Once Upon a Town (17 page)

With all the
warmth and good feelings of the Canteen years, it was potentially easy to push aside the thought that things could be more than a little dour and chilly back in that America. I found a remnant of that other America in the most unlikely of places: a display memorializing the medical profession of west-central Nebraska, in a corner of the county's historical museum.

Certainly the display must not have been intended to elicit somber and starched reactions; undoubtedly the people who put it together (and it appeared to have been in place for many years) meant for it merely to be an artifact of the era from which it came. But to spend time in that
section of the museum, to realize that it represented a very real and daily part of North Platte during the Canteen years, was to understand yet another way in which our world has changed—in this case, not necessarily for the worse.

It started with the framed photographic portraits of the physicians who served the town and county back then. They may well have been friendly, compassionate, welcoming men (and they were, in fact, all men). But to look at those portraits was to be reminded of the American age in which the medical profession often seemed purposely distant, didactic, unalterably aloof. When doctors, at least many of them, appeared to pride themselves on ruling from on high, with little room for long discussion or questioning. Doctor knows best.

It was a time when doctors seemed to have been encouraged to cultivate an aura of mystery—an aura that made some patients vaguely afraid, or at least apprehensive. The portraits on the museum walls, almost without exception, showed austere men with stringent, even-lipped, not-to-be-challenged expressions; shot at the Brown Harano photographic studios in North Platte, the portraits presented formal-to-the-point-of-frostiness men in eyeglasses and business suits and a visible demeanor that translated to: Don't ask.

It may have been unfair to judge them by the photographs, taken all those years ago, yet there was no ques
tion that the portraits had been composed to set a tone a universe away from soothing. These were doctors as the remote, elevated, mirthless older brothers of the Wizard of Oz—men behind curtains not meant to be fully pulled back, ever.

And if the men weren't really that way, plainly it was how they wanted the world to see them—at least the portion of the world that arrived expectantly each morning in the waiting rooms of their offices in this part of Nebraska.

 

“I was very surprised to receive the letter,” said Naomi Wood, seventy-two. “I received it in 1945, and I still remember opening it and trying to figure out how they got my name and address.”

The letter was from a hospital—McGuire General Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. The letter had been written by the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Garnet P. Francis, a serviceman who had been rendered blind by a Japanese shell in the Philippines. He had been freed from a prisoner-of-war camp after being held captive for three years. Four days after he was set free, the Japanese bombardment struck him.

His wife, Earleen, was an Army nurse who also had been a prisoner of war. She helped her husband survive the shelling, and after they arrived back in the United States and were heading for the hospital in Virginia for treatment
to try to bring back his sight, their train stopped briefly in North Platte.

That was what the letter was about. Evidently Lieutenant Colonel Francis had been given a cake at the depot—and evidently Naomi Wood (who at the time was sixteen-year-old Naomi Smith) had baked it, and had placed a card with it that contained her name and address.

“I probably put a birthday card with the cake, because we always assumed someone would eat the cake for his birthday,” Mrs. Wood told me.

So, mailed from the hospital on the East Coast, there was the handwritten letter from the blinded soldier's wife. It arrived at the home Naomi Smith shared with her parents in Big Springs, Nebraska, near the Colorado border. Lieutenant Colonel Francis's wife began the letter:

“I am so sorry I have neglected to write, but until now I simply haven't had time…. We found the card [with the cake], which was so sweet…. He is in the Dental Corps. He has a chance to regain his sight in a year, maybe before. This is why we are here in this hospital. He is being treated and I'm staying with him.”

Naomi Smith Wood told me she didn't recall baking that particular cake, but said she had always been eager to do whatever was needed during her Canteen duty.

“There was a group of ladies in Big Springs who would go to North Platte to help out—I forget whether it was the Methodist Club or the Happy Hour Club—and I liked
going with them,” she said. “You didn't always have an assignment when you got to the Canteen—you just let them know what you wanted to do, and they usually let you do it.”

The man who would become her husband, Bruce Wood, an Army Air Corps pilot of B-24 Liberators, also grew up in Nebraska, the son of a farmer, and he had been to North Platte before the war: “The town was somewhat of a shopping center for us, and they had some medical facilities there.” As a young boy he had been in the train depot, but when he went through as a serviceman, “They had rearranged things to accommodate the Canteen. They had scrambled to use up the space.

“There was a limit of time you could be in there and be served and be back on the train. If you were on a seventeen-car train and you were near the end of the train, you had a pretty long distance to cover to get to the Canteen, and get back. That's why we ran—to get there on time. If you dawdled too long, you were going to be stuck there.”

Lieutenant Colonel Francis had not been one of the men who ran to the depot—in all likelihood, because of his loss of vision, the cake was brought to him on board the train. Naomi Wood has kept the letter from the hospital in Virginia for all these years. The wife of the blinded soldier wrote to the sixteen-year-old girl:

“Your cake was simply delicious…. After being a prisoner of the Japs for three years, and after being starved
the way we were, it really tasted good. I hope I learn to make cake as good as yours when I start to cook. No one knows when that will be.”

I told Mrs. Wood how remarkable I thought the whole thing was, and she seemed surprised that I thought it was so exceptional. Those kinds of things happened—at least they happened at the North Platte Canteen.

“I was very happy to get the note,” she told me, “and I appreciated it.” At the end of the letter from the hospital, Lieutenant Colonel Francis's wife gave an address in St. Petersburg, Florida, where they hoped to be living after he was released from treatment and accorded time to recuperate.

“I'm sure I sent him a get-well card,” Mrs. Wood said. “And I hope he did. I hope he got well.”

 

The medical equipment on display at the county museum—the array of tools used by the doctors of the war years and the years before—was as cold and forbidding as the expressions on some of the physicians in the portrait frames. The equipment was designed for healing, for making a human feel better; in these surroundings, though, laid out and labeled as if they were artwork, the devices made you want to turn your head.

Perhaps that was it—perhaps it was the setting that was jarring, not the instruments themselves. But to see them,
to read their descriptions—the “long curved forceps,” the metal appliance meant “for irrigating wounds,” the dangerous-looking cutter “to remove adenoids”…to look at all of this was to gaze into a world the doctors lived in every day. No laser surgery or micro-incisions for them, not back then—these steel implements were their stock-in-trade; for many surgical procedures, they probably still are for the physicians of today.

To see the utensils in the display case near North Platte's Cody Avenue was to understand, just a little, the chasm there has always been between doctor and patient. The instruments here wouldn't cause a sideways glance, among surgeons. And the surgeons, after enough years in the profession, might not comprehend what a powerful effect the sight of the instruments might have on outsiders.

Not just the surgical tools, either, but the more mundane items doctors of the era carried around to house calls with them, the way housepainters carried cans and brushes. The little leather packet containing (as the label informed) an “ear and nose light”; the zippered “ear, nose, throat” case, with the examining probes inside in need of sterilization after each use; the hypodermic needles in their own boxes, apparently also reusable and not to be tossed away; the big, hollow glass tubes to feed medicine into those needles, before being boiled and made ready to accept more medication for more needles…

The metal pincers to assist in the extraction of internal
organs, the long surgical scissors, as functional and harshly utilitarian as a paid-by-the-round prizefighter…

Prairie medicine, preserved in this catch-you-off-guard setting.

 

“When the hospital trains would come through—those were the days that would get to you.”

Doris Kugler, eighty-three, was telling me about the toughest moments for the Canteen volunteers. She said a feeling of sadness came over the place when the trains carrying wounded soldiers would steam into North Platte.

“We were not allowed on the hospital trains,” she said. “We were only permitted to walk up to the cars, and hand up the baskets of sandwiches and apples and oranges and candy and cookies. Whatever soldier was able to walk to the end of the car was the one to whom we would hand the baskets.

“Sometimes you could see the guys looking out the windows of the train. You would see bandages. Some of these young kids were on stretchers, and seeing them, so injured…

“And of course, you would see all of this knowing that your husband was overseas fighting….”

Mrs. Kugler and her husband, Bill, had resided in McCook, Nebraska, south of North Platte, where he had
been the manager of a shoe store called Pat's Bootery. While he was in the Navy, Mrs. Kugler lived in North Platte with her mother, who had come to stay with her.

“We got along fine,” Mrs. Kugler said. “My mom got a job in a ready-to-wear store called the Mars Shop, on Dewey, and also got a job at O'Connor's Department Store. My dad had passed away in 1940—he was only fifty-six—so my mom said she would stay with me while Bill was in the service.

“A bunch of us wives got together and we formed a club. We called it the War Wives Club. Eight or ten women—we would go out to eat at Tucker's Restaurant on Jeffers. We all worked, and none of us had children, so we would have dinner and maybe a drink before we ate.

“The soldiers would come over from the military base in McCook, and sometimes they would get a little fresh. The owner, Mr. Tucker, would say to the soldiers, ‘These women are all my friends, and they're all married—stay away from them.'

“When I think about it now, the soldiers were probably lonely. They probably just wanted some ladies to talk to. We were all happily married, so nothing was going to happen—we thought it was kind of funny when Mr. Tucker would keep them away from us.”

She said that most of the members of the War Wives Club made scrapbooks for their husbands who were overseas: “News items, stories about parties, things from
Halloween—the idea was to save souvenirs from the time our husbands were gone, to give to them when they got home.

“I wrote Bill every day for two and a half years, from 1943 to 1945. I heard a lot of news around town. People would tell me things, and I would write it in letters to him. He was on Saipan, in the Marianas, and I think he got every letter I wrote.”

I asked her if she ever skipped a day—with weekends, she certainly could have gotten away with doubling up some days and taking other days off from writing.

“I could have done it that way, but I didn't,” she said. “Writing every day was something I wanted to do.”

Her husband came home in 1945. “I went to Omaha and met his train,” she said. “He got off…it was kind of strange. He always looked young in his Navy uniform. He didn't look hardly different at all. We got back in the groove pretty quickly.”

Her mother insisted on moving out so that the husband and wife could have their privacy; Bill Kugler got his job back at Pat's Bootery, where he worked for the next thirty-three years, until his retirement in 1978.

As for the War Wives Club, they all stayed married to their husbands. “We were pretty dedicated,” Mrs. Kugler said. “One of my friends from the club is ninety-one now. The others, I believe, are all gone.”

Mr. Kugler died in 1985; he was seventy-one, and he had been ill for more than five years.

“He had twelve operations,” Mrs. Kugler said. “One of the surgeons said to me one day, ‘Bill must have a lot of money, because you're sure stickin' to him.' You get to know the surgeons pretty well during a long illness like that, and you become friendly and you try to make each other smile.

“I told the surgeon, ‘He doesn't have money, but I'm stickin' to him.' And I'm very glad I did. I'm glad I stuck to him.”

 

There was an iron lung in the museum, beneath the row of doctors' portraits. From one end of the machine extended the head of a dummy, constructed to resemble a young woman.

The iron lung—made of solid gray-green metal—was, according to the manufacturer's identification label on its side, a product of the Wiesner-Rapp Company Inc., of Buffalo, New York. During the national outbreak of polio, when iron lungs were hailed as the one hope for life for young sufferers, this particular machine evidently was the first one purchased in this part of Nebraska, and was placed for use in St. Mary's Hospital.

The girl in the iron lung—the dummy—was meant to
represent a specific, identifiable individual. The dummy's face stared up toward the ceiling—her neck was encased in rubber so that the pressure inside the chamber could be maintained; there was a gauge on the side to measure that very pressure. The dummy was intended to portray an eighteen-year-old woman from Cozad—she was named in the display—who had been the first patient from the area to be put into the lung.