Once Upon a Town (13 page)

Day and night, they would sit with their backs to Front Street, staring toward the tracks. I thought about what might have happened to the old depot, had the Union
Pacific let it stay up. Without a reason for being there, without railroad employees and passengers inside the building full-time, it might have turned into something tawdry: a drug house, a place for squatters, somewhere dangerous. A blight on the town.

So its absence probably made some sense. But if the old depot—the old Canteen—was absent in a physical sense, it was present in other ways, ways that might have been just as important. I got one more reminder of that when I met the mayor.

 

Jim Whitaker, the mayor of North Platte, was carrying a thank-you note around town. It had just arrived—almost sixty years after the fact.

The note was from Bill Dye, a survivor from the aircraft carrier USS
Lexington,
which was sunk in the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 8, 1942. Mr. Dye, who had mailed the note from his home in Estes Park, Colorado, said he was sending the belated thanks on behalf of all the survivors from his carrier who had been treated so kindly at the Canteen.

“All these years later,” Mayor Whitaker told me. “Isn't that something—that they would write to thank us all these years later?”

I called Bill Dye, who is seventy-nine. “Some of us
were talking, and we realized that none of us will ever forget the lovely, lovely way we were greeted in that place,” he said. “Especially after what we had been through.”

The
Lexington,
he said, was hit by two torpedoes and three bombs. “It was hopeless to save the ship,” he said. “I was in the water an hour. I was picked up by a destroyer—at nineteen you think you're going to live forever, and you thought the
Lexington
could do anything. I had only my dungarees and my shirt. I think every man in the water left his shoes on the flight deck. The explosions, and the smoke…and then the ship was gone.”

It took three weeks for him to get from the Coral Sea to San Diego—he was transferred from a destroyer to a cruiser to a troop ship. Then he was sent to fight again in North Africa. And at some point during all of this, while being shuttled across the United States, his train pulled into North Platte.

“You have to understand,” he said, “on that train, you had no bunk. You sat up for three days. You had no shower. You were pretty weary.

“And then…you find this unexpected bouquet of nice people.”

Along with his note to the mayor, Mr. Dye had sent a giant thank-you card, signed by fifty of his fellow crewmen from the
Lexington
—fifty men who were survivors still. Late in their lives, they wanted to make sure that
while they were still on this earth they could find a way to express their gratitude to a place that had embraced them when they were young and very much in need of it.

“Those people in that town,” Mr. Dye told me, “they were solid rocks. Whoever figured out how to start that Canteen and run that Canteen should be president of the United States.”

No president had been to North Platte in quite some time.

But a governor had once endeavored to make one building in town as elegant as anything in Paris or London—as I was, with some melancholy, about to find out.

“Downtown at the
time was tremendously active, day and night—and this grand hotel, the Pawnee Hotel, was the center of everything.”

Larry McWilliams—the man who, with his young buddies when he was a boy, used to watch North Platte's painted women of the evening come in for cherry Cokes at the drugstore—was filling me in on the Pawnee. The hotel had opened in 1929 with ambitions of becoming the diamond of the Nebraska prairies. The man behind it had been North Platte's most successful politician of that era—M. Keith Neville, who was born in town and had risen to become governor of Nebraska in 1917.

After being defeated for a second term, Governor Neville came home, with the idea of building a hotel of great luxury and the highest standards. And he did it—on Fifth Street he constructed the Pawnee, intending to make it so beautiful that people's eyes would widen when they gazed upon it.

“It was an elite, elegant hotel,” Larry McWilliams told me. “It was the absolute nucleus of North Platte society. The Crystal Ballroom was beyond compare, at least in this part of the country. The high school proms were held there, the big annual festivals, the May Ball, weddings, retirements…any social occasion that aspired to be noticed took place in the Crystal Ballroom of the Pawnee.

“Governor Neville also built the Fox Theater, across the street from the Pawnee—a beautiful theater for live entertainment. He really wanted North Platte to be something.”

Few of the soldiers who arrived at the Canteen, just a few blocks away, ever got the chance to visit the Pawnee—they only had those ten minutes before the trains rolled out again. Which seems a shame—the Pawnee, even before the war, endeavored to be a signal from the city to the sophisticated outside world: We will try to meet you on your own terms. We will do our best, even if most of America has no idea we are here.

And today? The Pawnee today?

“It's sort of a retirement home,” Larry McWilliams said. “Nothing much really happens there.”

 

Sad to say, he was being too kind.

I walked up to the Pawnee in midafternoon. “Retirement home” appeared to be a euphemism. One step into the main foyer, and I could tell that the Pawnee was an end-of-the-line place—it had the feel of an inner-city mission, a shelter, for those low on both income and hope. The vacant stares on the faces of some of the men and women who sat motionless in the heat, the one fellow talking rapidly to himself with no one in earshot to listen, the utter torpor…

It would have been a sorrowful enough scene in any setting, but I had come to the Pawnee with foreknowledge of what the hotel had been. Not that those present on this day weren't trying; a man in the main lobby attempted to hold a religious service for those whose attention he could attract, and the ladies behind the front desk were friendly and helpful, although seemingly surprised to have a visitor who didn't have a relative in residence. They told me to feel free to have a look around.

It was difficult, standing in the middle of all this, to envision it as it once had been—the glittering, glowing beacon of the town, sending out its enchanting invitation to the residents of all of the counties in every direction, the place in this part of Nebraska to inspire deep-in-the-night dreams and summon up glorious memories.

The air on the main floor was heavy, the fragrance
unpleasant, and as I headed for a stairway that would take me to the Crystal Ballroom, I thought about a conversation I'd had with one of the old Canteen volunteers, a woman who had more than a passing familiarity with the Pawnee. She was Governor Neville's daughter—and she had lived within these walls, long ago.

 

“My dad was known as ‘the boy governor,'” said Virginia Neville Robertson, eighty-eight. “He was only thirty-two when be became governor of Nebraska. And when he came home, he wanted to give the town something great, and what he gave the town was the Pawnee.”

The hotel could be seen for miles around, she said: “It was the only eight-story building in town. Those were the days when a great hotel was the central point in any city, and the Pawnee was North Platte's great hotel. But to me, it was a home. We lived in the hotel, and raised our children in the hotel.”

She met the man who would become her husband, Donald Robertson, in 1934 when they were students at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln; they were married three years later. “He became a desk clerk at the Orrington Hotel in Evanston, Illinois,” she said, “and then he was a desk clerk at the Park Lane in Toledo, Ohio, the city where both of our daughters were born.

“But then the war started, and he volunteered. I came
home to North Platte. My father was such a great believer in the town. So while my husband was off at war, I helped out at the Canteen. I was married, so I wouldn't really have fit in as a platform girl—I mostly stood behind the counter with my mother and handed out cake.

“My father would come down to the Canteen quite a bit. I doubt that many of the soldiers who came in knew that he was the former governor of Nebraska. He was a very, very quiet man—he always used to tell us four girls, ‘Don't ever blow your own horn.'”

When the war ended, she said, her husband joined her in North Platte, and became the manager of the Pawnee. “We lived there from 1945 until the hotel was sold in 1973,” she said. “Especially with children, to live in a hotel was unusual, but we liked it. The Tom-Tom Room coffee shop off the lobby was sort of the town's gathering place, and because my parents lived in North Platte, and my three sisters, we could get together as a family at the hotel, and the children could play after school.”

She was proud of her father, she said—both as a dad, and as a man who wanted to do right by his hometown. “For so many years after he died, there was nothing in North Platte that bore his name,” she told me. “But now the old Fox Theater, across the street from the Pawnee, is used for plays put on by the North Platte Community Playhouse, and the building is called the Neville Center for the Performing Arts. So finally his name is on a build
ing, which I think would have pleased him, although he never would have said it.”

Mrs. Robertson's husband died in 1978, five years after they moved out of the Pawnee. “I look back with great fondness on our years living in the hotel,” she said. “It was the finest, most beautiful place that North Platte ever had.”

 

The walls were peeling in the Crystal Ballroom. Water damage had left ugly streaks.

Where once the citizens of North Platte had celebrated their most consequential occasions by dancing late into the night and dining decorously from china plates with silver settings, cafeteria-style tables with rough wooden surfaces had been set up in the ballroom. Yet someone had taken care to try to make things homelike for the current residents of the Pawnee: A little vase with fresh flowers sat atop each table.

The crystal was still there, if you looked up: Six chandeliers, in varying states of repair, descended from the ceiling. A rostrum—this must have been the orchestra stand—abutted the wall closest to the exterior hallway.

I walked around the second floor of the hotel, trying to imagine what it must have been like to come here when doormen greeted arriving guests, and parking attendants whisked automobiles away, and salesmen working their Western routes stopped for the night at the Pawnee after
having alighted from their trains. What it must have been like for the ranchers and farmers from the surrounding towns to come here for the weddings of their sons and daughters, giving their children a ceremonious send-off on what the parents hoped would be a serene and successful life.

There was a framed newspaper front page on the wall of a corridor near the ballroom; it was from the
Telegraph
of October 16, 1929. The banner headline announced
HOTEL MAKES FORMAL BOW TO PUBLIC TONIGHT
, the pride and optimism for the town almost palpable in the week just before, unbeknownst to anyone—the hotel's owners, the citizens of North Platte, the person who wrote the newspaper story—the United States would be plunged into the most terrible economic depression in its history.

And then, later, would come the war. I took the stairs back down to the first floor, and noticed a squared-off sign for what had once been the Tom-Tom Room, the popular and busy coffee shop the governor's daughter had told me about. The fellow in the lobby who had been trying to recruit congregants for the day's religious service was still at it. He didn't seem to be getting many takers. A man and a woman, perspiring profusely in the heat, saying nothing, worked a jigsaw puzzle, one helping the other.

 

“When I arrived in North Platte, I was feeling about as low as a guy can feel.”

Paul Gardner, seventy-nine, who now lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, was describing to me what had happened just before he got on the train that would stop at the Canteen—what it was that had so dispirited him.

“I didn't want to go home,” he said. “But they wanted to discharge me.”

He was a corporal in the Army Air Corps, which he thought was leading him toward something he had longed for his whole life. “I wanted to fly since I was ten years old,” he said. “That's the year they were opening a new airfield near where I lived, in Lima, Ohio. I walked five miles to see the bucket-scrapers drawn by horses—ten years old, and I would walk to watch them build that airport.”

He enlisted in 1942, right out of Lima South High School, and was in Army Air Corps training in California when he went up on a day he now knows he shouldn't have. He had a cold. Nothing more serious than that.

“I got bilateral infections,” he said. “Both ears—infections of the middle ears. I was deaf for five days, and I was hospitalized. I shouldn't have flown with that cold—I got my hearing back, but the infections had thrown off my sense of balance. Instead of graduating from pilot training, I was in the hospital taking sulfa drugs.

“The medical board washed me out. You either achieve a goal or you don't—my goal was to fly, to do whatever I
could as a pilot to help the war effort, and the medical board told me it wasn't going to happen. I was twenty-two or something like that. I cried.

“It's not like a baseball player who gets a year or two to recover, and goes on with his career. To fly in the war, they wanted you in training, and they wanted your training to be on schedule. Either you could do it or you couldn't. My balance was all screwed up. They told me they couldn't put me up there in the air in a position of responsibility. They told me my health would prevent me from carrying it out.

“We had to win the war. So many things depended on us….”

They told him to go home to Lima for two weeks, to see his family. “I had to go north to Sacramento to get on a passenger train,” he said. “I was on sick leave. There were about fifty or sixty of us servicemen on the passenger train, and as we were riding across Nebraska we were told that in the town coming up, they had a Canteen for servicemen.

“So that was my introduction to North Platte. My goodness…here I was, feeling the lowest of my life, feeling like a complete failure, and we got off the train and those people made me feel pretty special. Just the feeling of being
appreciated.
They were so
nice
to me. They didn't know me; they didn't know anything about me. But I was
in the uniform of my country, and that was good enough for them.”

He ended up spending his adulthood working for Westinghouse as a quality control specialist; his health has not been good in recent years: “I've got one of the worst hearts in the country.” He knows that by being disqualified from flying in the war, he may have been given a chance at life that other young men did not have.

“There was such a feeling among young men,” he said. “It was a feeling of ‘I don't know what tomorrow will bring.' You got a letter from home—‘so-and-so died in Europe.' You lost classmates from high school, from your hometown. It only has to happen to you once to stick in your mind. One of my football teammates at Lima South High School—Bob Brodbeck. I was the second-string quarterback, he was an end. I never got to say goodbye to him. I learned that he was killed in action in a letter from my mother.”

So by being grounded by the Army Air Corps medical board, Paul Gardner may have been spared a similar fate. He didn't fly in the war—and he didn't die in the war. It still bothers him, that he was not allowed to become a combat aviator.

And it still is with him, that memory of the brief time in North Platte that meant so much to him.

“There are moments in a young man's life when it means a great deal if someone seems to appreciate him,”
he said. “You have no idea what the respect I was shown by those people at the Canteen did for me. I was feeling like I was no good to anybody. And those people made me feel that I mattered.”

 

I left the Pawnee Hotel, taking one look back at it from the corner of Fifth and Bailey, trying to imagine the pride felt by former Governor Neville—and the pride felt by the town—on that night in 1929 when it had opened its doors.

So ornate, so aristocratic…it had been meant as a monument, a gorgeous monument inside of which people could sleep. It had been meant not only as the boy governor's gift to the town…but in a way, undoubtedly, as his gift to himself. His try for immortality.

There weren't many buildings like that going up anymore, at least not in North Platte. I had seen some obviously expensive homes during my walks through town—some of them of recent vintage. One in particular, a sprawling place with a fence around it, the kind of home you would find in the most exclusive suburbs of America's biggest cities—every time I passed it, I tried to guess who lived inside.

The biggest industrialist in town, whoever that might be? Another governor or senator, out of office and having cashed in on his connections? The leading banker, or the
head of the hospital? In the meritocracy of this part of Nebraska, who had risen to the top—who had constructed for himself this stately mansion?