Once Upon a Town (15 page)

Although there was never an official announcement that a train full of soldiers was coming, “It seems that we sort of knew ten or fifteen minutes before. The boys were anxious as they got off the train—I suppose there was a
kind of wonderment in their faces. But, oh, when they got inside and saw the food laid out for them—I'm sure some of them hadn't had that kind of cooking for a while.”

Seeing the young soldiers, “It made me realize all the more that the war was a serious thing. We had a radio on our farm, but the battery would always go down, and we would miss the end of the news reports about the war. We didn't have electricity on the farm—we had our own batteries, and a gas generator. The radio was in the living room—it was a console. I have to smile thinking about it, because it always happened—just when you thought you were going to listen to a whole program, the battery would go.”

So her main contact with the war, the actuality of the war for her, was the time spent with the young men at the Canteen. “It all happened in such a flurry, each train,” she said. “You would very quickly start putting out your sandwiches on plates, and pouring drinks so they would be ready. All of us would man our posts. The boys had such a fleeting time with us.

“There just wasn't time to get to know them. The faces all became a blur by the end of the day. But they were all real to us—and I think they were thankful that for a few minutes maybe they didn't have to think about the war.”

After the last train of the day had pulled out, she said, “Of course the Canteen seemed very, very silent and
vacant. The ride back to our farm in Brule would be quiet and pretty somber. All the food containers would be empty.

“You never really wiped away the thought of the boys. You could still see them climbing off the trains, and then filing back on. They knew not how many days they had left, or where they were going. They looked so young—they
were
so young—but they never said anything about it. It all went so fast at the Canteen, and they knew the train was pulling out shortly.

“At night on the farm, it would pass through your mind. The railroad tracks in our part of Nebraska were not even a quarter mile from our farmhouse, and every time you would hear a train, you would wonder if it was a troop train. If it was some of our boys.”

The world has changed in many ways since those days and nights, but the sandhills have remained constant. And Mrs. Johnson, who still lives there, has never forgotten what she would do, as a teenage girl, whenever the young soldiers hurried from the Canteen and back onto their trains.

“I would pray,” she said. “For all of them. I would watch them get onto the train, and I would ask the Lord to bless and keep them. I wanted to keep smiling, in case they turned around to look at us as they left. But I was praying for them, with my eyes open.”

There was an
airport in town, although I had not seen it in all my meanderings through North Platte, and had not even heard anyone mention it.

But I knew it existed—and that it was not just a strip for private planes, but a field that handled commercial aircraft. In most American cities that once depended on the railroads for interstate passenger service, the local airports were the reason train travel had dwindled. But if that was the case here—if the old Union Pacific depot had been torn down in large part because the North Platte airport had put it out of business—then the airport must have
earned its success very quietly. Either that, or something else was going on.

On the most sweltering afternoon of my time in town, I decided to go out and take a look. If nothing else, maybe the place was air-conditioned.

 

America's airports, in coming to dominance, had shrunk the country—had made great distances seem trifling. Part of that was illusion, but the concept of the outside world itself had without question been altered with the coming of the jets. If you could be anywhere in the continental United States within a few hours, how vast or detached could the world outside your town's borders possibly be?

I thought about that as I spoke with Marjorie Pinkerton, seventy-two, who had helped out at the Canteen as a young teenager when her family had lived on a farm near Shelton. She would ride a train to North Platte to volunteer along with her older sister. “I felt like just a tagalong,” she said. “Being the little sister, I just went wherever she went.”

What Mrs. Pinkerton told me about her knowledge of the war, though—about how, as a young girl, she had kept current on the events overseas—made the new American dismissiveness of time and distance seem like the profound
and pervading change that it has been. Because she learned her war news at a movie theater.

“That's one of the reasons that I don't think of the trips to the Canteen as being exactly
fun,
” she said. “It was kind of a scary thing, because of what I was thinking about the soldiers.

“When we would go to the Saturday night movies in Shelton, they would always have a newsreel. We had a little theater in town—the Conroy family, right in Shelton, owned the theater, and it had just one aisle, and no balcony. The girl who would take us to our seats—she was Kathleen Moog, she was my best friend, we were in the same grade in school—would have a flashlight to show us where to sit. Bill Conroy—he was in my class, also—would run the movie projector.

“We would wait for Bill to make the movie start—we would be ready to see
Mrs. Miniver,
or whatever the movie was that night. But first there would be the newsreel. Without television back then, that is how we knew what the war looked like. The battle coverage.

“It was black-and-white, and it would really bring it home. When you just heard about the war, you had to imagine things and picture it in your mind. But the newsreels made you see it. When troop trains would roll through Shelton, we would wave at them, and the boys would wave right back at us, out the windows of the train. Right there next to Main Street, across from the movie
theater—troop trains, right through Shelton. Whenever that would happen, I couldn't look at the boys in the train windows without thinking of the battles in the newsreels.”

The local feel of much of America—the feel that lasted right up until air travel became commonplace—even played a role in how she would meet her husband. Their meeting was a byproduct of a local evening newspaper—sort of.

“In 1950 I had moved to North Platte, and I was a teacher at the Franklin Grade School,” Mrs. Pinkerton said. “I taught third grade. I was walking home after school one day, and I saw a crippled lady—she was on crutches—on Third Street. She was in front of her house, and the newspaper was on the grass. I suppose the paperboy hadn't thrown it far enough.

“She was on those crutches, so I picked the paper up and carried it to her. We talked, and I still had a few blocks to walk to where I lived, and she said to me, ‘Well, come over this weekend, and we'll have lunch together.' So that Saturday I went to her house, and we started visiting back and forth, and she told me that she had a grandson. She took me to her china closet and said, ‘This is his picture.'

“It was his high school graduation picture, and I thought to myself, ‘Gee, I don't want to meet him.' She told me that he lived with his mom and dad on a ranch in the sandhills, about thirty miles away. His graduation picture didn't do anything for me, but she kept insisting and
kept insisting. So I said, ‘All right, I'll meet him.' And she had him come to the house, and we did meet.”

He was Harry Pinkerton, and they were married for forty-six years, until his death in 1999. They had two children. “It was a perfect match,” Mrs. Pinkerton said.

And it began on a side street with a mistossed copy of the evening newspaper as she walked home from work late one afternoon. It couldn't happen that way now. There is no longer an evening paper in North Platte.

 

Out Fourth Street, past downtown to the east, onto the old Lincoln Highway and through fields and countryside, I looked both to my left and to my right, trying to find the airport.

I almost missed it. An unprepossessing building miles out of the main city, it had a free parking lot with no attendants—the kind and size of parking lot you might find at a suburban branch bank. There were no cars parked next to the terminal building; anyone could pull right up to the door and walk in.

No passengers, either—that's what I discovered as soon as I got inside. At the single boarding gate of the airport—the place is called Lee Bird Field, named to honor a North Platte family's son who was killed while training as a military pilot in 1918—no agents were visible. I checked the
schedule—there were only two flights today, and both had already departed.

I approached the ticket counter; a woman told me she was unable to issue tickets to passengers, because an agreement between United Airlines and Great Lakes Airlines to run a joint operation had recently fallen apart, and until the details of Great Lakes' unshared proprietorship of the route could be worked out, purchases had to be made through a 1-800 number, and not at the airport.

Not that this affected all that many passengers; on a weekend day like this one, there were just the two flights to Denver (on Beechcraft twin-engine propeller planes); on weekdays there were three flights. The airplanes held only nineteen passengers, and were seldom full.

This is what had helped to do away with the once-bustling railroad station downtown; this, at one time, had seemed to be the lustrous future of long-distance transportation out of and into North Platte. Frontier Airlines had for a time flown jets—737s—into here, but after the deregulation of the airline industry was put into effect in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Frontier got out. It had happened all over the United States—when airlines didn't have to serve smaller cities, when they weren't required to by the government, they cut their losses and departed for good.

So twice a day—three times on weekdays—the nineteen-seaters set down here; twice a day—three times on
weekdays—they took off. I walked over to a machine selling big, various-colored gumballs, the old kind of gumballs in the old kind of vending machine you used to see in drugstores and on carnival midways—the sort where the gum rolled down clunky metal chutes with drop-down metal doors. A sign said that part of the proceeds would be “Donated to Civic Activities.”

I tried to envision the railroad depot in its busiest years, with those thirty-two trains a day steaming right into downtown, letting passengers off, taking passengers on, both the depot and the passengers filled with the sensation of
being somewhere.
There was a series of clocks on the wall of the airport, each clock set to the time zone of a different city, and labeled as such.
LOS ANGELES. DENVER. NORTH PLATTE. NEW YORK. LONDON.

I walked up to a window that was hot to the touch and looked at the runway in the sun, with not a plane to be seen.

 

“They said I was too valuable on the homefront,” said John Zgud, eighty. “I was working at Martin Aircraft in Baltimore—I was the foreman in a sheet metal machine shop.

“My bosses told me that I was needed where I was, and that even if they did release me to go into the service, the Army wouldn't take me, because working in the aviation plant was too important to the war effort.

“But I said to myself, ‘I'm going to quit my job.' I went to a tavern on the corner, and ate some crabcakes and drank some beer, and I thought about it.

“I knew I could stay a civilian, and have every excuse for doing so—I was helping to build airplanes. But when the war was over, people would have asked me, ‘What did you do in the service?' And I would have had a new suit on, and money in the bank, and I could have said, ‘I worked in an aircraft plant.' I was young. I didn't want to say that.

“When the war was over, I wanted to be able to say that I did my part.”

So he quit the job in the aircraft factory, he joined the Army Air Corps, and he found himself on a train across the United States on his way to prepare for combat. He ended up as an aerial gunner on B-24s, flying thirty combat missions in Europe. But first was the train ride.

“It was a troop train made up of fifteen or twenty old passenger cars,” he said. “We had to keep the windows closed, or all the soot would get in. The train was packed full—no shower, no place to eat. We ate these dried-up field rations.”

It was one of those times in American life when the way in which people moved from place to place was irrevocably, everlastingly changing. He gave up a safe job in an aircraft plant…to ride on a train all across the United States…so that he could learn how to fly in airplanes
that got shot at. It was his decision, and he has always believed it was the right one.

“After all that time on the train, and all those field rations, North Platte was almost too much to believe,” he said. “These girls came out of the depot and toward the train with cigarettes, candy, chewing gum, telling us to go on inside and have some food and something to drink. Pretty, young girls—I still know a few of them.”

That is because today he lives down the road from North Platte, in Cozad. He came back to the United States and got a job in Philadelphia as a plumber. He didn't much like it—and his wife said she had a sister who lived in a place they might enjoy more.

“Betty's sister lived in Nebraska,” Mr. Zgud said. “We came out to see her, and we said, ‘This looks like a pretty good place to settle.' And it has been.”

When Mr. and Mrs. Zgud want to go somewhere, though, the highway is about the only option. The passenger trains don't come through here any longer—and the limitless promise of the air age is down to the thin drone of twin propellers, two or three times a day.

 

A sign on the wall of the airport building said that North Platte had been home to the nation's first lighted airfield. (The lights had consisted of fuel-burning barrels placed around the perimeter of the runway in 1921, so that a
two-plane airmail caravan that was originating in San Francisco could touch down for servicing on its initial route east. One of the planes crashed soon after leaving California.)

There would be no more planes in North Platte this afternoon—no planes requiring lights, no planes not requiring lights—and I walked back into the parking lot, where the sun had turned the blacktop into goo that clung to the bottoms of my shoes. The sound of no noise was everywhere.

Whatever the birth of air travel may have promised the country—speed, convenience, the vanquishing of gravity—it took something away in the course of delivering those promises. What was taken away was, in no small measure, the country itself: the country as land, the country as place. On an overcast day, passenger jets don't just speed over North Platte—they don't even provide an opportunity to acknowledge it exists. People looking down from the sky have no idea it is there.

Those thirty-two trains a day, moving in and out of the old depot downtown—maybe there were days when the trains stopped, and not a single person got off, not a single person got on. Maybe the stops at North Platte, on days like those, were useless.

But at least the people on board knew they had tarried somewhere. At least they had to concede the fact of the town. If only by hearing the sound of the conductor's
voice, announcing that they had arrived in a place that had a name.

 

“We lived in Lexington, sixty miles east of North Platte, in the war years,” said Maxine Yost, eighty-two. “I was a young mother of two small children and, with the consent of my husband, I lined up a baby-sitter for the day. I volunteered to come with the ladies of the Presbyterian church to help in the Canteen for that one day.”

If the North Platte airport was a reminder of how the way of arriving in town has been altered, Mrs. Yost's tale was a different kind of reminder—a reminder of how coming to town, even in the Canteen years, could hold hidden letdowns.

“We left Lexington early in the morning, bringing crates of hard-boiled eggs furnished by many of the nearby farmers,” she said. “I was delegated to stay in the kitchen of the Canteen to peel the eggs, and it took many hours. I was disappointed to have to stay in the kitchen and not be able to talk to or visit with any of the servicemen.”

That's what she had not expected: to work in the Canteen, yet never speak to a soldier. “I could only peek out once in a while and see the servicemen,” she told me. “I wished I could work out in the dining room, and serve some of the men. But somebody else took the eggs out to the main room. I just wanted to wish the boys good
luck—to tell them I hoped they had good luck where they were going, and that they would come back safe.”