Once Upon a Town (10 page)

NO HORSES ALLOWED.

Every time I
would see that sign—it was on the edge of Centennial Park—I would start to smile, as if the sign were some quaint gimmick. As if it were a version of those 1950s drive-in restaurant knockoffs you find in a lot of large cities—the newly opened restaurants that strive to remind customers of a previous era, with waiters and waitresses carefully trained to snap their chewing gum and call the patrons “Sweetheart.” It's all done with a wink—everyone is pretending. It's theater, stagecraft. Everyone involved—waiters, waitresses, diners—might as well be acting in a play. What is being sold is not hamburgers—
what is being sold is an experience, or the memory of one.

That's what I first thought the “No Horses Allowed” sign was—a determinedly cute reference to times past, a reminder of what the town used to be. A gentle little joke.

But it wasn't—what it meant was what it said: that you weren't allowed to ride or lead your horse into the park. With the interstate highway and the cable-television hookups and the brand-name fast-food restaurants, there were moments when it was easy to half-believe that North Platte was just another interchangeable part of a bland and homogenized America in which Connecticut is no different from Texas, which is no different from Oregon, which is no different from Georgia. All the same, in the ways that matter.

That is the notion we have come to accept about the United States. But west-central Nebraska is still, at its kernel, what it was; west-central Nebraska is spiritually often just a blink away from the place the pioneers first crossed so long ago.
NO HORSES ALLOWED
at Centennial Park meant no horses allowed—sort of like check your guns at the door of the saloon. In fact, I was seeing a horse every day, right in a city neighborhood. I didn't know what it was doing there, near the intersection of Cornhusker Circle and McDonald Road. It roamed inside a low fence, and some mornings I would see a young woman pull up in a Honda Civic, get out and give the horse some fresh water from a garden hose, make certain the horse had enough to eat, and then be on her way, apparently to work.

That was the only horse I saw in this part of town—maybe the sign in the public park applied to this horse specifically—but the horse, and the admonition on the sign, were a reminder that the people who lived here in the Canteen days must not have had much trouble understanding that they weren't in Indiana or New Jersey. No widespread homogenization of the nation, not back then—this was a place that back then, I sensed, felt like itself, not like everywhere else.

 

“My dad was our alarm clock,” said Waneita Schomer, seventy-nine. “We didn't need any other alarm clock. He never slept a minute past the time he meant to wake up.”

Mrs. Schomer might be just about the model witness from an era in which this part of Nebraska could never have been mistaken for anywhere else. The specificity of her memories, the exactitude of her accounts of what the Canteen days were like for her family…

“I was born in a little town thirteen miles east of North Platte,” she said. “Maxwell. It was in an area right between the North Platte River and the South Platte River. My mother's group during the war was the Valley Extension Club, and they would be assigned to the Canteen at least once a month, sometimes more.

“Everything we cooked or ate on our farm was sweet
ened with honey. We raised the bees, for our own use. We used the honey from the combs as our sweetener for the apples we canned, for our coffee, even for our cereal. If we had oatmeal, we put honey in it. The only thing I can't stand to eat today is a honey cookie. I just had too much honey when I was young.

“But for the things my mother baked for the Canteen, we bought sugar. My mother and father said the servicemen should come first, so we used very little sugar in our home—we used the honey from our bees—and we purchased the sugar to use for the servicemen.”

She remembers in scrupulous detail what it was like on the farm on the nights before a trip to the Canteen. “Late in the day, we would dress chickens. We had no refrigerator, so we had to get the chickens ready for the Canteen just the afternoon before. My dad was really handy with an ax.

“Mother had a great big iron kettle on a tripod out in the yard. We would get it boiling hot. There was no electricity or gas on the farm. We used lots and lots of wood for the fire—and corncobs to start it. We would pluck the chickens. You just dipped them in the water—you didn't hold them in there long. Then we would wash them real, real good. We'd put some baking soda in some water and clean them. Then we would soak them in salt water until two-thirty in the morning.

“We would get three or four hours' sleep. My dad
always knew when to get up—he never slept through. Even if he had to meet someone on a train, he always knew the time in his head.

“We would get up and take the chickens to the Canteen. People are so fussy about refrigeration today. We would just get a bushel basket and line it with oilcloth. Then we would put the chickens in there, and cover them with another piece of oilcloth. We would leave the farm about five-thirty
A.M.

“In the car we would have the chickens, and three or four dozen hard-boiled eggs. My dad had an old Model A—a 1928 Ford. It was a big deal for us to drive somewhere—we walked even to church, which was three and a half miles. It wasn't so much to save gas—people think that the gas rationing was because there was a gas shortage, but it was really to conserve the tires. America got its rubber from Japan, and the government didn't want us to burn up the tires. That's why people weren't supposed to just drive around.

“But we would drive to North Platte, to the Canteen. And when the trains rolled in…man, the sight of all those guys jumping off…

“None of us girls were allowed on the trains. Those guys had been away from women for a long time. We knew we should stay away from the train cars.”

I told her that I had heard the soldiers were always perfect gentlemen to the Canteen women.

“Like I say, they had been away from women for a while,” Mrs. Schomer said. “Let me put it this way: My mom and dad would have killed me if I had put my name in a popcorn ball.”

Her life, she said, had not turned out exactly the way she might have dreamed. “First I worked in a dime store,” she said. “F. W. Woolworth. I was getting ready to go to the teachers' college in Kearney, but I had major female surgery two weeks before. And then that was the year the crops failed.”

She got married when she was twenty-one, she said, “but twelve and a half years later my husband died. I was a widow at thirty-three.” To support herself she went to work for the Union Pacific Railroad, as a clerk, and stayed with the company for thirty-three years.

“I feel very sad that the passenger trains don't come through anymore,” she said. “It used to be that if you wanted to go to a big town like Denver or Omaha, you could just jump on the train and go. I could get a train to Denver at five-thirty or six in the morning, shop for three or four hours, and be home that night.

“It was fascinating just to have the trains coming through all the time. If you didn't have a lot of money to spend, you could go down by the tracks and watch the trains, and play pump-pump-pullaway with your friends—where you pull each other apart. Or you could play andy-andy-over, where you would throw a ball over
a building and have your friend try to catch it on the other side.”

She can still see the old depot, she said, even though it is gone. “Do you know, I can see the soldiers running to make the trains,” she said. “In my mind, I can see all of it. I visualize that, more than I visualize the soldiers running
off
the train and
into
the depot. Because there was something about how much they liked being here—they
knew
they had to get to that train or it would leave them, but they always stayed to the very last minute.

“That's what I see, when I close my eyes—those soldiers on Front Street,
running
.”

 

It wasn't that the East Coast, and what it represented, was foreign or exotic to west-central Nebraska during the Canteen days. Then, as now, national companies did everything they could to drum up sales everywhere in the U.S. I went through some old editions of North Platte's newspapers from the war years, and on most pages there were advertisements for famous brands—Waneita Schomer may have been a girl on a family farm with no electricity, but that didn't stop the merchandisers from trying to entice families like hers to be customers.

Montgomery Ward proclaimed that “in spite of rising costs, in spite of material shortages,” it was cutting its prices on radios. “Here's your chance! Trade in your own
set on this sensational 1942 Airline.” The Airline was a stand-up console radio, bigger than most of today's television sets. Wards was selling it for “$59.88, less liberal trade-in.” For families on budgets, a smaller radio could be had for $26.88. The war was the context of the sales pitch—“Now! Get Europe!”—and the little radio was promoted for its strong reception, necessary out on the plains: “Price cut on this powerful 7-tube! Look at the features—automatic tuning, tone control, loop aerial, big speaker! Includes rectifier!”

Burpee's seed company, operating out of headquarters at W. Atlee Burpee's Burpee Building in Philadelphia, took out ads offering the people of North Platte Burpee's Giant Zinnias in the “five best colors—scarlet, lavender, yellow, rose and white.” Five packets of seeds could be purchased for a total price of ten cents. Pepsi-Cola, through its local bottling affiliate, was running a wartime promotion with North Platte bowling alley owners: “There's PEP in Pepsi-Cola to improve your bowling score! Insist on it always! Twice as big—twice as good!” The manufacturers of Camel cigarettes were positioning their product in an elite category, depicting in their advertising a man and woman on a ski holiday, enjoying Camels in the great outdoors; it was said to be “the cigarette of costlier tobaccos.”

The nation and its famous products in the 1940s entered North Platte in myriad ways—from the Buicks on sale at Hahler Buick-Olds, to the name-brand couches,
chairs and tables on display at Midwest Furniture Company on Dewey Street, where living room suites started at $49.50. So it was not that North Platte during the war was unaware of what the rest of America found to be alluring. North Platte knew—its citizens were being asked on a daily basis to purchase parts of that allure for themselves.

The affecting thing was not that North Platte knew about the East Coast and the big cities. The affecting thing was that men from those big cities were learning about North Platte. Men like George Dawson, of Manhattan.

 

“I was drafted into the Army Air Corps in January of 1943,” said Mr. Dawson, who is now seventy-seven. “I had been a college student at City College of New York; before that I had gone to the High School of Commerce on Seventy-fourth Street.

“What they got when they took me into the service was a kid from Manhattan who had never been farther west than Hoboken. I became a B-24 navigator. There was a long trip across the country soon after I went into the service. A train trip to California.”

On the train ride, he said, he began to see an America he had only heard or read about. “I liked the vistas,” he said. “The immense spaces. I had not been used to that.”

As the train approached North Platte, “I knew about the river, and Lewis and Clark and all that, from my stud
ies in school. I did not expect what came next. A sergeant told us that we could get out of the train in North Platte, and we did—and here was this Union Pacific train station, loaded with tables….”

As Paul Metro had when he had spoken with me from his hospital room, Mr. Dawson began to cry. He said:

“There was love there….”

He had to stop.

“I'm sorry,” he said after a few moments. “It wasn't Times Square, that depot. It wasn't Grand Central Station. But what that depot was…I was overwhelmed by the pure, simple generosity. We were treated as if we were their sons. They could not have treated their own sons with more kindness than they treated us.”

He paused again. It was a while before he could continue.

“Nothing fazes a New York teenager,” he said. “I took it in stride, that day. When you grow up in New York, New York is the city, anything else is the country. That day at the Canteen—all of this was happening to me with a bunch of guys. At some level when you're in your teens, you just accept the things that happen to you as the way things are.

“Nebraska was unknown territory to a New York kid. Before that day, I probably thought of Nebraska in terms of big, Scandinavian people. Probably what I saw in a Hollywood movie about Middle America. That day I learned
something. I learned that the country was a hell of a lot bigger than Manhattan island. I found that out in North Platte.”

He lives on Cape Cod now, he said: “above the state forest.” He spent his life after the war as a sales representative for academic textbooks. He finds himself thinking of North Platte often, “with tender thoughts and feelings.” There is a reason for that, he said:

“I don't know if you talk to many other fellows my age, but there is more looking back than looking forward. I had an uneven childhood. Things were not always the happiest in the house where I grew up. I needed a feeling of community more than most people, or so I suppose. That's what moved me so much in North Platte. It was their acceptance of me without question. I didn't grow up with that.

“Who were we, on that train? We were the hope of the world, at that moment. We were any kid on the street. We were all the same. We all wore the same uniform. We were ‘our boys.' We were their boys.”

He went into the service as a private, he said; he left as a second lieutenant. He went through North Platte twice more: “The next times I was there the feeling was the same, but I could let the guys on the train know what was waiting for them there.”