
,
Burns and Allen
at 6:30
P.M.
,
Elmer Davis News
at 7:55
P.M.
,
The Kay Kyser Program
at 9
P.M.
,
The Ramon Ramos Orchestra
at 11:30
P.M.

One day I spoke with a woman named Dorothy Townsend, who told me that the radio signals coming out of the sky weren't the only joy being delivered from above.

 

“It could be pretty bleak out in Nebraska during the war,” said Mrs. Townsend, eighty-eight. “The towns we lived in were mostly very small, and there was not a lot for a person to do.”

She and her husband had lived in Sutherland, she said, and one of the ways they had come up with to entertain themselves was to look at the stars.

“We would stop and watch the northern lights,” she said. “We would pull off the road and sit and look at the
sky. We would make an evening of it—we would come to North Platte to go to church, and then we would eat a bite before driving out to look at the stars.”

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 thank
ing 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.