Once Upon a Town (5 page)

They dropped everything they were doing, and when the young men looked out the windows of the trains, the smiles were waiting for them.

Love will find you. It will.

There was a
photo around town—an old black-and-white picture taken at the Canteen—that I had seen more than once. For older residents of North Platte, this particular photograph seemed to sum up much of the spirit of the town during the war years.

In the photo, a young sailor—you can see him only from the back—is seated at a piano in the Canteen, apparently playing away. Surrounding him are other military men and women, all in uniform, some sipping coffee. And above the piano—as if staring down at the sailor making the music—is a caricature of Adolf Hitler.

Playing and singing in the face of war and death—what
a photo. So I was surprised, one day in town, to meet the sailor in the picture, now grown older.

His name was Lloyd Synovec, and he was seventy-three. He told me he had not always lived in North Platte—he hadn't when the war had begun.

“I was seventeen at the tail end of the war,” he said. “I grew up in eastern Nebraska—a town called Pierce, about fourteen hundred people, near Norfolk. I came from a Navy family, even though we were midwestern. I would have liked to have gone into the service even sooner, but my mother…

“Well, you know how mothers are. She said, ‘Why are you in a hurry? You can wait a while.' But I was seventeen when I went in, in forty-five.

“I was in boot camp in San Diego, and I was given the opportunity to spend a little time back at home, so I hitch-hiked east. Me and another kid from the base in San Diego. We got some rides up the coast, and then, right outside of Reno, we got a ride the rest of the way from a wealthy guy who was there for a divorce. He was from Bayonne, New Jersey. Believe it or not, people at that time picked you up if you were hitchhiking. They'd go out of their way to give a guy a ride.

“He had a big Buick. For a seventeen-year-old kid from Nebraska, that was like a limousine. We even helped him drive. He paid for the food. He had been out there getting rid of a wife.”

After Synovec's visit to his family in the eastern part of Nebraska, he started back to the base in California, riding on a passenger train. “I think it was in July or August,” he said. “The war was pretty close to over, but no one knew it at the time. We didn't know the A-bomb was going to come.

“I knew about North Platte, and the Canteen. The fellow who had given us the ride home had driven through the town, on Highway 30, but we hadn't stopped and I hadn't seen the train station. But I knew about it, because my mom had sent a little money or something down there. Women from hundreds of miles around were baking cakes and sending them to the North Platte Canteen.

“The train heading west pulled into the North Platte station, and the conductor yelled that we had about fifteen minutes. There were other military people on the train, and we jumped off and went in. My first impression was: ‘Holy cow!'

“You just didn't see things like that. The place was absolutely packed—in addition to the guys from our passenger train, there was a troop train stopped at the station, too, so the place was full of soldiers—more soldiers than sailors. I was kind of flabbergasted. I grabbed a sandwich and a glass of milk, and just looked around.

“There was a piano over in the corner. I had played a little bit in my high school's orchestra—I had studied music for six or seven years because my mom made me
take lessons. I kind of quit for a while until I heard that girls liked piano players. Although, at seventeen, I don't think I would have known what to do with a girl.

“But at the Canteen I saw that there was no one sitting at the piano, and it looked like a pretty good one, so I took my sandwich over there and I sat down. I didn't expect to be the entertainment, but everyone started gathering around.

“I knew all the tunes of the day—‘Mairzy Doats' and ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition' and ‘I'll Walk Alone'…the other soldiers and sailors began requesting songs, so I played them, and they sang. I remember one that they called out for….”

Synovec began singing to me, all these years later: “‘I left my heart at the Stage Door Canteen….'”

He said that as he heard the soldiers and sailors around him singing during that brief stopover in '45, “I was pleased. Those of us who play piano are always pleased to find one that plays well, and this one did. I suppose it had been played by hundreds of guys who came through the Canteen during the war, and on this day it was me.

“I didn't even know that anyone took a picture. I didn't see it until years later. I had my blues on—I look at that picture today, at me in my uniform, and I don't think I could get my leg in now where my stomach was then.

“I remember they kept yelling what songs they wanted me to play. ‘Let's hear “In the Mood.” ' I wasn't nervous
about playing the songs—I was nervous about
time.
I knew I'd have to get on my train before very long.

“Everyone was having a good time—you get that many people together, singing, there's no chance to be blue, at least for those few minutes. I remember that when it was time for me to go, I got up and made a little speech thanking all the ladies who made the food for us.

“I was pleased as I got back on the train. I'd played for the people, I had a big old ham sandwich and a cold glass of milk in my stomach—what more could I have asked for?”

He said he was stationed at Pearl Harbor at the end of the war, and served there for a few years after that. “I came back to Nebraska, and the GI Bill was available to all of us, but I decided I was not collegiate material. Looking back, studying was not my bit.

“I got a job as a Linotype operator—this was back in the hot metal days. I worked on weeklies at first—there was one called the
Fremont Guide and Tribune.
I worked on some commercial printing jobs, and I got a job at the newspaper in North Platte, where I worked for twenty-two years. That's how North Platte became my home.

“I'm retired now, unless you count mowing my own front lawn for free. I'm glad that I wound up here. This town has never been a big town, but it seems to have a good heart.

“I never would have guessed it, the day the train stopped and I went into the Canteen—I never would have
guessed that I would end up spending most of the rest of my life here.

“That stop that day was so brief. But it's funny—I can still hear the music I played that day. I can hear it right now.”

 

There did not seem to be an overabundance of entertainment options in town as Saturday night approached; I browsed through the North Platte
Telegraph,
looking for somewhere to spend a few hours, and came up empty.

I didn't want to just spend the night in my room. Around the hotel since my arrival I had run into quite a few men and women who told me they were serving as coaches or chaperones at a big softball event that was being held in town: the Amateur Softball Association's Sixteen-and-Under Regional Softball Tournament, in which girls' teams from around the Midwest were competing in an effort to make it to the nationals. The men and women had suggested that I come out and watch.

So, around dinnertime, I did. The Dowhower Softball Complex was on the north side of town, past the Union Pacific tracks where the Canteen had used to be. The local favorites—the North Platte Sensations—were scheduled to play the St. Louis Lightning.

The heat wave had not broken, not even a little, and the temperature still hovered around triple digits. The dirt on
the back-to-back diamonds was baked solid; the coaches were telling the girls to “drink a lot of water,” as if such a suggestion was necessary. The girls on both teams looked as though they had been on a forced march through the desert, and the contest had not even begun yet.

“You're the one, one, one, you're the one,” the girls chanted in the direction of one of their players, trying to encourage her toward a good performance in the game to come. The team members were cheerleaders and participants, all at once—“They've got different cheers for every one,” the mother of an infielder told me.

The star of the Sensations, I could see, was a pitcher the girls called Pook. A tall young woman, she had fire in her eyes as she warmed up. I was told that her real name was Jessica German, and that she lived in Cozad, some fifty miles away. She could have pitched for the Cozad Classics, but the North Platte Sensations were a much better team, a regional powerhouse, so she had chosen to play for them.

The game began; the parents of the players stood along the baselines, or, so they could see the right diamond, sat backward on the top row of a set of bleachers built facing another field. Their legs dangled in the air. A few feet away, a “Rain Room”—a tent with mist-producing sprinklers rigged up—provided a cooldown area for younger boys and girls, including a few in diapers who ran through the falling water.

Next to the home team's bench, a handmade sponsor board was propped up, featuring advertisements for local businesses that supported the team. The ads—pieces of paper inserted into clear plastic sleeves on the board—promoted companies that could serve a North Platte citizen on various stops from birth to death: the Old MacDonald Day Care and Nursery School. The White-Musseman Hearing Aid Center. The Carpenter Memorial Chapel, Troy Tickle, director.

“All right, Pook!” the girls on the Sensations called out as the game began. I found Pook's father—his name was Britt German—sitting atop one of the backward-facing bleachers, watching his girl. He told me that he was an electrical lineman for the city of Cozad, and that Pook was what Jessica had been called when she was a baby; the name had stuck.

He had encouraged her to play for the Sensations, he said, because “she loves the game, and this is a better team for her than the one in Cozad.” It was not the most convenient decision; he had to drive her all the way to North Platte and back for every practice and every game of the year—each time a hundred-mile round trip. “I bring her and wait with the wives,” he said.

He said he had never figured out just how much driving—and how much devotion—this entailed, but when I asked him, he did the math in his head. “One hundred
miles a trip, maybe one hundred times a year,” he said, “and she's been playing on teams here for six years…what does that come out to? Sixty thousand miles?”

“Two down, now!” one of the mothers on the baselines called to the team. She glanced toward the scoreboard, which was dominated by a Union Pacific freight-line logo with the slogan
WE CAN HANDLE IT
. The girls on the field peered toward the St. Louis batter, Pook German cupped the ball in her hand, her father leaned forward, and I realized that these girls at play were only two or three years younger than many of the soldiers who had once passed through this town on their way to war.

 

Those two or three years of difference—from mid-teens to late teens—must, in the days of the Canteen, have seemed like centuries to boys just too young to go to fight for their country. At least that is the conclusion I drew after talking with one of those boys, who had helped his mother at the Canteen.

“I would guess I was fifteen,” said Floyd O. Berke, now seventy-six, who grew up in Eustis, Nebraska, about sixty miles east of North Platte, and who still lives there. “I was a member of the Tri-County Luther League, which was the organization of young people from churches in our area.

“My mother had gone to the Canteen with the ladies' group from our church, and when we young people volunteered to help, we met up at the church and each of us brought a gallon or so of gas to help us get there and back. We went six or more to a car.

“In addition to the gas for the car, we brought cookies, cakes that had been decorated, fried chicken, coffee makings, and breads, meats, spreads and cheeses for sandwich making. When we got to the Canteen the sandwich makers took a slice of bread, applied the necessary fillings, added the second slice and stacked the sandwiches to the side. When the stack of sandwiches was about twelve inches high, one person had the job of slicing them in half. He had a long knife and
carefully
sliced through the stack while the rest of us stood alongside to catch everything that might be dropping.”

This was all in preparation for when the moment would come: when young men just slightly older than the sandwich helpers would arrive on the tracks outside. “When we were alerted that a train was coming, we got into our positions so we were ready to serve.”

Mr. Berke told me that “for a bunch of kids as young as we were, it was fun. We were pretty much in awe of those soldiers and sailors in their uniforms, so close to our own ages. I had a lot of respect for them, just looking at them in the uniforms. The young and old soldiers were kind of
mixed together—although when I think back to it now, the young soldiers were seventeen or eighteen, and the old ones were twenty-three or twenty-four.

“My job was to serve them coffee. I didn't know if I was doing it wrong or not. I just assumed that you let them pick up the empty cup, and then you filled it up while they were holding it. I think some of the time I filled the cup half-full before they got to it, so I could speed things up.

“It looked to me like they were having fun. I know that sounds strange, in a time of war—maybe I thought they were having fun because I knew they were going places I wouldn't have minded seeing myself.

“For the most part they were all cordial and polite. I think the military had a way of preparing soldiers for active duty so that the soldiers' minds could be set at ease a little bit. Yes, they sensed they were going to be in danger, but they didn't seem to think that they would be the Number One target.”

The Union Pacific depot itself, he said, impressed him and made him feel very small. “I wasn't so much intimidated by the building as fascinated, I suppose. To me it seemed like such a big, stately depot. Afterward, when I got older and went to Omaha and Chicago and saw the train stations there, I knew that the North Platte depot had not been anywhere near the size of those. But when you're
young, the first train depot you see makes an impression on you.