Once Upon a Town (14 page)

It turned out not to be a he, but a she. And as for the meritocracy…as for the idea that the person who built the large and costly house did so after working her way to the top of the world of commerce or politics, the way Governor Neville had before erecting the Pawnee on the plains…

This was a new era—all over the United States, and right here.

The owner of the spectacular home—the master of the manor?

She had been an employee of the North Platte post office.

She had won $50 million in the Powerball lottery.

She lived about as far from the tracks as a person could live.

I was beginning
to understand just how the sandhills—the defining physical characteristic of this part of Nebraska, the boundless dry sea of rolling dunes that made everything feel the way it felt—had shaped the lives of the men and women of the Canteen days. How the sandhills had made everything in the world of those men and women seem vast beyond comprehending, yet paradoxically small and confined, all at the same time.

I spoke with people who had grown up surrounded by all of this—Marian and Kent Peterson were two of those people—and as I listened to them, I could almost see them here in the 1940s, see them as they would excitedly come
into town with their parents to meet the troop trains.

Marian Peterson—she was Marian Rodine then—is sixty-eight. The way she recalls being a young girl in the sandhills, “We went to church, or grocery shopping, but we didn't go to the movies. I grew up near Gothenburg, and I don't think I saw a movie until I was in high school.”

Which is why the Canteen was such a thrill for her, at the age of eight or nine. “I would go with my mother's ladies' group—it was a church group called the New Hope Dorcas. My mother never learned to drive, so my dad did the driving to the Canteen. He drove, and carried the food.

“It was such a different way of life for me to see. The sailor boys were so good-looking, to a young girl like me. The sailors and the soldiers would just come rushing in the door, like they couldn't believe there was enough food for them. They would play the piano and sing…that was so
interesting
for me, never having seen anything or done anything like that.”

Her knowledge of the war, she said, mostly came from listening to family conversations. “I don't know if we had a newspaper in the house or not,” she said. “We mostly gathered around the radio not to listen to war news, but to soap operas.
Fibber McGee and Molly.
We'd sit there and listen to it together, and play dominoes.

“The war, to us, was not something that came out of the radio. It was the boys at the Canteen.”

In a different part of the sandhills, the man she would
marry—Kent Peterson, now sixty-seven—was growing up, too. They had yet to meet.

“My family lived near Brady, between Gothenburg and North Platte,” he said. “We had a pretty modern radio, for the time—my uncle had a hardware store, and we came into town from the farm and bought one there. We kept our radio in the kitchen—that's where you gathered, that's where you had your heating stove, and your food.

“One of our neighbors, Mr. Craig, would come over and listen to the radio with us. He liked the fights. So if boxing was going on, we'd have to listen to boxing. War would have to wait.

“You would listen to the radio with your family in the kitchen, and you just warmed up real good and jumped in bed. You would heat up a flatiron, wrap a blanket around it, and put it in your bed down by your feet. That would keep you warm for most of the night.”

He said he would go to the Canteen with the group of volunteers from Brady, often in the evening: “We'd get out of school, and hurry up and milk the cows. I definitely liked going to the Canteen—we couldn't wait to get those fourteen cows milked so we could get started.

“The servicemen from the trains were always so neatly dressed. It was such a rat race, with them hurrying around—I didn't want to be like those guys. It was kind of scary. I was a little boy from a farm, nine years old. It was too much for me to want to be a part of.

“But it was fascinating to see. My family and I always just wore overalls all the time—I had never seen anyone with uniforms like that. It was such an event, riding the twenty-eight miles to see all that at the Canteen.

“Muddy roads, and no lights along the roads at night—but I hadn't seen anything in the world. I might have gotten to town once a month, if that. To take cream in to sell to the grocer. We'd get seven dollars for a five-gallon can of cream, and we'd spend six dollars of that on groceries, and save the other dollar for church.”

That was sandhills life, for a young person as the war was beginning. Eventually, he and Marian Rodine would meet.

“I was a cheerleader at Gothenburg High School,” she said. “He tells me he would come from Brady to the football games and see me cheer. I graduated from high school in 1950, and I didn't know him. I went away to the Bonnell Beauty Academy in Hastings, and then I came back to Gothenburg to work at the La Grace Beauty Shop. I met Kent at church, at an evening Christmas program. He escorted me back to my home that night. We got married in 1954.”

Kent Peterson said: “The cheerleader girls were pretty good-looking, and she was the prettiest one of the bunch. I'd go down to the fence and pretend to be watching the game. You had to be on the move, at that fence—you couldn't just stand there. But the reason I was there was to look at her.”

I asked him if, when they finally met, they had fallen in love right away.

“Oh, I don't know,” he said, half a century later, laughter in his voice. “We're still working on it.”

 

I rode north on Route 83, past the viaduct, past the tracks, past the old Elks Club and the softball complex, out of town. I wanted to see the sandhills at their most unpopulated.

At one time—as late as the 1860s—this was known as the Great American Desert; some topographical experts of that era declared that it was unfit for human habitation. They were wrong; although the sandhills are, in essence, literal dunes, their fragile surface is held in place by the tenacious roots of native grasses. The grass stabilizes the hills; as long as the grass is safeguarded and kept intact, the sandhills provide the best grazing land for cattle on the North American continent, and a stunning portrait of glorious isolation for those who live here—and especially for those who are seeing all of this for the first time.

As I proceeded farther out of town—in the direction of Stapleton, and Thedford, and Lewanna and Brownlee and Valentine, all the villages leading to the bottom border of South Dakota—the houses became fewer, and the stretches of land between the farms grew longer and longer. There was green all around, in every direction; contrary to the name, the sandhills in summer had the lush and spellbind
ing look of a perfect and undulating putting green, the largest putting green imaginable at the most far-flung and expansive golf course in the world.

There were moments—almost inexpressibly splendorous moments—when the sandhills were all that seemed to exist. Nothing but them, as far as the eye could behold. I thought about Mr. and Mrs. Peterson, and what it must have been like when they were very young, coming with their parents into North Platte, which, surrounded by the sandhills, must have seemed like Manhattan. And I thought, as I was always thinking now, of those soldiers on the trains. Of what they must have pondered as they passed through this country.

 

“Fourteen months ago I lost my wife of forty-eight years,” said Lawrence W. Jones, seventy-seven, who lives in Nacogdoches, Texas. “I'm coming out of a tunnel. I was just numb for seven or eight months.”

He was explaining that he felt all right—or at least felt good enough to talk with me about the Canteen, and why it has such an enduring place in his heart.

“It would have been about the first part of August in 1943,” he said. “I was a tailgunner in the Army Air Corps. I wasn't even old enough to buy a drink.

“I had volunteered out of high school in Sarasota, Florida. There was nothing to do in that town—the only
jobs available were working at soda fountains, at least when the circus left its winter headquarters and was on the road.

“I had graduated from a six-week course in gunnery school at Buckingham Air Force Base in Florida, and they sent us west on a train, to Salt Lake City. There were probably five hundred military people on that train—field artillery, infantry, air corps. And after that long trip across the country, at five-thirty one afternoon we pulled into this place none of us knew anything about.

“We looked out the windows, and there were these women talking to us, passing us sandwiches and everything. They said, ‘Are you going to get off the train?' We said, ‘We don't know if we're allowed.' They said, ‘We've got it fixed—you can get off the train.'”

And so, he said, they all did. “We lived in our uniforms—we never wore civilian clothes. We were all in our uniforms when we walked into the train station…and there were these plank tables, loaded down with every kind of food you could imagine. Homemade cakes, pies, sandwiches, Coca-Cola…We could not get over it. Out in the middle of nowhere, or at least to us it was the middle of nowhere, and it was getting toward dusk…this was like a miracle.

“I got to thinking in my own mind: ‘Where do all these people come from?' So I asked. And they told me that they were from all over that part of Nebraska, some
from a hundred miles away. The farmers' wives made chicken for us, and they brought milk from the farms….

“And they did it day after day after day after day. We were there for so few minutes, and then it was ‘All right, load up the cookies, get back on the train.' Puff, puff, and we were gone.”

As the train pulled out of North Platte, he said, he couldn't stop thinking about what he had just seen. “Those people spent all that time and donated all that money—to get the sugar and all that stuff. They gave up their own ration stamps. They were using their ration stamps for us. We all knew what that meant. I wrote home about it.”

He was a tailgunner in B-24 Liberators over Europe and North Africa. “Wars are not about killing, and wars are not about dying,” he said. “Wars are about love. That's what you remember. All the other stuff is incidental. The people you depended on, though, the people you came to love…

“It's the bulletin board syndrome. You got up in the morning and you went to the bulletin board to see if your name was on it. Whether you would be flying a mission. We were good at our jobs. We stayed good to stay alive.

“Flying those missions, everything was in slow motion. You're twenty-five thousand feet above the ground, and you have no feeling of movement. You watch the contrails behind the ship…the heat, mixed with the cold moisture
in the air, behind each engine…The only noise you would hear is the drone of those engines. I'm all by myself back there, seeing that. I felt like I flew the whole war by myself, back there in the tail alone.”

As he began to talk about North Platte again, I heard something in his voice. It was the sound I had come to recognize in these men.

“I don't know,” he said, crying. “It's something that comes over you every once in a while. We had heard that there were women in that Canteen who had lost their sons. And they would come down there. To see us.

“I think that we really were all in it together. The women who were there—their personal lives, and the lives of our own mothers…

“It was either going to be freedom or slavery. If we had lost the war, the men would have been in slave camps, and the women, if they were good-looking, would have been in the officers' clubs of the enemy who defeated us, doing their ‘duty.' Our enemies would have confiscated all of our wealth, all of our nation's art…everything. We never think about that, because we won the war. But if we had lost…

“You think back to the war, and it's not the shootings and bombings you think about. It's the relationships with people, and some of them, you realize now, you hardly even knew, but they still meant so much to you. When veterans get together, they talk about this mission and that
mission. But what they really mean is: ‘What happened to so-and-so?'

“That's how I feel about North Platte. What happened to all of those people? They were like our mothers and our sisters. How did they know to do that for us? How did they know how much it would mean?”

 

On Route 83, with the sandhills promising to roll on forever, I decided it was time to head south again—to turn around and go back to town.

That shoreless sea of green, no matter which way I looked—I tried to picture it in winter, covered in snow and ice, or in autumn when the grass turned brittle. The people who had driven through here every month of the year so they could volunteer at the Canteen—they must have felt that they were hurrying toward something: hurrying toward a world they had created at the depot, a world where the distant march of those war years had become authentic and present and a daily part of their very fabric. Hurrying through these silent miles toward something great.

The towering grain elevators just north of the Union Pacific tracks told me that I was approaching the city itself. Painted across the tops of the elevators, linking them, were the two words, as definitional as an urban skyline, an unflowery and unambiguous welcome:
NORTH PLATTE
. And painted beneath those words, as if to patiently explain that
the grain elevators were for work, not for picture-postcard show:
A FARMER-RANCHER OWNED SERVICE
.

Underneath them, if you knew where to look, was the place where a train station once stood.

 

“They were oil roads,” said Helen Johnson, seventy-three. “That's how we got to North Platte—on dirt roads that had oil on the surface to keep down the dust.”

She grew up in Brule, a town of 410, sixty miles west of the Canteen. “Brule and Big Springs had their Canteen days together, because the communities were so small,” she said. “My folks lived on a farm, so we had plenty of eggs and meat. My mom made meat sandwiches for the boys. It was easy to convince me to go. There was food in my dad's car from top to bottom. The trunk was chock-full of sandwiches. We would hold the cakes as we rode.”

She was just thirteen when she started going. “You were delighted to greet the guys and give them home cooking, and as a teenager you liked to see the boys. But you also had this feeling in your heart that some would not make it home. You would look at them and feel a lump in your stomach thinking about their future.”