Once Upon a Town (4 page)

On the weekend
after I arrived in North Platte, the
Telegraph
devoted a full page to coverage of young men and women in the area who had decided to become husbands and wives.

Each engagement story was accompanied by a photograph of the couple; the men and women were dressed casually, for the most part. Open shirts (even T-shirts) for the males, everyday dresses or blouses for the females.

About Angela Faye Abbott of Kearney, and her fiancé, Shawn Henry Warner, also of Kearney, the newspaper reported: “Abbott is a 1996 graduate of Hartington High School and a December 2000 graduate of the Nebraska
College of Technical Agriculture in Curtis, with a degree in horticulture systems with landscaping, greenhouse and turfgrass options…. The prospective groom is a 1995 graduate of Ord High School and a December 2000 graduate of NCTA with a degree in natural resources. He is employed by Buffalo County Surveying in Kearney.”

Love finds you. Out here on the plains, or in the commercial canyons of New York or Chicago, love finds you. Michelle Blaesi of North Platte, who, according to the
Telegraph,
attended the Mid-Plains Community College dental assisting program and who was working as an assistant manager at the Subway sandwich shop, would be marrying Joshua Nelson, also of North Platte, who had attended Nashville, Tennessee, Diesel College, and who was working at Guynan's Machine and Steel.

Love finds you anywhere. One of the engagement announcements—because of the small town where the prospective bride and groom lived—caught my eye especially. Renee Munson and Luke Connell, both of Tryon, would be getting married; she, according to the
Telegraph,
was employed at Wal-Mart, he worked “as a ranch hand for Ron Lage.”

Tryon was a tiny place with which I had become familiar because of one woman who, during the 1940s, had grown up there. Her name was Ethel Butolph, and now she was seventy-nine. Love will find you. Yes it will.

 

“The Canteen?” Mrs. Butolph said to me. “I never went there. But I got my husband there.”

Tryon, she said, was about as small as a town could be: “Seventy or eighty people. In McPherson County, about thirty-five miles north of North Platte. There was a post office and a little grocery store and a high school, but that was about it.”

In her family, she said, there were ten children—nine girls and a boy. She never went to high school: “I guess I thought I was smart enough. Not every girl went to high school back then.”

Women from Tryon volunteered a regular shift at the North Platte Canteen, and they came up with a tradition. The women would make popcorn balls to give to the soldiers, and in each popcorn ball they would put the name and address of a girl who attended Tryon's high school. The idea was to give the soldiers someone to write to.

“Now, today, a girl would probably be scared to do something like that—write to someone she has never met,” Mrs. Butolph said. “Then, it was a friendly thing to do.”

But the popcorn balls at the Canteen didn't apply to her—at least they weren't supposed to. Because she wasn't in school, she wasn't thought of when the Tryon Ladies put the names in the balls. “I was just staying home most nights, doing some baby-sitting for people, and I had a job
in the post office over in Ringold. Ringold was even smaller than Tryon. I got the job because all the boys were in the service. The Ringold postmaster went off to war, so I took his place.”

Her younger sister Vera, though, had her name put into a popcorn ball, because Vera was in school. “A soldier named Woodrow Butrick got the popcorn ball with Vera's name in it when he passed through North Platte,” Mrs. Butolph said. “He wrote to her. The first letter, I believe, was from Ogden, Utah. These boys were lonesome. They would do anything to get some mail.”

Vera and Woodrow began to correspond regularly, although they had never met or spoken. And after a while, an Army buddy of Woodrow's said to him: “Woody, you don't know if she has a sister, do you?” The Army buddy was a young man by the name of Virgil Butolph.

“So he began to write to me. He was four years older than I was. Vera and I would just write friendly letters back to the two of them. Mom would read the letters before we mailed them, and she also read the letters that Virgil and Woody sent to us.

“It went on for three years. It got to the point where my sister and I were writing to them every day, and they were writing to us just about every day, too. Woody went to Germany, and Virgil went to Alaska, and we kept writing.

“We sent them pictures, of course, and they said they liked the way we looked. The way we felt about each other
grew by letters. I think you get to know a person better through a letter than you do by seeing them. When you see someone in person, you're putting on such an air. In a letter you tell things the way they really are.

“We corresponded from 1941 to 1944. He sent me a ring at one point, and I said in a letter, ‘I'll wear it, but this doesn't mean we're engaged.' He wrote back and said, ‘OK.' But I think we realized that maybe this would be it—maybe it would happen.

“I received a telegram from him in 1944. It said: ‘Coming home.' He came to Nebraska on a furlough. He got off the train at Kearney and he borrowed a car and he drove to Tryon. I thought he was very cute, when I met him.

“For our first date we went to a rodeo over at Stapleton. We went with four of my sisters. My parents didn't seem to mind him.

“We were married two weeks later, while he was still on his furlough. We got married in the North Platte Methodist Church. Then he had to go back to his base in Alaska.

“When the war was over he came back to Nebraska and got a job in North Platte with the railroad. For the next thirty-two years we lived very happily together. We had five children.

“The day he died, we had gone to look at the cranes. They come here every spring and fall. This was on the cranes' spring stop here. We had driven out to see the
cranes, out in the country, near Hershey. There must have been about a thousand of them, out in the cornfield, doing their dances, jumping up and down. Virgil and I always loved to drive out and watch them.

“We were driving home. I remember, we were on a street with no traffic. He hadn't been a bit ill. It was about two in the afternoon. He slumped over the wheel; it was a heart attack. By the time the emergency workers arrived, he was gone. He was fifty-nine.”

She was silent for a second, and then said: “Don't make it sound too flowery. It's been a good life. I have no complaints.”

She wishes she could have seen the Canteen just once, she said, because of how it had brought her husband to her. “During the war, you couldn't get gas for a trip like that,” she said. “Those thirty-some miles from Tryon to North Platte, and then back again…you didn't make a trip that long unless you really had a reason you had to do it.

“But I wish they hadn't torn the depot down. I don't know what I would have come to, if it hadn't been for that place. The Canteen changed my whole life—and I never even set foot inside it.”

 

Love will find you—apparently it has always been true. Love will find you, when it is least expected.

One afternoon when I was in North Platte, I spent sev
eral hours going through old steel cabinets where letters, documents and news clippings from the Canteen years were stored. I found this—sent in April of 1944 to Mrs. S. C. Rabb, of 514 North Maple in North Platte.

The letter had been written by the mother of a young airman who had passed through the Canteen, and who had been given a cake that Mrs. Rabb had baked.

The boy's mother, Ethel Koncilek, of West Sayville, Long Island, New York, had written to Mrs. Rabb, whom she had never met:

And then there were the young soldiers who were in search of…

Well, if not love, then the next best thing.

“I was a farm boy from Wisconsin,” said Don Griffith,
seventy-eight, when I located him in Indian Harbour Beach, Florida. He laughed. “I was getting ready to join the Sixty-sixth Infantry, and when we were training, we were out to meet girls and get a free dinner. In that order.”

He said that he had enlisted when he was nineteen, and was receiving Army specialized training in engineering; the course was being given in Golden, Colorado.

“We lived in fraternity houses on a college campus, and we went to classes at the college,” he said. “We were very military—when the professors walked in, we would jump up and stand at attention. I think we scared them.

“But what we really wanted to do was meet some girls. For some reason, we told ourselves that the best girls to meet were over the Colorado line, in the rural part of Nebraska. Don't ask me why we were convinced of that.

“We would take the Galloping Goose streetcar line from Golden to Denver. Then we'd hitchhike to Nebraska, and we'd head for church. I'm not kidding you. That was one way to meet girls—find them at church.

“Now, these girls in church were pretty well chaperoned. And…

“Aw, all right—I'll tell you why we thought we had a better chance in Nebraska. We wanted to get far enough away from where we were training that the girls we met would not be so used to seeing guys in uniform. We would stand out.

“So we'd meet the girls in church, and they would
invite us back to their farm or ranch to have dinner with them and their parents…. It was nice. We were away from home. We were meeting girls. Yes, we had to hitchhike to Nebraska and go to church to do it….”

He laughed again, and then turned serious.

“We may have been young,” he said, “but we weren't too young to appreciate what happened to us at that North Platte train station.” He had passed through North Platte after his training in Colorado was finished.

He said that although the food and the coffee he was given at the Canteen were tasty and filling, “That wasn't the biggest thing about North Platte. The biggest thing was how those people made you feel really appreciated. Those happy smiles that you saw. They were just being so nice.

“I know it sounds like a simple thing. But I was heading for an infantry division when I went through North Platte, and I didn't know exactly where I would end up [he would end up in France]. And I never forgot those smiles.

“The men in North Platte were mostly gone, like they were in every town. That one little town could never have supported the Canteen all by itself. It had help from all the farm communities, all around the area. They all came to North Platte to make sure no train ever went unmet.

“You don't forget something like that, when you're overseas. There was no place else I ever knew of, or ever heard about, that went to that great effort. A lot of people might be
willing
to do it. Or at least they might say they would be willing. But in North Platte, they
did it.
”

Mr. Griffith said that he finds himself thinking about his brief stop at the Canteen more than he would have imagined. “My generation is disappearing,” he said. “I doubt that our children or grandchildren will know that North Platte ever existed. That was the
other
side of the war—the one that doesn't get mentioned in the history books. What the people at home did. How supportive the civilian population was.

“We were masses of soldiers. There were almost more of us than there were civilians—at least I'll bet you there were more of us than there were men our age who didn't go.

“The men of our age group who didn't go probably never got over it. They missed the experience we had. All of us came home—and maybe you had a cousin who had asthma, and he didn't go into the service. We'd come home and have our stories and our drinks, and the ones who didn't go…that guy would be left out.

“It wasn't only the battles they missed out on. They missed out on something like North Platte—they missed out on knowing how good people really can be, how considerate. It wasn't easy, what the people at that train station
did for us—as I remember, we came through in the middle of the night. The troop trains didn't time it to make it easy for the people who worked at the Canteen. The trains came when the trains came.

“And the people were
there.
You should have seen it. You have no idea what that meant to us. The middle of the night. And they were
there.
”

 

Mr. Griffith was accurate about the people in surrounding towns and counties making sure that the Canteen never went unstaffed. I found a list still on file in North Platte—a list of the communities whose citizens regularly traveled to the Canteen to help.

Absolutely remarkable. More than 125 communities, not just from Nebraska but from Colorado, too. An honor roll of towns: Anselmo, Berwyn, Bignell, Brandon, Dry Valley, Dix, Oconto, Lillian, Sarben, Roscoe, Lewellen, Tallin Table, Thune, Lemoyne, O'Neill, Verango….

Some towns you can't even find on a map, sixty years later. Towns so small they have disappeared. But during a time of precious gasoline, and no interstates to make the journey smooth, the people from those towns got to North Platte. They saw to it that when the trains pulled in, someone was there.

Holbrook, McGrew, Elsie, Brule, Bucktail, Farnam,
Flats, Arthur, Birdwood, Sunol, Wallace, Westerville, Eddyville, Elm Creek…