Once Upon a Town (3 page)

“It's funny what you remember. When those ladies came onto the train, I remember that there was a real big
napkin in the bottom of the basket, and the sandwiches were laid out on the napkin.

“Just tell them that I still thank them from the bottom of my heart. And that if they ever ask themselves whether what they did really mattered, that the answer, to put it bluntly, is: Hell, yes.”

 

That night in my hotel room, the weathercaster's voice came out of the television set, giving the local forecast for the next day:

“Hot, hot and more hot.”

But in the midst of a summer of soaring heat, my thoughts kept going back to that Christmas week in 1941, to the freezing Nebraska nights when the Canteen began. For the few people there at the very start, before anyone could know how long the war would last, and thus how long their commitment would be required…

Before it was history—when it was just a silent impulse out on the plains, in a tiny place cut off by time and distance from the rest of the country—who from the town walked into that railroad depot, and what, in their own hearts, brought them there?

“I had read
about it in the paper—about Rae Wilson needing helpers for this project she had in mind—and so I went down there on Christmas night, the first night the Canteen opened. I was twenty-three and a single woman, and I was lonely that Christmas. So I went to the railroad station. There were only five of us there that first night.”

LaVon Fairley Kemper, eighty-three, who now lives in Littleton, Colorado, was telling me the story of that night in 1941 when the Canteen began in earnest.

“I was teaching school in Lodgepole, Nebraska, about seventy-five miles west of North Platte,” she said. “I had come to North Platte to spend Christmas with my dad.
He was single, and he was living in a rooming house. We had no Christmas tree—we really had nothing. He had a room, and I slept on a couch in the living room of the rooming house.

“We had finished our Christmas dinner, and the paper had said that Rae Wilson was looking for volunteers, so I told my father I would be back. It must have been eight-thirty or nine o'clock when I came down to the depot. I was feeling pretty lonesome that night.

“At the depot, there were seven or eight bushel baskets that the ladies had filled with apples and candy. They had stored the baskets in the lobby of the Cody Hotel, because there was no one to guard the apples on the train platform, and as cold as it was, the apples probably would have frozen. By the time the train came in, there wasn't a soul at the depot except for us.

“It didn't come in until about eleven o'clock that night. The news about troop train movement was very hush-hush. Later, after the Canteen was up and running, we would get the word from railroad people—the code we used was ‘The coffee pot is on.' Meaning a troop train was on the way.

“That first night, the soldiers on the train were so amazed—way out there in the boonies at eleven o'clock on Christmas night…they were quiet as they looked out of the train at us. We carried the bushel baskets out to the
train, gave the men the apples and the candy, wished them Merry Christmas, and the train left.

“I think after that we all told each other goodnight, and we went our separate ways. Rae Wilson told us to come back the next morning, which was fine with me, because my dad worked days. He was a machinist.”

She helped out at the Canteen all that Christmas vacation, she said, and then went back to Lodgepole to teach. “It was a town of only about two thousand people. I taught history and English and Latin at the high school, and I coached the high school plays and was the adviser for the Pep Club. Life was so sort of empty in Lodgepole, with no men in town because of the war, that I just took on everything I could do at the school.

“They had an assembly that first year of the war, and I was looking out at the boys in the auditorium and thinking, these boys are going to end up going to war, and some of them are not going to come back. I tried to keep the tears from flowing down my cheeks.

“I would go to North Platte one weekend a month, to stay with my dad and help out at the Canteen. It was very, very quiet in Lodgepole, with not very much for a young woman my age to do. But I wanted to show an interest in the town that was providing my living, and not have them think that I was just a carpetbag teacher who would leave every weekend. I thought I owed it to them, to the small
town, to be there, to be in the church on Sunday, to get to know the parents of the boys and girls I taught.

“I guess I looked forward a lot to my one weekend a month visiting my dad and working at the Canteen. For that one weekend a month I would be around the fellows, and I felt I was doing something for the war. It wasn't so lonely.”

One thing she will never forget, she said, was what happened to a woman who volunteered with her at the depot—a woman by the name of Elaine Wright.

“Her husband was a railroad man. He was one of the ones who knew when the troop trains were coming, and who would tip us off. She had a son, who was off in the Navy.

“Most of the older women who worked in the Canteen had sons in the war. It was like a healing thing for them, to work there—their homes felt hollow with their sons away, and I think they sort of built their world around the Canteen.

“I think Elaine Wright was in the Canteen when she got the word that her son had been killed in action. I wasn't there that day, so I don't know for certain that she found out inside the Canteen. But I believe that was so.

“What I do know is that after being away for several days because of her son's death, when she came back to the Canteen you could hear a pin drop when she walked in. There was silence, and a lot of hugs. And then she said: ‘I
can't help my son, but I can help someone else's son.' And she was there day after day.

“I didn't see any change in her after her son's death, except that she was probably even more caring to the boys who came in from the trains. I don't think she ever told any of those boys that she had lost a son.”

LaVon Fairley Kemper told me that after the school year was over in Lodgepole, she moved to North Platte, got a job teaching at Roosevelt Elementary School, and persuaded her father to move out of the rooming house where they had spent that first Canteen Christmas, and to rent with her an apartment that they could share: “It was a nice place.” And she continued to volunteer at the Canteen.

The Christmas alone with her dad, the sharing of the apartment…I asked her if her mother had died, and if her dad had been a widower.

She paused for just a second.

“My mother was a come-and-go mother,” she said. “She changed men frequently. My father was a quiet, gentle man. I don't know what my mother being that way did to him inside.

“My mother…I think she would have made a fun sister. But not a mother. When you go off and leave your daughter…she shipped me off to her sister when I was in the second grade. Then again when I was in the sixth grade. She really didn't care. Her fly-by-night life was more important to her than I was. She would just
announce that she was leaving, and that she had made arrangements for me.

“My mother died when she was sixty-two, which was probably just as well. She would have made an awful old woman. My dad never remarried. I never knew him to go out with anyone. I just admired him so much and loved him so much. He was the one thing that stabilized my life. I depended on him completely.

“He lived to be eighty-five years old. He died in 1977. He stayed in North Platte, after I was married and I was living in Colorado. I made sixty trips to see him in the last five years of his life. An eight-hour trip each way. I would catch up with his business and do his mending. And I would sit with him and tell him what a great father he had been to me.

“Those trips were my payment to him. For being the man he was, and the father he was.”

She made those sixty trips from Colorado to North Platte and back by bus, she said.

“The passenger trains were gone by then,” she said. “There were no trains that would take a person to North Platte.”

 

I noticed it right away:

People waved from their cars.

I was making the ninety-minute walk my daily rou
tine—from the Quality Inn across the South Platte River, over to Leota, up past the hospital and the church, around the bend to E Street and then turn around and head back—and the waves from the front seats began to seem automatic.

You wouldn't necessarily think that would be the case—certainly I had understood the wariness from the grandmother that first day in town, when I had paused by the house where her grandson was playing with blocks. These weren't heavily traveled streets, I was someone who hadn't been around before….

Maybe it was the safety that people feel inside their cars. They were moving faster than I was—maybe there was no gamble in a quick wave to a stranger, or a sociable beep of the horn, which I was hearing all the time, too.

Still—it's not something you experience much in a big city. Especially if you cross in front of a car whose driver thinks he or she has the right of way, the only wave you're likely to get consists of a single raised finger. And the horn honks directed at you are not often of the amiable variety.

Here, though, it had a “Good morning” quality to it. I couldn't help thinking about whether any of this—the small-town instinct by motorists to greet someone they've never met—might be a remnant from an earlier time in the town's history. A time when the greeting of strangers was the town's stock-in-trade.

Because I was finding more and more of those long-
ago strangers—men who had been here many years before I, men who had come briefly to town in a previous century—who remembered the greetings quite well.

 

“I didn't know North Platte myself,” said Jack Manion, seventy-eight, who now lives in Florida, north of Tampa. “But it so happened I had a high school sweetheart who was living there.”

Manion had been in basic training in California in 1943, preparing to serve in the Army Signal Corps. A troop train was scheduled to take him and his fellow soldiers all the way across the country, to New Jersey. He had sent a telegram to his girlfriend—he had not seen her for more than a year—saying that he would probably be stopping in her town for ten minutes or so. He was not permitted to say what train he would be on, but he indicated what day he would likely stop in North Platte.

“On the train, I got slicked up as best I could,” he said. “I told the other guys: ‘Put your shirts back on, get decent.'

“But I couldn't get the guys too interested. There's a lot of lethargy that builds up when you ride on a troop train. A lot of the guys couldn't believe there was anything special for them in a little cow town.

“I knew I wanted to look nice for my girl, but that wasn't an easy thing to do. You packed in barracks bags in
those days, and your clothes got pretty rumpled. You had two bags—you put your laundry in one bag one week and in the other one the next week. You would try to have your clothes not be wrinkled and your shoes shined—we were as serious about that as twenty-year-olds can be.

“I was trying to keep myself cool on that hot train. I was doing my best to try not to perspire through my clothes.

“We pulled into North Platte, and the guys couldn't believe all the people waiting for them on the platform. I got off with the rest of them, looking all around for my girlfriend….

“And there she was. She was out there kind of looking for me. I was one of many guys coming off that train wearing the same khaki uniforms. I can't even remember if she had seen me in a uniform before. But we found each other. She had driven to the depot, and I guess she had waited for a number of trains, thinking I might be on one of them.

“Right next to the curb was her Buick. Black. Parked parallel, right next to the depot.

“We got into the backseat of her car. We were…well, we weren't, you know—but we were having a private session, getting to know each other again. People were looking at us, but we didn't care. I knew I only had a few minutes, and I was afraid I'd miss the train. If people walked by and stared at us, I wasn't going to waste time thinking about that.

“Some of the guys came by the car—they were saying ‘Way to go, Jack!' It was probably an awkward situation for her. We had kind of drifted apart. We hadn't separated, but we hadn't seen each other in a long time, either.

“I believe it was a train whistle that let me know it was time to go. I looked out of her car, and the troops were dispersing from the depot, and I sensed that our time was up.

“I dragged her with me through the Canteen—it was thinning out quite a bit, the guys were almost all back on the troop train. She was only nineteen or twenty—she was probably a little embarrassed. I put my arms around her as we stood on the platform, and we were kissing goodbye. All the guys were sticking their heads out the train window—some of them were polite enough to ignore us, but most weren't. Like I say—this had to be embarrassing for her, but she hung in there.”

He ended up serving in the Pacific, he said, on Saipan; after the war he was hired as an electrical engineer by General Electric in Syracuse, New York, where he worked on, among other products, color television sets. That life was what the train had ultimately been taking him toward.

And the girl in the black Buick at the North Platte train station? Did he come home from the war to marry her?

“Alas, it turned out someone else did,” Manion said. “They say you outgrow each other. We wrote to each other for a while, but pretty soon that stopped. We weren't mad at each other. We just drifted apart, as people do.” He
doesn't know what happened to her. He met someone else—and they have been married for fifty-three years.

When the troop train pulled out of the North Platte station that day in 1943, he said, “It was kind of lonely. A little sad.”

But he knew that, if he was fortunate, someone else awaited him down the tracks, toward the east.

His father was a civil engineer: “His job was such that we moved around a lot.” And at this point, his dad had a job near the Nebraska town of Kearney. Manion had let his parents know he most likely would be traveling past Kearney on this day.

“We weren't going to stop in Kearney,” he said. “But between the cars of the train, there was this little platform. They let me stand on it as we approached Kearney.

“My parents were waiting there, next to the tracks. As the train rolled through Kearney, it slowed down a little bit. I was able to reach my hand out and shake my father's hand. Just for that one little moment.

“The conductor of the train was nervous about it, but he allowed me to do it. It was: Here I come, here I go. That brief. I think my father kind of had tears in his eyes as our hands touched.

“But he knew that it was a troop train. He knew that it couldn't stop.”