Once Upon a Town (18 page)

From a news account, posted as part of the exhibit:

Then an update: The young woman was “improved.” Then “slightly improved.”

Then:

Such a peculiar exhibit; such an uneasy feeling. I looked at the head extending from the iron lung, immobilized; I looked at the glistening metal instruments in the nearby display cases; I looked at the impassive faces of the doctors in the picture frames above.

It was difficult to conceive what it must have been like to be the young woman inside the machine—the first person in North Platte to be sealed in the pressurized lung, her every change in condition reported to a curious public reading the daily news. Whether she wanted strangers to know or not.

I looked again at the face, at the eyes gazing straight up. There was one word to describe the patient: helpless.

“Knees up! Knees
up!”

The expanse of grass I came upon while walking through North Platte early one morning contained a tableau as far from the sickroom gloominess of the museum exhibit as anything could be on a luminificent summer day—as removed from the darkness of youthful illness and infirmity as any scene you could ever encounter.

“Linebackers! Over here!”

Summer football practice—the first sessions, preparing for the fall season. These were North Platte High School athletes, but practice was being held on the field behind
Adams Middle School—these boys weren't sure things to make the varsity, they were younger students, many of them trying out for the high school team for the first time, and they did not rate the main football field, at least not yet.

I wandered over to watch, and stood with two of the coaches, men in shorts and T-shirts with whistles clipped to lanyards. “We're just taking a look at them,” one of the coaches told me. “Seeing who we have here.”

And in the eyes of the young football players you could tell that they were wanting to be seen, hopeful to be noticed. Entering high school in the middle of Nebraska, figuring out what it means to be a young man, aspiring to be thought of highly, to be admired…you could see the boys sneaking glances at the coaches, trying to perceive if the coaches might be looking back at their section of the field. Each boy seemed to be attempting to run a little faster than the one next to him, shout a little louder during calisthenics, be a little quicker to his feet after the stretches were completed. Anything to be singled out.

“All right!” a coach yelled. “Everybody down to this end of the field!” They sprinted, while at the same time trying not to appear too overly eager, and it all translated, as it forever has at summer football tryouts, to: I hope the men in charge will take note of me, and approve.

“Linebackers!” That word again, hollered again, and you could tell that for some of the boys the word was tantalizing, a promise, something they dreamed would soon
enough officially describe them. To be a linebacker, on the North Platte Bulldogs varsity on Friday nights in autumn…

How do you break out of the crowd? That is what this all came down to: a chance to break out, maybe for the first time in your life; a chance to be special, a chance, in this high school, to be a part of the group at the top of the hierarchy.

The coaches circumspectly pointed out to me the boys they thought had the best prospects for making the team, and some of the boys saw the coaches pointing, and I thought about boys not much older than these, boys who once were taught, at basic training, that breaking out of the crowd was not supposed to be their goal. Boys who rode the trains into and out of this town, many years before this summer morning, members of a team with different kinds of uniforms. “For our away games, we travel as far as Lincoln,” one of the coaches told me, and I thought about young men who were on traveling squads that hurried through here on their way to Europe, on their way to the Pacific. Away games.

 

“It's difficult for me to think about the war without thinking about my high school football classmates,” said Anthony J. Barak, seventy-nine. “I somehow always find myself thinking about what happened to them.”

He grew up in Petersburg, Nebraska, went to Cathedral High School, and worked for a year to save enough money to go to Creighton University in Omaha. But in 1943 the Navy sent him to midshipmen's school in Illinois: “There was a great need. We had a double class going at the same time.”

In Fort Pierce, Florida, “We had amphibious boat training—the floating coffins, they called them. We practiced our landings. Then we were supposed to go to Coronado, California. The troop train was a mixture of Army and Navy guys.

“That troop train…it was like a cage full of monkeys. You couldn't rest, you couldn't sleep—there was just seating, no beds. It was cold outside as we rolled through Nebraska, but it was so hot in the train. We were supposed to sleep sitting up in our seats or lying down in the aisle.

“It was going to be three days from Omaha to San Diego. At North Platte we kind of went off on a side track—that was the first inkling I had that something unusual was going on. There was a little girl standing there by the side of the train. We got off, and I went up to her and took this package from her. It was a cake. I was so surprised, I kissed her on the cheek.

“Although I had grown up in Nebraska, all I really knew about the town was that it was in sandhill country. My dad was a federal banking examiner, and he traveled through many towns. He had always told me that North
Platte was a railroad town, full of railroad people and cowboys from the ranches.

“So that was my expectation. But what happened there…we were there for, at best, twenty minutes. We were treated like that not anywhere else the rest of the trip. No one else did anything like that for us. They were mostly older ladies at the North Platte station, and they made us feel sort of like it was our mothers, greeting us and hugging us. It was like being home, a little. Home for twenty minutes.”

Home would soon seem like the most distant of memories. “I was at Okinawa,” Mr. Barak said. “Our ship was in the picket line off Okinawa—we were supposed to pick up any incoming kamikaze aircraft or submarines.

“I often think about the trip over there. It was really our first experience with rough seas. You got awful seasick. The only real training for something like that we had was on Lake Michigan, which was very choppy—but the Pacific Ocean, those huge waves…

“They could slap you either left or right. Sometimes the ship would heave and pitch. It dived down into the waves. If you were on the deck, and the ship would surge, you saw the horizon go up and down. I lost the fight a few times. I got so sick.

“It's the most horrible thing, and there's nothing you can do about it. You should have smelled the troop quarters on the ship, where we were housed. You'd go to the
men's room, and you'd slip on vomit on your way there. People were getting sick all the time. It was a pretty awful business, I'll tell you. I would rather hit a beach than sit on a troop ship and be so sick.”

When he had left Nebraska for the war, “I had a girlfriend back home. She gave me up for being lost. She thought I was going to come back in a coffin. Because of that, I felt that people didn't really appreciate what we were doing for them. Because of
her.
But then I would think about North Platte, and about people who
did
care about us.”

He returned from the service and studied assiduously, earning a Ph.D. in chemistry. He spent his career teaching biochemistry and internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He has been married for fifty years; he and his wife raised five children.

When he thinks of his time in the war, it is not necessarily his shipmates who fill his memories. He recalls young men who were not at sea with him. Mr. Barak—like Paul Gardner, who had told me about his lost fellow high school football players—remembers the teammates from his school.

“I played three years for the Cathedral football team,” he said. “We were the Cathedral Cardinals—red and white. We were really pretty good.

“I can see them now. I lost one in India, one in New Guinea. You'd hear about it when it happened. You'd get
the news that some of the guys from your high school football team were getting killed.

“Hooks Hamilton, our halfback. Herman Jadlowski, who played tackle. You're a kid, and you played next to them on your high school football field…and then they're dead.”

 

The North Platte football team continued their summer workouts and, as the sun rose higher in the sky and the morning heated up, some of the players took their shirts off and tossed them to the side of the field.

I found myself smiling as they did it, because a few days earlier I had met Gene Slattery. The ultimate take-off-your-shirt kid.

He's sixty-eight now, a farmer—but when he was nine, at the beginning of the war, he devised his own way of making money for the Canteen.

“It started with some goats,” he said. “We lived over in Big Springs, and my dad took me to a livestock sale, and I was helping to sell some goats down on the floor and someone who knew my family kidded me by yelling: ‘Why don't you sell your shirt, too, Gene?'

“So I did—I took it off and sold it. I gave the money to the North Platte Canteen, and people talked about it.

“I got the idea to keep doing it. Every livestock sale I could get to, I would go down onto the floor of the sale
barn and the auctioneer would auction my shirt off. I did it all over this part of the state.

“People started buying it and then giving it back—they'd pay for it and say, ‘Let's sell it again.' So I would sell it many times at the same livestock auction. The buyers knew the money was going to the Canteen.

“And whenever someone did keep the shirt, there were clothing-store owners in North Platte who told me: ‘Now, Gene, any time you need a shirt, you come to me.' They would give me shirts for free, to sell at the auctions.”

He did it for four years: “The most I ever got for a shirt was seventeen hundred dollars, at a War Bonds drive at the Paramount Theater, across from the Pawnee Hotel. Right up on the stage.”

Then the war ended, and the Canteen closed, and there was no more reason for him to do it. He was thirteen; soon he started high school, and did all the things that high school boys in the late 1940s did, including playing on the football team. He was a lineman.

“But no one knew me as a football player,” he said. “Everyone knew me as the kid who sold his shirt.”

 

“When I graduated from high school in Sutherland, there were only fourteen students left in my class, and we had started as freshmen with thirty-three,” said Marge
Roethemeyer, seventy-three. “Only three of our graduates were boys. The rest…well, you know. The war.”

The boys in her class had been sent off to fight, leaving high school life behind. When she was fifteen, she began to travel the twenty miles to North Platte with “the older women” of Sutherland—“they seemed old to me at the time, but thinking back on it now, many of them were young married women”—and would volunteer to help at the Canteen.

“I told the ladies in North Platte that I was sixteen, although I wasn't yet, because they had that rule that if you weren't sixteen you couldn't work on the platform, and I wanted to. I was kind of a tomboy, and I liked being outdoors.

“My dad had been in World War I, and he had been gassed and shell-shocked. He seemed always to be sick and always in veterans hospitals. He was gone a lot when we were kids.

“Living with my dad being like that all those years, I just did what I could. When World War II started I was a freshman in high school, and I helped the Red Cross fold bandages. That was before pre-made bandages—they didn't have things like we have now. You had to fold and cut the bandages by hand.

“The Canteen always felt like a home to me. It was as homey as could be. There wasn't room for everyone to
dance, but some soldier would always want to. He'd say ‘Let's dance'—he would probably be seventeen or eighteen years old—and somebody would play the piano, and we'd do the jitterbug.

“It would never last very long—maybe five minutes. That's not very long anyway, but especially when the boys were going to be there for such a few minutes. You'd hear someone call ‘All aboard,' and all the boys would tear out and get on the train. You'd be kind of downcast that it would be ending so quickly.

“Some of those boys would make an impression on you at first light. A couple of them, I wrote to. A lot were going overseas. They would ask, as they were leaving the Canteen, ‘Will you write to me?' They weren't flirting. They were lonely.

“Sometimes it was really cold out on the platform. You would stand out there and wave at the train as it pulled away. They would be looking at you through the train windows, and you would wave goodbye until it was gone.”

 

The North Platte football players were running wind sprints, sweating in the sun.

I talked with the coaches a while more, and then headed off to try to find something I had been hearing about. My time in town was growing short; I would be
leaving soon. But after thinking so much about the trains that didn't bring people here anymore, I wanted to see a certain piece of land to the west and the north of the main city. I wanted to learn if what I had been told could possibly be true.