Once Upon a Town (16 page)

Mrs. Yost said that she does not regret having traveled to North Platte that day, although it was not what she had anticipated. “I knew that I was helping,” she said, “if only by peeling the eggs for the boys to eat.”

She was back home in Lexington in time to make supper for her husband, she said, and that night, when she thought to herself about what had happened at the Canteen, “I knew it had not been a wasted day.”

Still, she said, it was a big world out there into which the young soldiers were being sent, and she has for a long time been sorry about one thing:

“I wish I would have at least walked out onto the platform. To see them get onto the trains and pull away. To see that with my own eyes, and to tell them goodbye.”

At dinner one
night, while waiting for my meal to arrive and reading some old news clippings I had found from the town's wartime years, I heard something: the
William Tell
Overture.

I didn't even have to look up to know where it was coming from, but I did anyway.

A cell phone—the phone of one of the other people eating in the restaurant.

It was a thin, trilling, reedy version of the melody—the
William Tell
Overture as it might sound on a tiny kazoo—which the man had programmed his phone to play instead of ringing in a conventional way.

He let it keep ringing—the man allowed the
William Tell
Overture to play again and again, as he checked the phone's display screen for the caller ID of whoever had placed the call. Then he could decide whether to take the call—while the rest of us in the vicinity of his table had to listen to the phone's music.

What it made me think of was not the usual assortment of complaints about how telephone discourtesy has taken over the land. Instead—because everything I was encountering in North Platte was in the context of the Canteen, and what had happened there—the phone and its musical ring made me consider another fact of life faced by all those young men on the trains, in the days before instant communication became an American birthright.

They went years without hearing the voices of the people they loved, some of those soldiers did—years without hearing the sounds they would have cherished. Now we expect that voices be delivered to us anywhere, any time—we demand it, really. The
William Tell
Overture beckoned the man who could not decide whether to permit the caller's voice into his life right now, and I tried to imagine it: riding across the country on a troop train, knowing the voices you adore will be lost to you for years, knowing you will not even be able to count for certain on receiving a letter from those who care the most about you. Cast adrift on your way to war, with no lifeline home.

 

“If someone wanted to mail a letter, you'd put a stamp on it for them.”

Leona Martens, seventy-three, was telling me what would happen in those first moments when the soldiers hurried into the Canteen. She was a teenager in Wellfleet, Nebraska, during the war: “Just a jump and a holler,” as she described the town of fewer than one hundred residents.

But then she would go to the Canteen.

“I was really young at first,” she said. “A freshman in high school. Those boys would come into the Canteen like you'd known them for a long time. ‘Well, would you like to see a picture of my girlfriend?' ‘Sure I would.' They'd pull a picture out and show me.

“It was probably pride, and loneliness, too. They were proud to show you their girl—show you what they had. But they knew they were leaving that behind.”

Her job inside the depot, she said, was preparing the fixings for sandwiches. “I helped with the meat grinder. It was a big commercial grinder that you ran by hand. It wasn't something they'd let the little kids do.”

They wouldn't? I thought she had said she was young when she came to the Canteen.

“I was thirteen,” she said “That's not little—not when you're born on the farm.”

So she ground the meat—“it went further when you
ground it, put in a little pickle, a little mayonnaise”—and did whatever else was requested of her: “Anything they needed. One day I poured iced tea all day.”

But the main thing was the boys—the young soldiers and sailors. “Any woman who tells you that flirting didn't go on isn't telling you the truth,” Mrs. Martens said. “They forget what they were like when they were fourteen and fifteen and sixteen if they tell you they didn't flirt.”

The era, of course, was quite different when it came to the ramifications of flirting: “Girls didn't go to bed with boys the first night. You just smiled and talked with them and maybe rolled your eyes a little.

“The night before, I would talk to my mother about what a fun day it was going to be. We would bake cookies and my mom would tell me that we were going to get around early in the day.”

Get around early in the day?

“That meant get up right away and get breakfast over with,” Mrs. Martens said. “And when we got to the Canteen, it was just kind of a rush. They had big double doors looking out on the tracks, and those doors would open up and the soldiers would come in off the train in droves. There'd be no one in there, and the first thing you knew, the place was full.

“I'd always be wearing a skirt and blouse. No pants on girls back then—we wore skirts and felt like pretty girls. When those boys came in…well. I've always been a flirt.
Don't let the other women you've been talking to fool you. These were handsome, eligible guys on those trains.”

I asked her what the soldiers would say to her.

“You'd always hear, ‘You remind me of my sister,'” she said. “Don't you know the lines boys use on girls that age?

“But a lot of times we'd just get done with one train, and here comes another one. You'd not hardly recover from the last train—you would have had fun with that bunch, joshed with them—and the next bunch comes in. A lot of them had been on their train from clear across the country.

“City and farm kids both, never been away from home, some of them. You could tell those—they were the ones who were so quiet.”

Those were the boys, she said, who sometimes would have letters in their hands. They would have written home while on the train, and they would be looking around for a place to mail the letters, and the girls at the Canteen—having seen the looks in the eyes of lonely boys many times before—would walk up carrying postage stamps, and would take the envelopes, and would assure the boys that the letters would be on their way.

“There were always the boys who had the gift of gab,” Mrs. Martens said. “They're the ones who had a circle of people around them. But then you would see the boys who didn't—the boys who didn't seem to know how to talk to anyone.

“Those are the ones you would walk over and say hello to. With boys like that, you really felt needed.”

 

The American soldiers around the world may have been waiting for letters from home—letters that took weeks or months to arrive—but some of those soldiers across the oceans were writing letters addressed to North Platte.

As I read some of those old letters, I was struck by the courtesy, almost courtliness, of the young men who took the time to write. One of the letters, sent during the war to the
Telegraph
by a Private John L. Lewis:

And always—always—there were the letters from the soldiers' mothers. What had surprised me at first—that the mothers of fighting men who passed through North Platte would expend the effort to put their thanks on paper and mail them to the North Platte volunteers—was now something I was accustomed to. The soldiers would write to their mothers, and say how they had been treated at the depot; the mothers would write thank-you notes to the Canteen, as if not to do so would be unforgivable.

One such letter:

Some of the soldiers and sailors weren't as new to the ways of the wider world—they'd been around. Ralph Steetle, now eighty-nine, a retired public television executive who lives in Waldport, Oregon, was a Navy lieutenant junior grade and thirty years old when his train took him through North Platte.

“I had left my wife and daughter in Baton Rouge, and was on my way to San Francisco,” he said. “It was a regular passenger train, and there were about a hundred of us military on board, and maybe three hundred other passengers.

“As we approached this one community the conductor yelled, ‘All uniformed personnel out, next stop.' We thought, ‘Oh, hell, someone's going to count us again.' Another checkpoint. We're going to be checked to see if we're still living, or whatever.

“As we get out, it's quite obvious it's not a military check stop. All these people come out of the train station, with things in their hands. It's a town project. I got hold of the local newspapers while we were there. The society news wasn't about parties or dances—it was about how
many hams were taken to the train station, how many pies were baked.

“It's soon evident to us what they have done in this town. There had been some moments during the war—you might be at a bar in Chicago and someone would say, ‘No serviceman here buys his own drink.' But nothing like this—nothing like what we found in this town.

“Inside the train station was a counter that must have run a couple hundred feet, and a white tablecloth covering it. It was loaded with all kinds of food, and the people made it obvious it was their gift. To us. You knew as soon as you walked into the room that you would never forget this.

“They had a birthday cake they wanted to give to anyone, but it was no one's birthday. One of the ladies finally said to this Army captain: ‘Captain, it's your birthday.' And he said, ‘All right,' and he took it back onto the train and we all ate a little of it.

“We'd all had a weak cup of coffee somewhere, but we'd never had a feast. I figured they were patriotic souls who wanted to do their part. They thought it up, and they did it.”

He left San Francisco for the Philippines and New Guinea: “My last sight was the Golden Gate Bridge, and I thought, ‘I wonder if I'll ever see this again.'” Occasionally, while on duty in the Pacific, he would recall those few minutes in the town where the people had been waiting. “There are certain times during the war, when you're
going from tedium to nausea and back again, when you think of good things,” he said. “You would remember North Platte, and you'd think, ‘I wonder if those people are still doing it. If they are, bless their heart.'”

The delivery of the mail to the fighting men in the Pacific was sporadic at best. Knowing that communication would be difficult and much delayed didn't make the reality of it any easier.

“I had a child born while I was gone,” Mr. Steetle said. “That was a solitary feeling, being away from my wife and knowing that the baby was coming.

“It was six weeks after my daughter was born before I knew we had a baby girl, and my wife knew that I knew. All those weeks, not knowing. That's just how it worked. Our baby's not a baby now. She's fifty-eight. Her name is Janie.”

 

One cold winter day at the Canteen—according to a newspaper report of the time, which I came upon in the back of a cabinet drawer in town—the women volunteers encountered an ex-serviceman.

The former soldier was sixteen years old.

He was wearing no uniform—just light clothing with a pair of Army shoes.

The women had to persuade him to have something to eat. The story reported: