Once Upon a Town (7 page)

He was a platoon sergeant in the Marines; after the war was won, he said, he got a job in claims management for an insurance company. He never went back to North Platte.

“The funny thing is, for all the feelings I have for North Platte, I never saw the town itself. I never got out of the immediate area of the Canteen.

“There may have been a lot of love in the eyes of those ladies who greeted us, back then. But there's a lot of love in
our
eyes, now. Love for that town.”

I told him that with all the memories of combat a man like him must have, it was a little surprising that when he remembers the war, those brief minutes at a Nebraska train station would still mean so much.

“I have a lot of combat memories, yes,” he said. “But believe me—there's room for North Platte in my memory. There's room for it in all of our memories.”

 

What Mr. Anderson had said about never seeing the town itself—about just seeing the train depot—was something I kept thinking about.

Because if he were to see North Platte today, he might be struck by how far it has moved away from itself, away from the train station. It's not the only American city to experience such a thing—in fact, it's a common tale. But it says quite a bit about what America's cities were then, and what they have become now.

One morning I made a point to start downtown, near the old Canteen, and move gradually outward, toward the interstate. Away from what used to be—away from the place of Mr. Anderson's memory.

Downtown, had you
not looked at a calendar or at the date on the morning
Telegraph,
could have fooled you into thinking you had stepped into 1954.

Around its compact core—Dewey Street, Jeffers Street, Bailey Avenue, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Streets—it had the hemmed-in, self-contained feel of America's downtowns when those downtowns were the magnets of the cities they centered. Red brick road paving, and solid gray concrete buildings with their dates of construction carved in deep, hollow Roman numerals (“MCMXIV” over the door of the building at 100 East Fifth, the one that con
tained the city offices of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company)…

One signal that this downtown, like so many of America's downtowns, was perhaps no longer the vibrant heart of the region's commercial life was that the names of the majority of the businesses were purely, almost plaintively, local—you would not recognize them outside of North Platte. In a nation long grown accustomed to chain operations being equated with prosperity and customer familiarity, North Platte's downtown seemed composed mostly of business concerns whose reach did not exceed the next intersection.

Hirschfeld's Fashions for Men, Hoover's Fine Jewelry, Young's Sporting Goods (
REMODELING
, the hand-lettered sign informed passersby), the Brick Wall Restaurant, the Shepherd's Books and Gifts…

It was the downtown of our parents' parents—it was the comforting and unapologetically insular downtown of the soldiers who went off to war, and of the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, who waited for them in the years just before television and the interstates changed everything. I walked through this downtown, and I could almost see it as it was in the days when if a person wanted to go shopping, he could find anything in the world he needed, right here.

Brown's Shoe Fit Company, and Sew What Alterations
(the stores with the play-on-words names seemed to have moved in where more traditionally titled merchants had once thrived), Sam Thomas Insurance and North Platte Boot and Shoe Repair and the Dixon Optical Company, with a sign that looked as if Harry and Bess Truman could have been passing through town on the day it went up and strolled right in the door…

CLEAN IS KEEN
, the legend on a garbage barrel, padlocked to a light pole, announced. One tip-off to how the city, and the nation, had changed was something quite fundamental: the absence of people on the streets. They had moved on—they had taken their business elsewhere.

There was a time, though—the time of the Canteen, which had been located just a block or so from this cozy core—when the people had gravitated to this part of town as if it held the answers to everything.

 

“I would take my daughter shopping downtown,” said Mattie Rumery, ninety-five. “She would always want a certain kind of shoe—a pair of pretty little pink slippers. But they just weren't available, during the war.”

Mrs. Rumery first lived in North Platte when her husband was part of the faculty at a University of Nebraska agricultural facility near the town. “It was called the Station, and we women called ourselves the Stationettes.
There were maybe fifteen or seventeen of us. We would all volunteer at the Canteen.”

She said that she learned quickly: “When one of those trains came in, the fellows did not walk—they
ran
into the station. The word had gotten around—they knew they would have
good food.
Some country women would bring in their own chickens, but the rest of us had to buy our chickens for frying.

“In the corn season we would always bring roasting ears for the boys to eat. There was no list of what we were supposed to bring—we could bring in everything we liked, if we thought the boys would enjoy it.

“One of the things the boys liked us to get ahold of and make for them was boiled eggs. In the service they were provided with artificial eggs. What we gave them was real eggs. They would crack the shells and gobble them down.”

The reward—for her, for the Stationettes, for all of the volunteers she knew—was something deceptively simple: “There was a feeling you were pleasing them,” she said. “It wasn't that we felt we were working for them—
they
were working for
us.
We all understood that. We didn't even have to say it.”

Which was where her daughter's shoes—or, more correctly, the lack of them—came in.

Mrs. Rumery would take her young daughter to shop
for shoes in downtown North Platte during the Canteen years, and the selection they found was invariably scant. There was a reason for this:

“It was very hard to get shoes,” she said. “They had to have good shoes for the boys in the service, so most of the material for shoes went for that. For the boys. You just didn't have the chance to buy fancy shoes—only the basics, and not much of a selection of that. My daughter wanted those pretty slippers so badly, but you didn't have a choice, you just took what the stores had. I had to buy for her a little brown oxford. The people in the store had to pad the shoe all around inside, to fit her little feet—you couldn't always get the right size.

“She would cry sometimes, and I would cry with her, but I would explain: The soldiers had to have the best shoes. That was the way it was, and that was the way it should have been.”

The train depot, she said, was the hub of the city back then—the train depot was the point from which everyone entered North Platte, and then walked into downtown to explore the stores, restaurants and hotels.

“The depot had beautiful detail work on the windows, and all around it,” she said. “For those of us who were there, it's kind of hard to believe that it's past history. Just that quickly. During my lifetime.

“Sometimes people would get off the train and see our
downtown, and they would decide to settle in. They got jobs here and raised families here and spent their lives here. All because they stepped off the train at the depot, and walked into downtown, and liked what they saw and how it made them feel.”

 

The Mall—that's how it is known, just those two words—must have, in the 1970s, when it was constructed, seemed like the ultimate alternative to the old North Platte downtown.

You can't walk there from downtown—well, you could, but it would take you too long, everyone drives—and when it was built the idea of it, with all the stores under one roof during the brutal Nebraska winters and impossibly humid summers, must have seemed unbeatable. North Platte wasn't alone in having fallen for the promise of the self-contained, single-story mall—during the part of the twentieth century when The Mall was built, almost identical versions of it were going up all across the United States.

What no one seemed to have considered, in those first days of the covered malls, was just how desolate and cold they might feel once they grew older, and the customers took their leave. Today, inside The Mall (with its white-on-brown exterior sign), the first thing I encountered in the
wide, unbroken central corridor was an unoccupied kiosk with the printed notification:

SPECIALTY LEASING. YOU COULD BE SELLING YOUR RETAIL PRODUCT OUT OF THIS SPACE TODAY! SPACES AVAILABLE BY MONTH, YEAR, OR FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON. FOR LEASING INFORMATION, CONTACT THE MAIN OFFICE.

The Mall was closer to the interstate than downtown North Platte was—downtown had been built near the railroad tracks, or maybe it had been the other way around. But whoever had constructed The Mall had done so with the knowledge that the customer base could not be assumed to be near the tracks, but instead near the strip of nonstop highway that reached from one end of Nebraska to the other.

Here were the store names that anyone in any state would recognize: Bath and Body Works, Radio Shack, Dollar General, Foot Locker, Waldenbooks, Payless Shoe Source, General Nutrition Center. Yet, like downtown, there was a permeating silence here. Wherever the people of North Platte were congregating, it wasn't underneath this roof.

At least downtown had those red brick streets; at least downtown felt as if it probably held a place in someone's heart, if you could find the person. The Mall…

The stores were open for business in the central part of
the structure, but at the far ends, like at so many of the older malls I had seen across America, there was mostly quiet. Over what was supposed to be the welcoming, wallless frontage of one store space was a metal gate, pulled down to guard nothing but a vacant interior.
NOW LEASING
, the sign said.
DIAL PROPERTIES, OMAHA, NEBRASKA
.

This is what had done away with downtown.

 

“He's in the hospital, but he wants to talk to you.”

The son-in-law of Paul Metro, seventy-eight, of Edison, New Jersey, was letting me know that even though Mr. Metro was facing surgery the next day, he wanted to tell me about his brief time in North Platte. It still meant that much to him.

“I was one of the men those people went out of their way to be nice to….” Mr. Metro began when I reached him in his hospital room.

He started to cry softly in mid-sentence. I would have attributed it to the stress of being about to go into surgery, except that it was happening regularly when I spoke with the men who had come through North Platte on the trains. The volunteers from the Canteen, while emotional, usually remained composed. But the soldiers they had welcomed…as often as not, they would weep at some point during our conversations as they recalled the experience.

“It was a furlough from Wendover, over Christmas,” he
said. He had been assigned to the unit that prepared the B-29s for the eventual flights that would end World War II; he had been a radar mechanic based in Wendover, Utah, under the command of Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, who would fly the atomic bomb to Hiroshima.

“I was heading home to New Jersey for Christmas,” he said. “The conductor told us that we would be stopping in a town where there was a free Canteen. I had not seen much of the world before going into the service. I went to high school in Linden, New Jersey, and the farthest west I had ever been before the service was when my father took us on a vacation to Pennsylvania once. On old U.S. 22—a two-lane highway through little towns. That was my idea of travel.”

Training in the remote salt flats of Utah for the atomic bomb mission, he and his unit operated under almost total secrecy—even their families were to be told nothing about what they were doing. So as he progressed toward his mother and father's house in New Jersey for Christmas…

“We stopped at the station in North Platte, and a mob of guys were running toward the depot,” he said. “Everybody sprinted, like the place was going to run out of food. But there was plenty for everybody. I had a sandwich and some milk, and I spoke to some of the people who greeted us, just thanking them for doing it.

“Those people…” He began to cry again.

“Those people were working so hard to show their
concern and regard for all the servicemen. I think if more of us had realized just what an effort those people were putting out for us, I think maybe we would have sent more thank-you letters to them, so that they would have known how much we appreciated it. I worry sometimes that they didn't know—we were there and gone so fast.”

He talked about shoes—I hadn't said a word to him about what Mattie Rumery had told me about her daughter and the shoe stores with the limited selections, but he brought it up himself.

“Do you know what all the civilians did during the war?” Mr. Metro said. “We in the armed forces get all the credit for fighting the war—but the way they rationed things, so that we could have what we needed…We always had good pairs of shoes to wear all the time, without ever having to worry about it—we had good shoes because the civilians were doing without. We got the best.”

He said that of the twenty-seven men in his radar unit, only five were still alive. He was speaking to me from the Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he said; he told me he was divorced and lived by himself. He was scheduled to have his gallbladder removed in the morning. He said he had spent his time after the service as an insurance field man; he had already undergone heart bypass surgery, and had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. When he had begun to feel the pains that
would necessitate this operation, he said, there was no one in his house for him to talk about it with; he had called 911, and here he was.

He said he was feeling all right, although a little scared. “They gave me a shot of that drug they used to have in the Army—what is it? Morphine.”

I asked him why he had sent word that even on a night like this, he was willing to talk with me.

“I know that many of those people in North Platte are older now, like me—or they're gone,” he said. “When I think of them, I think of young girls handing out magazines and fruit at the windows of the trains. But of course they're not young girls anymore.

“They'll all be gone soon. All of us will be gone. And I think America should remember those people. Right in the middle of the country, with all those trains going east and west—railroad transportation was really the only thing at the time. Those people in that town—they helped us. They made us feel that someone appreciated us.”

He broke down again.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It's a lonely day here.”

 

On the farthest outskirts of town, I found it.

The place—and the people.

Here was what downtown had evolved into. Here was
the focal point of the city's commercial life—here was its heartbeat.

The Wal-Mart SuperCenter. Open twenty-four hours. Two minutes by car from the interstate exit.

The parking lot was so full when I arrived that it was a challenge finding a space. The moment I walked in I found everything that downtown wasn't, everything The Mall must once have aspired to be.