Once Upon a Town (8 page)

The store was packed with people—you couldn't see from one end of the big building to the other, of course, but the brightness of the lighting, the excited murmur of the shoppers, the country music playing from ceiling speakers (Wal-Mart knows the tastes of its local communities)…

This was it—this was where the town had moved. Never mind that there was a Wal-Mart like this seemingly in every community all across the country; never mind that, unlike the old downtowns, the buying decisions about the products that would stock the shelves were made not at the local stores, but at a central headquarters. The fact was, those shelves were overflowing. Employees were everywhere, keeping things in order, offering to help; the Wal-Mart greeters were at the front doors, telling the nonstop streams of arriving customers that their presence was appreciated.

A massive grocery with fresh fruit and vegetables, the
aroma wafting through the aisles…an eyeglasses department with an on-site optometrist…a barbershop…a school-supply department…a full-service pharmacy…luggage, and carpeting, and television sets, and computers, and a bank, and kitchenware, and a portrait studio…

It wasn't that the Wal-Mart felt distant and national and corporate-controlled; that was the usual criticism about Wal-Marts, but if the SuperCenter had felt like that, the people of North Platte would not have been jamming the store. No, what the Wal-Mart near the North Platte exit of I-80 felt like was what the old downtown must once have been.

It felt like…

What an odd and paradoxical word to use, for a place like this…

It felt like home.

Wherever a person was from, this felt like home, or what the American idea of home has evolved into. This felt like hometown shopping. The real place—downtown North Platte—didn't feel like the real place. This did. All these different stores, inside the Wal-Mart—except they weren't different stores, they were the same store. And if Wal-Mart had stores like this all across the United States…

Well, that only helped. Because to the people who were shopping, no matter where they were from, the store felt like their town. They'd shopped here before. Whatever
brought them here today, they were somewhere they'd been. It seemed familiar—much more so than those silent brick streets near the tracks downtown, much more so than that chilly and barren mall. This was where they could count on feeling at ease. They'd been here all their lives.

The city had moved away from the city. In the blocks around the Wal-Mart were the other places that made people sense they were at home—the Hampton Inn, Apple-bee's, the Quality Inn where I had my room. Out here, North Platte had moved away from North Platte, and had been pulled, as if against its will, toward America.

And if somehow the soldiers of World War II were to come through again—if somehow the troop trains, on their ten-minute stops, were to steam in here—would a town do now what this town did for those six million soldiers sixty years before?

Inside the Wal-Mart, black-colored half globes mounted at measured intervals all along the ceiling—black-colored half globes of the kind you see on casino ceilings, the globes covering surveillance cameras—stared tirelessly down upon the throngs of shoppers. The railroad trains of the Canteen days, and the trust of those Canteen days, were far away.

Would a town today do what this town did then?

The question, today, is more elemental than that.

The question, out here by the exit ramp, is:

What's a town?

Having immersed myself
in the more wholesome facets of North Platte, I decided, in the interest of balanced reporting, to seek some vice. It was not going to be easy.

I knew there were no casinos in town—I had asked, and had been told there were none anywhere in the area. No strip clubs, either, or lap-dance emporiums—not a one. Nothing in the Yellow Pages to indicate the town even had a seamy side.

Which is why—in the company of two nurses from the local hospital, who had volunteered to be my chaperones—I found myself on my way to the weekly bikini contest held at the Touchdown Club. This was likely to be as close
as I would get to the racier precincts of the town. At least as the town was now.

 

Such precincts were not always so hard to find—which is why I was looking. In the years before the Canteen, I had been told, Front Street near the railroad tracks had been lined with brothels. Apparently the town had quite a past. As railroad historian George H. Douglas has written:

But then came the war, and the Canteen.

“I wasn't old enough to work in the Canteen, even as a platform girl,” said Doris Dotson, seventy-one, who still lives in North Platte. “I was only twelve or thirteen during the first years of the war.

“They had a jukebox in the Canteen as well as the piano. My cousins had taught me how to jitterbug. I would go down there to dance. So many of the soldiers on the trains were boys not that much older than I was, really. You know that expression, ‘I'd rather dance than eat'? The boys would pass up the food tables to come down and dance with my friends and me.”

She said that the ten-minute stops the trains made at the depot sometimes stretched to twenty minutes, but not much more than that: “As long as it took to put water in the steam engines.” The atmosphere, she said, was “wall-to-wall—like a big cocktail party—shoulder-to-shoulder.”

As soon as she and her friends heard music beginning to play, “Us girls started acting silly. We started dancing with each other. The boys would come over and we'd put our hands out, like we wanted to dance. No slow songs—we didn't want to make the boys homesick for their girls. We didn't want to make them sad. ‘In the Mood,' ‘Tuxedo Junction'…anything that was fast, we'd dance to.”

Although she was spending so much time dancing with the soldiers and sailors at the depot, “My mother never worried about me. As far as I was concerned, I was being very patriotic.

“I had a jacket that I called my insignia jacket. I just started collecting patches from the units of all the soldiers I danced with, and I sewed them onto my jacket. If they didn't have the patches with them, I carried little slips of
paper with my address on them. It said ‘Doris Hedrick'—that was my name then—‘402 South Chestnut, North Platte, Nebraska.'

“The soldiers who would dance with me would always look at my jacket and say, ‘You don't have the best patch on there.' A few days later, I'd get a letter with their division's or platoon's patch in it. My dad finally painted our mailbox red. He said we had the hottest mailbox in town.”

Her family lived about ten blocks from the station, she said: “You could walk down there after school every day, around four o'clock, and you'd know that you would catch a train every hour. A lot of times there were at least two trains an hour.”

As much fun as she was having at the Canteen, she said, “That was also kind of a sad period in my life. Not just mine, but everyone else's. I got a job working as a carhop at a drive-in restaurant—the Shady Inn, at A and Jeffers. Hamburgers, Cokes, malts. Beer, too—you could take beer out to the cars. You had to be twenty-one to drink it, but if you were a carhop, you could carry it to the cars no matter how old you were.

“I was still going down to the Canteen to dance. By the time I was sixteen, I had graduated to being a soda jerk at the O'Connor Drugstore at Fourth and Dewey. And during all those years, all those troop trains kept coming through, day and night….

“What I meant about being sad is this. I'd dance with some soldiers, and they'd send me a patch. I'd write them, and they'd write back, and I'd keep writing to them as long as they wrote back. But then, when their letters stopped…

“Did they just get tired of writing? Or were they killed in action? I never had any way of knowing. I didn't dwell. I hoped that they had just gotten tired of writing to me, instead of the other.”

She doesn't dance anymore.

“I had a stroke,” she said. “I'm down to my cane and my walker. I don't think I could jitterbug.

“But I still have my insignia jacket. All those patches. All those boys.”

 

From the street one afternoon—South Jeffers Street—I had seen the sign advertising the bikini contest. The sign said there was a $1,500 first prize, and that the contest would take place on a Friday night inside the establishment where the sign was posted: the Touchdown Club.

There seemed to be no hint in town of the pre-Canteen North Platte—none of the seedy enterprises that were alleged to have once made the city tawdry. So I concluded that this would have to do. I had no idea what the bikini contest entailed, but I knew, as a visitor in a small town, I probably shouldn't be seen skulking around the
place alone. I mentioned my misgivings to two nurses who worked at the hospital that was along the route of my daily morning walk—the Great Plains Regional Medical Center—and they said that if it would make me feel more at ease, they would accompany me.

They asked their husbands to watch their children, and just as full darkness was falling, the three of us walked into the site of the bikini contest. It was…

Well, it was a sports bar. A sports bar with a University of Nebraska theme. Photos of football players all around, Husker memorabilia…there seemed to be a stage of sorts in the front of the main room, but there was no one standing on it.

We took a table, and ordered some beers. The place was mostly empty, except for a table in the restaurant section, at which was seated a girls' softball team, with parents in charge. We talked, and waited, and talked, and waited, and talked…and nothing happened.

One of the nurses told me that she recognized a female employee of the Touchdown Club—she had helped deliver the woman's baby at the hospital. She asked the woman what was going on.

The woman said they didn't want to start the bikini contest until the softball girls had finished eating, and were off the premises so they didn't have to witness it. It wouldn't be right.

Very thoughtful. The softball girls took their time, and when they finally departed, bats and gloves in hand, the lights went down and big-beat music started to course through the room.

High-beam colored lights swept the stage. It was time.

And no one came forward.

There were no entrants.

I looked around. Customers sat at two or three of the other tables in the bar, but that was it. And the bikini-wearers? The women who would strut about in pursuit of the $1,500?

There were none.

This was vice in North Platte.

The nurses and I looked at one another. We looked at the empty stage.

“This may be a long wait,” one of them said.

 

Larry McWilliams was a young boy in North Platte before the Canteen turned Front Street into a chaste, patriotic oasis. He's seventy-one now, living in Golden, Colorado, and he told me that he smiles when he thinks of the contrast between the North Platte of the Canteen days, and the North Platte of the years just prior to that.

“There were lots of bodies to be found in the cornfields,” he said. “North Platte was known as Little Chicago,
back then. Very rough and wide-open. One of the brothels was known as the Como Rooms. The most famous madam in town was Dotty LaRue.

“Patriotic? I think North Platte considered itself to be patriotic even before the Canteen. The people who ran the town appreciated their freedom—the freedom to be corrupt.”

Nevertheless, he said, it was a safe town for a boy to grow up in—and when the Canteen opened, the entire atmosphere around the tracks changed. “I'd usually go down to the Canteen with my buddies at least once a week. I was eleven years old. My parents would never worry about me wandering around the tracks—anyone let their kids do that when the Canteen was up.

“The place was absolutely humming, all the time. The girls from North Platte High School were always there. It gave them the opportunity to flirt on a short-term basis. To be noncommittal. After all, the train was going to be leaving in twenty minutes. Sometimes there would be a little smooching going on. To raise the morale of the soldiers they'd just met.”

And it wasn't just the young girls who kept their eyes open when the trains came in, he said. “I heard my Aunt Regina Rector telling some women once that Fred Astaire was at the Canteen, coming through on a special services train that carried movie stars. She said that Fred Astaire started dancing with her on the platform.”

The arrivals of the troop trains were so constant, Mr. McWilliams said, that in the wintertime the snow around the depot turned black: “There were so many trains, with so much soot from the engines, that the soot just became a part of the snow on Front Street. That's one of the memories of the place that stays with me: black snow.”

He said he and his friends loved the Canteen, but they hadn't minded the North Platte that had preceded it, either.

“We were so young then, we weren't really aware of what was going on in the town. We would be at the soda fountain at the corner drugstore, and the prostitutes would come in for a cherry Coke, and we knew something was up. We just weren't quite sure what it was.”

 

At the Touchdown Club, forty-five more minutes had passed, and still there were no women in bikinis on the stage. Management appeared to be getting nervous.

A burly fellow who worked for the place began to circulate through the crowd, what there was of it. He held a yellow legal pad in his hand, and was approaching tables. I saw that he was inviting women customers to enter the contest. He was almost pleading. He was getting no takers.

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” I heard him beseech one young woman who was having a burger and a drink with her date. She shook her head no.

This was better than anything I could have imagined. The one place in town openly devoted to something a little off-color…and the stage sat bare.

“We're really sorry about this,” one of the nurses said to me, as if they were letting me down.

“Sorry?”
I said. “This is great.”

The fellow who worked for the bar came up to our table with his legal pad. He said to the two women: “Can I interest you in entering our bikini contest? We still have spots available.”

One of the nurses, who was forty-one years old, laughed out loud.

“I'd love to,” she said, “but I have to get home to my family.”

He went on his way. The music boomed. The lights crisscrossed the empty stage.

What was that line I had read, in the old newspaper story from the days of the rough-and-tumble railroad gangs? “The peculiar swagger of the devil-may-care bullwacker and blackleg”? What was it that Larry McWilliams had told me about his North Platte boyhood? About the prostitutes coming into the drugstore soda fountain for their soft drinks?

This was going to have to do. There was a bowling alley right next door—actually, attached to the Touchdown Club. This was going to have to suffice for my big night out.

 

There are nights out…and then there are nights out.

“It had to be in 1944,” said William F. Kertz, seventy-seven, of Elmwood Park, Illinois. “I was on my way to the West Coast on a troop train. In the Army during the war I was in England, and France, and Belgium—but I know that the train ride was in 1944.

“I didn't get to see the town of North Platte—just the station. I got off the train, and they were very generous to us. It made me know what Nebraska was like.”

There are nights out….

“At a later date,” he said, “I was stationed with the Army outside Omaha. I went to a dance at the Fontenelle Hotel. I met a girl. Such a pretty girl. Her name was Shirley.”