Once Upon a Town (9 page)

Shirley Gilstad, to be exact. “I was working for Metropolitan Utilities,” Shirley Gilstad—now Shirley Kertz—told me. “My girlfriends and I went to a dance one night. It was kind of a shock to have one of the girls say to me, ‘There's a soldier who would like to meet you.'

“He said to me, ‘I'm Bill Kertz from Chicago, and I'd like to dance with you.' He was very friendly, and very nice looking. And he loved to dance. We danced that whole night.”

They have been married for fifty-five years. “He has often said what a nice thing it was for those women to be out at the train station in North Platte when the troop trains
went through,” Mrs. Kertz said. “But I tell him, he should have figured it out at the dance at the Fontenelle Hotel:

“Nebraska people are like that.”

 

One of the nurses dropped me at the front door of my hotel.

“We could have waited around the bar to see if anyone entered the contest,” she said. “But I really have to get home before my kids go to bed.”

“Thanks anyway,” I said. “But no one was going to enter.”

“I know,” she said.

“I appreciate the ride,” I said.

“Do you think anyone ever enters the bikini contest?” she asked me.

“I wouldn't have any idea,” I said. “You live here.”

“I know,” she said. “But it's the first one I've been to.”

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” I said. “I don't see how they can afford that, with so few people in the place.”

“Maybe that's how they can afford it,” she said. “They know that no one's going to enter, so they won't have to pay it out.”

She drove off, across the bridge, over the river. I thought of Doris Dotson doing the jitterbug to “Tuxedo Junction,” and soldiers being given a smooch to keep their morale up, and black snow by the railroad tracks all winter long.

There were islands
in the South Platte River—little half-protruding grass islands that dotted the water.

The river itself didn't look all that inviting. Some days I would walk across the bridge that spanned it, other days I would travel a narrow dirt path down to its banks so I could walk at river level. Things were more than moderately grungy down there; oversized and overly used cardboard boxes, and the remnants of campfires, made it apparent that some people were living along the river, making do. It was not a place you would recommend anyone visit after dark.

But during the daytime the grass islands provided a site for children and their parents to play and relax—the hotter
the Nebraska days became, the more families I saw sitting on the islands. From down there in the river, the perspective on the world at large was kind of Tom Sawyerish—you had to be up at bridge level, on Jeffers Street, to realize you were really just a few steps away from the Wal-Mart.

I would see the river at the beginning of my walk, and then again at the end, as I returned to the Quality Inn. I was beginning to look forward to all of this, to count on that daily walk through North Platte. It was starting to feel like a place I knew.

 

One person I kept thinking about was Ethel Butolph's younger sister. Mrs. Butolph, who had met her husband because of the popcorn ball at the Canteen, was a woman replete with the aura of romance—when I had spoken with her, I almost could close my eyes and see her courtship with the soldier who fell in love with her.

But, of course, Mrs. Butolph's name had not even been in a popcorn ball—the whole point of her story was that it was her sister Vera whose name had been put into the ball, and because of this, and where it had led, Ethel met her husband-to-be. Sort of a three-cushion shot into the side pocket.

Still, it had worked. I wanted to speak with Vera to hear the tale from her side.

I heard it, all right.

“I was just going to high school,” Vera Butrick, now seventy-seven, told me. “The club of ladies from Tryon went down to the Canteen in North Platte when they were scheduled for their duty there, and they were the ones who put the names in the popcorn balls. We didn't even know they were doing it.

“So one day I received a letter from some guy—William Woodrow Butrick. The letter was delivered to Tryon High School, not to our house. He said in the letter that he was from White Cloud, Kansas.

“He just introduced himself in the letter. He said he was a farm boy, and that the ladies must have put my name in the ball. So I wrote him back. A little cheering-up letter. I was a farm girl, too.”

She told me she was one of several girls in her high school class who received letters from soldiers. “Some of the girls answered, some didn't,” she said. “I did. I wrote to Woody, and that's how it happened that he said he had a friend who needed a pen pal, and my sister got involved with the fellow she would end up marrying.”

Vera and Woodrow wrote back and forth for quite a while, she said. She had gotten a job in North Platte: “I was working at a laundry, Gambs Laundry, folding sheets. It was boring, but you had to do something.” That was when she first met Woodrow Butrick in person.

“He had a furlough and he came to town,” she said. “I was living with two of my sisters in an apartment. There
was a knock on the door. It was a soldier. It was about eight o'clock in the morning. I was already up, and so was my sister Opal.

“Oh, gosh. I wasn't much impressed. I didn't think that much of him, standing at the door. We went to breakfast at a little restaurant a half a block away. I was so darn bashful it was pitiful.

“He was a big eater. He ate, and we sat there and talked, and then we walked in the park. We caught a ride out to my folks' farm, northeast of Tryon.

“Then he had to go home to Kansas, and after that they shipped him to Germany and France. We kept writing, and the letters became very friendly. Maybe a little mushy, but not much mushy.

“I wasn't really falling in love. He was just nice and everything. I think he got serious first.”

When the war ended, she said, she was teaching at a small grade school in Tryon. I told her that this sounded like a pleasant way for a young woman to make a living.

“I thought it was an awful job,” she said. “There were only three kids in the whole school. It was just a little country grade school. You could teach in it if you had your high school diploma. Or even if you got a teacher's certificate by taking a test in high school.

“Three kids—that's it, that was the school. A kindergartener, a first-grader and a third-grader. One of the three was my nephew, and the other two were neighbor kids.
When you were the teacher at that school, you did everything. Keep the fire going in the wintertime—whatever needed getting done, it was up to you to do it.

“I did that for two years. I would take marriage any day over that. After the war, Woody came back. We got married, and were married for forty-six years.”

They lived on a farm in Robinson, Kansas, she said, until he decided to get a job as a freight handler in North Platte. “We were kind of hard up in Kansas,” she said. The job he took in North Platte enabled him to support her, and for them to raise two daughters. She was always grateful, she said, that she got out of that little schoolhouse in Tryon.

“Woody and my daughters were the high point of my life,” she said. “I'm not the bravest person in the world. I don't know who I would have met. I'm thankful that someone put my name in the popcorn ball at the Canteen, because that's what did it. For me, and for my sister Ethel, too. Neither of us would have met our husbands otherwise, and our children never would have been born.

“Woody died in 1992. He was a very good man.”

 

Something I kept going back to during my time in town was the guest book—actually, a collection of them.

They were not elaborate. They were stiff-backed bound volumes, in which the soldiers who came through on the
trains evidently had been invited to sign their names and list their hometowns. These were the kind of books you sometimes encounter at weddings, set out for the guests to inscribe so the bride and groom and their parents can in future years look back on the ceremony and have a record of who was in attendance.

You also come across these books at funeral homes, so that the family will know who was present to pay last respects. It was impossible for me to keep that connection out of my mind as I leafed through the pages and read the names. I knew that some of these men undoubtedly never returned from the war.

Their penmanship was careful. The soldiers had arrived for their brief time in North Platte during the era of fountain pens, and the signatures had that distinctive look. One name on top of another, for long page after long page, book after book. Those ten minutes in the train station must have speeded by in a blur—it was surprising to me that with all of the food and beverages, all the singing at the piano, all the welcoming greetings from the Canteen volunteers, the men would take the time to stop and sign the guest books.

But they did. Private Harry E. Benson, Hartford, Connecticut; Private Arthur G. Hannel Jr., Buffalo, New York; Private Bill Regan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Private Paul W. Font, Rome, New York; Private Bob Quick, Cleveland, Ohio; Private First Class Joseph F. Snodgrass,
Newtown, Indiana; Sergeant D. G. Christensen, Los Angeles, California; Private Bert T. Hames, Akron, Ohio…

They must have been in such a rush. Yet they signed in. It was almost as if they wanted someone someday to know they were once here, if only for those few minutes.

And it had worked. That's what I kept thinking as I looked through the books and moved my eyes closer to all those signatures. All these years later, someone knew.

What I could not know, of course, was what happened to all of those men who had signed in during the war. But once in a while, I was able to find one of them—the bearer of a name in the guest book. Kelly Pagano, for one.

 

“I was drafted,” said Mr. Pagano, eighty-nine. He lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin; he grew up in the Wisconsin town of Marblehead, “a quarry town—they broke stone. My dad worked there in the kilns, for the Western Lime and Stone Company.”

In May of 1943, he said, “I was going on thirty-one. I was working in a defense plant, welding oxygen tanks for bombers. The older guys were getting drafted at that point. I was married. I thought it was about time I went in.”

He served with the Navy in the South Pacific. On one trip across the United States, the troop train stopped in Nebraska.

“I didn't know what it was,” he said. “I asked some of
the other guys. They said, ‘This is
North Platte.
There are people in the depot with food baskets for you.' I said to myself, ‘Oh, my, this is really something.'”

While he was in the Canteen, he said, “I signed a register. Just to say I was there.”

He got back on the train, he continued on toward his Navy service, and when the war ended he moved back to Wisconsin and resumed his work as a welder and raised a family. In the 1960s, Mr. Pagano, his wife and his son and daughter planned a summer vacation in the western United States.

“We were going to Colorado Springs,” he said. “It was a driving trip. I had a new Oldsmobile. I had told my son Dick about the North Platte Canteen, and about how I had signed a register book there, back in the forties, during the war.

“On the way back from Colorado, I decided to stop in North Platte. I had not been there since that day. Dick was fourteen, my daughter was seventeen. I said to them, ‘My name is registered in that town.' I wanted to show my children how I was treated.

“We found it—after all those years, we found North Platte. We had a map in the car, and Dick read the map, telling me what road to get on. We found the building where they had the old registers.

“And the kids found my name in there! My name, and the date I had been in the Canteen. We had to look for a
while, in all the books, and Dick helped me—he was pretty proud that I had been a serviceman.

“After so many years…to see my name, the way I had signed it…it was quite a moment for the Pagano family. We found a motel and stayed overnight, and we went out to a restaurant for dinner. I kept explaining to my family: You got treated so good by the people in this town. You're on the train, you're leaving for the service, you don't know where you're going. And you got treated so good.”

I found Mr. Pagano's son, who is now fifty-three years old and a corporate attorney. “I remember my father being so pleased in North Platte, because seeing his name in that guest register brought back so many memories for him,” Dick Pagano told me. “I was fourteen—when you're fourteen, you don't really know what things mean. But I could tell that my father was moved.

“There was a swimming pool at the motel—that's what I remember. That's what's important to you when you're that age. But we had driven all that way, and my father was happy.”

Kelly Pagano said he has been married for sixty-one years, and that he finds himself thinking more and more about the way the world was when he set off from Wisconsin to fight the war. “We used to keep the key to our house in the mailbox,” he said. “You could sleep in your house with the doors open. Now there are bars on the windows.”

But one thing that is unchanged are his thoughts about the Canteen—not just his thoughts of the day when as a sailor he first visited it, but also the day he and his family drove into North Platte in search of something.

“The kids wanted to find my name in that book, and they found it,” he said. “There was their dad's name, right where I said it would be.”

He asked me to do something for him:

“You tell those people who live there that there are a lot of guys like me who don't know a whole lot about their town, but we know the most important thing:

“We know that it was a place where when we needed it the most, we were treated wonderful.”

 

I would wake up early and watch “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The local television station played it. North Platte is one of the smallest towns in the United States to have its own television station—an NBC affiliate—and it begins each broadcast day with a tape of a choir singing the national anthem.

This used to be somewhat common for television stations. But in many cities, especially the more populous ones, the every-morning playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” faded away at approximately the same rate as the concept of “beginning the broadcast day.” The broadcast
day, in most places, never stops, so it never starts—it is perpetual.

In North Platte, it stops, sometime between midnight and dawn. And when it starts again…

There is that choir. And just in case some other station somewhere wants to boast that it, too, plays “The Star-Spangled Banner” each sunrise….

First verse
and
second?

You get both in North Platte.

Just the sound to put a visitor in the proper mood as he heads out the door for his daily rendezvous with the river and its islands of grass.